Windows 11 vs. Linux Gaming Performance On The ASUS ROG Ally
Many readers have been curious about the performance of Linux gaming on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that out-of-the-box runs Microsoft Windows 11 Home... Well, the wait is over with the first benchmarks today of Windows 11 against Ubuntu 23.04 Linux on the ROG Ally. Beyond looking at the out-of-the-box performance, the results under Windows 11 with ASUS' "Turbo Mode" is also included plus some modifications to allow Linux to be more competitive to Windows 11 for games.
The ASUS ROG Ally is an interesting $699 gaming handheld with the new AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC that features eight Zen 4 cores (16 threads) and RDNa3 graphics plus this handheld having 16GB of RAM, 7-inch 1080p 120Hz display, and 512GB NVMe SSD plus microSD options too. But unlike Valve's Steam Deck that runs SteamOS as a modified operating system built atop Arch Linux, ASUS ships Windows 11 Home on the ROG Ally.
The performance of the ROG Ally under Windows 11 was looked at out-of-the-box and then repeating all the tests when running in the "Turbo" mode set via the ASUS Windows app.
For the initial Linux results on the ASUS ROG Ally they were tested using Ubuntu 23.04 given its popularity. For those wanting Arch Linux, Arch Linux on the ASUS ROG Ally will be looked at in the upcoming comparison benchmarks against the Steam Deck.
The Ubuntu Linux configurations tested for today's article included:
Ubuntu 23.04 + Linux 6.4: The Ubuntu testing was using the Linux 6.4 Git kernel in its near-final state. With some games when running the stock Linux 6.2 kernel of Ubuntu 23.04, there were graphics hangs. No AMDGPU hangs were encountered when using the latest Linux 6.4 kernel, so that is being used for all the Ubuntu runs as the latest open-source upstream experience. All other Ubuntu 23.04 settings/packages were at their defaults.
Ubuntu 23.04 + Linux 6.4 + Mesa Git: In addition to using Linux 6.4, upgrading to Mesa 23.2-devel from the Oibaf PPA was also tested for providing the latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers for the RDNA3 GPU with the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme.
Ubuntu 23.04 + Linux 6.4 + Mesa Git + Perf: The above configuration but also switching over to the "performance" ACPI Platform Profile rather than the default balanced mode. The ACPI Platform Profile is for allowing the ROG Ally to run in its performance-optimized mode, akin to the "Turbo" behavior under Windows.
Ubuntu 23.04 + Linux 6.4 + Mesa Git + Perf All: The above configuration but also setting the CPU frequency scaling goveror to the "performance" governor rather than the default schedutil governor that makes use of scheduler utilization data. While changing to the performance CPU frequency governor is commonly done on desktop gaming systems, for systems like the ROG Ally with integrated graphics it's less convincing. Since both the CPU cores and GPU share the same power budget and thermals, forcing the CPU to always run in its performance mode can in turn hurt the GPU performance. In any event this run has those numbers.
From there a wide variety of graphics and gaming benchmarks were carried out on the same ASUS ROG Ally under Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux. The same ROG Ally with the same BIOS configuration and version was used throughout testing. (Any reported hardware differences in the table just come down to how the information is propagated under each OS.)