With the release of the new AMD Zen 2 processors, it’s inevitable that we’re gonna be seeing a lot of side to side testing of these chips on Windows and Linux platforms. Here is one of those awaited comparisons regarding the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X on Windows 10 Pro 1903 and Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.
The test system employed for the comparison was: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X at stock speeds, ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600MHz memory, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 560 graphics. The test consisted mostly of CPU related workloads and did not focus on gaming aspects.
For the Go programming language performance, Windows was pretty neck and neck with Linux except for the build performance where it got left behind.
With both Windows and Linux running OpenJDK 11, the performance was more or less comparable between these systems on the Ryzen 9 3900X. Different workloads however, would fluctuate between favoring Ubuntu 18.04 or Windows 10.
Windows 10 slightly one-upped the performance offered by Ubuntu 18.04 in the BLAKE2 crypto test.
Intel’s SVT-AV1 video encoder performed better on linux but the performance was comparable for H.264 video encoding with x264.
The 7-Zip performance for the two systems is pretty close with the Ryzen 9 3900X but we do know Ubuntu trumps over Windows with Zen/Zen+ processors.
The GraphicsMagick OpenMP-threaded image editing continues to give the best performance for Linux.
asmFish and Stockfish chess benchmarks gave similar results.
CPU-based rendering performance is still much faster on Linux. With the Blender modeling software, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS won across the board for all the different scenarios benchmarked.
Linux is still much more faster for PHP and Python workloads than Windows 10.
In the proprietary Geekbench synthetic benchmark too, linux had a small but easily visible advantage over Windows 10.
Novabench showed minutely better memory performance on Linux with this synthetic test.
Now, while the Ryzen 9 3900X performed significantly better on Windows 10 than we’ve seen in past AMD Windows vs. Linux comparisons, looking at the mean performance difference, Linux led by approximately a whole 8%. While this has been one of Windows’ most impressive showing it’s still apparent Linux trumps when it comes to pure performance.
For a detailed overview, read Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Performance On AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
To look at more specifics and numbers check out OpenBenchmarking.org
I think what Windows does, because what “workaround” I found almost always improves performance by ~5-10%, is that since I think Windows 7’s one of the service packs Windows changed “task priority” standard – what used to be “below normal” became “normal” priority, and if you set task to above normal – then performance of that task rises.
But why set below normal as a new norm.
Previously if task 100% utilized CPU the system would hang/freeze until the task is complete.
So one day I installed Windows 10 alongside out of date Win 7, and I see – system seems to not hang anymore when rendering; and one day I ran benchmarks and now I see that CPU performance was lower, after changing task priority in task manager got same score as was getting on Win 7.