Windows 10 October 2018 Update Performance Against Ubuntu 18.10, Fedora 29

First up with the Unigine Heaven graphics test that is well supported across platforms, the OpenGL performance between Windows 10 and Linux was right on-par for this Radeon RX 580 graphics card used throughout testing. The notable exception to the performance was Fedora 29 with its Wayland-default session still causing (X)Wayland woes for the Unigine-based environments and other select games. On Windows 10 when switching to the Direct3D 11 renderer, it was delivering much better performance than OpenGL on any of the operating systems tested. Of the Linux distributions, Clear Linux was the fastest but it was a very tight race among those distributions mostly on Linux 4.18 and Mesa 18.2.

The synthetic GpuTest on the Radeon RX 580 was running in favor of Windows 10 while Manjaro 18.0 and openSUSE Tumbleweed tumbled into the slowest spots. But this article is mostly focusing anyhow on the overall system and CPU performance with gaming Windows vs. Linux tests going to be reserved for an upcoming Proton/SteamPlay benchmark comparison.

The Golang performance tests between Windows and Linux were mixed. Generally though Windows 10 was on the slower side but the October update did help a tiny bit it seemed. The older Go packages in Debian 9.5 appeared to offer some performance benefits of the tested Linux distributions but overall these Golang results were rather mixed.