An Early Look At The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Performance On AMD Ryzen 9 5950X + RX 6800

With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" less than one month out from release, I have begun testing it on more desktop and server platforms ahead of release. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS overall is in nice shape. On current generation platforms I am not seeing much uplift compared to Ubuntu 21.10 but for those still making use of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS series with its older compiler and other older packages, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is providing some uplift. Here is a look at Ubuntu 20.04.4 vs. 21.10 vs. 22.04 daily on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.

Over the next few weeks will be plenty of benchmarks on different Intel/AMD/Arm systems looking at the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance compared not only to prior Ubuntu Linux releases but also that of other Linux distributions / operating systems. For just under a month to go until the Ubuntu 22.04 release in late April, here are some benchmarks showing the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Radeon RX 6800 performance across Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS / 21.10 / 22.04 daily.

While still a few weeks out from release, with the various freezes in effect the package versions are basically locked in for release and should offer a fairly close look at how Ubuntu 22.04 will perform upon its official release -- especially with Ubuntu not carrying debug flags by default during its development phase or other debug-assisted modifications carried by some distributions.

The same AMD Ryzen 9 5950X + CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi + 32GB RAM + Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB NVMe SSD + Radeon RX 6800system was used across all testing. Each Ubuntu release was cleanly installed each time and left at its defaults.

Even with Linux 5.17 being the latest upstream kernel, Ubuntu 22.04 is sticking with Linux 5.15 due to its Long Term Support state. This is a bit sad for those on the very latest hardware especially Intel Alder Lake and other recent hardware that can benefit from optimizations/improvements in the newer kernel. In any case, it's easy to upgrade the kernel via the likes of Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA or others if desired.

Mesa 22.0 is found on Ubuntu 22.04 for the newest open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, various GNOME 42 components are used and the Wayland session remains the default, and GCC 11.2 is the default system compiler as was the case with Ubuntu 21.10. For those still on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS but planning to migrate to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, it's a more significant shift in going from GCC 9 to GCC 11, Wayland by default on the desktop, etc.