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.)
Radeon Gaming/Graphics Performance: Windows 11 vs. Linux GPU Benchmarks
With the end of the year upon us it’s a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it’s interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.
This end-of-year benchmarking is looking at the Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance for the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards for both a mature and modern look at the AMD Radeon Linux driver support on Linux and Windows. A variety of games were benchmarked — primarily games that run well on Linux via Steam Play — as well as other graphics benchmarks for seeing how the performance is looking. Similar articles are coming in the days ahead carrying out benchmarks on Intel Arc Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce hardware as well for looking at the landscape as we enter 2023.
The Windows 11 testing was done using Windows 11 Pro with all updates as of this week. The Radeon RX 6800 XT was tested using the Adrenalin 22.11.2 Recommended (WHQL) driver as the latest for that Navi 2 GPU. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX on Windows was using the Adrenalin 22.12.2 for Radeon RX 7900 Series (WHQL) as the latest RDNA3 graphics driver there as released last week.
Over on the Linux side, Linux 6.2-rc1 and Mesa 23.0-devel were in use as the very latest open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver support atop Ubuntu 22.10. This Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0 testing offers a look at the very bleeding-edge Linux graphics capabilities for the AMD RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics hardware.
All of this testing was carried out on the same Intel Core i9 13900K «Raptor Lake» system at stock speeds with 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, ASUS PRIME Z790-P WIFI motherboard, Solidigm P44 PRO 2TB NVMe SSD, and the reference RX 6800 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. From there a variety of different games and GPU benchmarks were conducted.
Linux vs windows gaming performance
I am seriously considering switching from ol’ good Windows 10 to Ubuntu on my desktop PC. Currently I’m using it on my laptop for 3 years now, and am super glad with it. But my biggest concern about using Ubuntu as my main system was gaming.
I’m a hardcore gamer, having quite powerful PC, playing AAA games, so this is a bit important to me, that games run smooth on this.
Soooo I decided to run an in-game benchmark, to see if there are some differences between both systems. Sadly, only game that I own, has benchmark and will fit on my tiny 120 GB SSD, on which I currently have Ubuntu installed was STEEP from 2017. So I installed it on both Windows and Ubuntu (on Ubuntu via Wine), selected high graphics, ran the benchmark and. Well it had 150 fps on both, which is for some reason absolute ceiling (maybe becouse I have 75 Hz monitor and V-Sync enabled). So I cranked up settings to super uber full ultra (detailed settings below), ran benchmarks and. Was shocked.
*disclaimer — on both systems I turned off absolutely everything running in background, so there was only Uplay and Steep on Windows, and Lutris, Wine, Uplay, Steep on Ubuntu
Game settings on both systems
Windows 10 frame rate Windows 10 CPU usage Windows 10 GPU usage
Ubuntu 20.10 framerate Ubuntu 20.10 CPU usage Ubuntu 20.10 GPU usage — for some reason Ubuntu doesn’t read my GPU usage or temperature.
I was shocked, that a game running on Wine (basically a Windows emulator) had ABSOLUTELY the same frame rate (1 fps lower average, 1 fps higher max), but had almost half of Windows’ CPU usage. Bind blown for real.
I will try to find a game that supports Proton and has benchmark, just to see how faster native running can be, but. WOW. I was expecting like 30% worse performance on Proton, and even worse on Wine, but this is just insane. That’s becouse my last «gaming» episode with Ubuntu was like Ubuntu 16.10?
So if you are wondering, how is Linux gaming now, I can clearly tell — nothing to be ashamed of, my Tux friend. For me, Ubuntu came in hard, not just kicking the door, but coming in with them.
And last, but not least — my PC specs:
MSI GTX1660Ti Ventus XS OC 6 GB
*last disclaimer — on Windows game was running on Crucial BX500 SSD, while on Ubuntu on Patriot Burst SSD, I really doubt this affected the results, but I mention it anyway