When AMD announced its Ryzen 9000 series desktop processor lineup at Computex earlier this year, the company touted big performance gains thanks to a massive 16% IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) boost.
While the company's claims probably have not been untrue, the overall performance of a processor is the byproduct of not just IPC but the clock speed too, and this is where a lot of the media who reviewed the chip felt it fell short. For example, the octa-core Ryzen 7 9700X is much more efficient than the 7700X but it leaves performance on the table, at least on Windows 11 it seems.
According to a comparison by the German website PC Games Hardware (PCGH), it seems Windows 11 24H2 may not be the right OS choice if you have a Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPU. The site found in its comparison that in most instances, the Linux distro Nobara, which is supposedly optimized for gaming, was faster than Windows 11 24H2. And the performance gap was not limited to just gaming either as productivity tests also showed Ryzen 9700X performing better on Linux.
Although PCCH has conducted more game tests, we decided to show the performance difference in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion pack, which is known to be very CPU-heavy, so much so that the game devs once cautioned about sufficient thermal cooling.
In the title, Linux Nobara came out faster in the average framerates as well as the percentile lows, indicating a better and smoother overall gaming experience on Linux.
Meanwhile, Nobara also showcased excellent performance with file archiving as both compression and decompression were noticeably faster (image below). The former is more memory-dependent and that is why it sees a big boost when faster memory is added like we saw in our DDR5-7600 RAM kit review.
The Linux distro was faster in decompression too indicating that it is better than Windows 11 24H2 at both overall resource management, be it memory or CPU.
Phoronix also conducted a wide range of tests on Linux and found that Zen 5 saw impressive improvement over Zen 4, again implying that a Ryzen 9000 series CPU owner could be looking at a better-performing setup if they were to switch to a lighter Linux distro.
Bear in mind though that Windows 11 24H2 is yet to be generally available for non-Copilot+ PCs and that implies optimizations could probably be pending, though bear in mind that the Ryzen AI 300 series processors that will power Copilot+ PCs are built on Zen 5 as well, the same as Ryzen 9000 series.
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