Further testing reveals it's not a clear-cut victory for Windows 11 over Ubuntu Linux

A few days ago, we published a report which discussed the performance of AMD Radeon cards on Windows 11 and how it compared to Ubuntu. The overall numbers favored Windows 11 by a significant margin, especially on the newer RX 7900 series GPUs based on RDNA 3 architecture.

As a follow-up to that, earlier today Phoronix published benchmark data for rivals Nvidia. And just like with AMD Radeon GPUs, it looks like Windows 11 is the way to go over Ubuntu when you are primarily looking to play games. Once again, two Nvidia GPUs were tested, an RTX 3080 and a 3090. The test bed was the same as the one used in the earlier AMD comparison.

In terms the geometric mean comprising the entire gaming test suite, the RTX 3080 system was 6.5% faster on Windows 11. The 3090 though was around 8.74% better.

The results are very similar to the AMD results since the more powerful the card, the bigger the gap is between the Windows 11 and Linux performance. This means Linux seemingly has a higher driver overhead than Windows 11 since the performance delta between the two OS keeps growing as we move higher up the GPU stack.

Interestingly, in terms of computing throughput, Ubuntu actually shines as it is able to beat Windows 11 in a convincing manner.

Curiously, the performance gap between Ubuntu and Windows 11 is very close in these two instances as both are just shy of 5%. This is not what was observed in the case of gaming.

The full test results, for both compute as well as gaming, can be viewed in more detail on Phoronix's site at the source link below.

Source and images: Phoronix