Radeon Gaming/Graphics Performance: Windows 11 vs. Linux GPU Benchmarks

While Unigine Heaven was showing the best results with Windows, in the newer Unigine Superposition benchmark there was similar performance on both Windows and Linux!

The Unigine Superposition benchmark results were very encouraging and showed the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver performance matching AMD's proprietary and official Windows graphics driver performance.

With the X-Plane 12 flight simulator, Windows 11 was faster for both of the graphics cards tested but a more pronounced lead for the Microsoft OS / Radeon Software for Windows driver when using the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

If taking the geometric mean across all of the graphics/gaming benchmarks carried out in this article, Windows 11 with the latest AMD Radeon Software drivers came out ahead. Especially with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX that launched earlier this month the Windows performance was 11% faster compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT and its mature driver support that was just 6.5% faster with Windows.

The biggest surprise for me personally from this testing was seeing how well RADV ray-tracing is working on Linux with Mesa 23.0-devel compared to the Radeon Software driver on Windows.

That's the brief look at the Radeon Windows vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance as we hit the end of 2022. Some additional games like F1 22 and Cyberpunk 2077 were dropped from this comparison due to rendering artifacts on the RX 7900 XTX under Linux. Similar Intel Arc Graphics and NVIDIA benchmark results will be coming in the days ahead along with other performance testing of the never-ending work on the open-source Linux GPU driver stack.