11 ms·
Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.10 Performance For Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake
- eknkc 2y agoSo, this got me curious. Assuming a cpu heavy benchmark with no syscalls (calculate primes or something like that) I’d not really expect a major difference between OSs. I guess you have the scheduler possibly fucking things up and the memory management. Maybe? What else could contribute to a raw cpu benchmark difference?
- jeffbee 2y agoPower government seems like a likely candidate.
- riskable 2y agoIf it hasn't changed since 24.04 the default power governor in Ubuntu 24.10 is "powersave". I'd be curious to see how performance improved if Phoronix tested with the "performance" governor.
- jeffbee 2y agoIt could go either way honestly. The "performance" governor tries to max out the CPU clock rate all the time but because of transient thermal capacity this is not always optimal. The CPU will rip as hard as possible even under powersave, and it might hit a higher transient peak because it starts out cold.
- HPsquared 2y agoPower management maybe.
- LeifCarrotson 2y agoIt's almost certainly the scheduler, IMO. > On average the Ubuntu 24.10 release was about 14% faster than Microsoft Windows 11 out-of-the-box on this Lunar Lake powered ASUS Zenbook S 14 laptop. What else was the "Out-of-the-box" Windows installation trying to do while they were running the benchmark? Sitting here on my Windows 10 installation with nothing but Firefox and Task Manager open, there are dozens of things clamoring for the attention of the scheduler and using CPU: https://i.imgur.com/NxBOBXm.png https://i.imgur.com/NxBOBXm.png Yeah, I've installed several of these services on purpose, but I've also uninstalled or inhibited a bunch of things that I didn't need.
- sumtechguy 2y agoWonder if it is putting things onto p-cores more aggressively. Would need to the power graphs at the same time to see that.
- llm_nerd 2y ago>What else was the "Out-of-the-box" Windows installation trying to do while they were running the benchmark? It's trying to maximize the performance to power usage ratio out of the box. The default power profile is very conservative, which on a laptop means better battery life and reduced heat. Given that this comparison didn't do even rudimentary power consumption, heat, or CPU frequency scaling measures, it is overwhelmingly likely as the difference. > there are dozens of things clamoring for the attention of the scheduler and using CPU Linux machines have hundreds of processes too. It simply doesn't matter in 2024. That isn't a factor and isn't relevant, nor is the scheduler to blame. This is a silly misleading benchmark that is de facto clickbait. Pretty surprisedto see it doing well here.
- high_na_euv 2y agoYou have shitton of custom soft there
- xxs 2y agothe scheduler has been an issue for windows for quite some time... along with the built-in anti-virus (and ads).
- llm_nerd 2y agoThere are such an enormous array of possible influences on this, most likely being the power profile. By default Windows on a laptop (in this case a Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V) uses a reduced power mode where it limits the max frequency and is less aggressive in scaling up core frequency because of the greatly reduced return per unit of power (which can destroy battery life and make heat profiles unacceptable). This comparison makes no mention of the power profile, nor does it observe battery usage if applicable. This looks like a misleading if not completely useless clickbait comparison. Others mentioned schedulers, and while schedulers can account account for a percent or two difference across this sort of wide workload, instead a huge disparity is seen.
- mallets 2y agoOr the more obvious answer: newer binaries/libraries/kernel for Linux. Is it still hard to believe Windows leaves a lot performance on the table? And it does mention powersave governer for Ubuntu.
- albertopv 2y agoCoworkers switched from Win11 to Ubuntu, our main Spring Boot project compiled time was cut in half. I guess ntfs is a factor in this specific use case, it's a medium sized project with a few thousands files and classes.
- consteval 2y agoNTFS is 100% the problem here. It really struggles with many small files type use cases. In pretty much all my projects, I notice a huge compile time cut in Linux and Mac as opposed to Windows. Also a lot of typical Linux pipelines become unbearably slow if you try to replicate them in Windows.
- EasyMark 2y agoHave you thought about using ccache since you have so many files to compile? Although I assume after the initial compile it’s not that big of a deal.
- BoredPositron 2y agoMhm... older CPUs were pretty close, but I guess Windows is really slow in adopting scheduler optimizations. The last one for Ryzen was in the pipeline for two years.
- Havoc 2y agoWow those are some pretty spicy gaps. Would have guessed closer to 1% OS difference
- EasyMark 2y agoI don’t know, it seems like Linux has always has a 10-20% advantage over windows when running these types of benchmarks about as far back as I can remember.
- luciusdomitius 2y agoThis is strange - I wasn't expecting such a difference on CPU-only benchmarks. In my experience as a software engineer I find Linux much faster than windows mainly due to the file system being more performant (e.g. the builds run noticeably faster). For CPU-intensive tasks I always thought they were quite similar. On the other hand since upgrading from 6.6 to 6.11 I noticed a great improvement in UI responsiveness on my old X1 Tablet and I doubt this Ubuntu uses a recent kernel even. Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows in a long time.
- jeffbee 2y agoThis release of Ubuntu uses 6.11 which is about as fresh as anyone could hope for.
- jadyoyster 2y agoI think it must somehow use a recent kernel, otherwise Lunar Lake wouldn't be supported?
- nullindividual 2y ago> Linux much faster than windows mainly due to the file system being more performant (e.g. the builds run noticeably faster) It's not the file system. It is the file system filter. NTFS is a high performance FS. Microsoft is working around this via a feature called DevDrive. It uses ReFS instead of NTFS as ReFS leverages copy-on-write.
- SG- 2y agoWith what OS's are doing for mitigating exploits these days for CPU (especially Intel), poor Windows schedulers, or historically bad power management, it's hard to pinpoint what's causing this.
- taf2 2y agoI play sc2 on Ubuntu nightly. Except for the battle.net being super slow to load the game play is insanely good.
- tkuraku 2y agoSame
- DonnyV 2y agoWait....Starcraft 2 works on Linux?
- porphyra 2y agoIt has been running flawlessly on Proton for years. Here's one way to do it without having to tinker with Wine guts or whatever. 1. Install Steam using your distro's package manager, e.g. sudo apt install steam 2. Download battle.net's setup.exe from their website 3. In steam, "Add non-steam game" and add the setup.exe 4. In steam, right click on the battle.net setup.exe and in properties, under Compatibility, check the box that says "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and select Proton Experimental. 5. Run it, which will allow you to run the installer on the first run. On subsequent runs it will just launch the battle.net launcher, allowing you to run the game immediately. And everything works!!! Of course, you can feel free to do it manually with Wine or using a different tool such as Lutris. To be honest, this works with almost any Windows game that I can think of. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcraft2_on_linux_via_steam_is_effortless/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr... Also, nice username --- I imagine it is Donny Vermillion from Starcraft 2 haha.
- tombert 2y agoI recently sold my Macbook, bought a Thinkpad, and am running NixOS full time, and I have to say that desktop Linux has gotten pretty excellent since the last time I ran it full-time. I'm not sure if it's thanks to Wayland, or just improvements to the kernel, or improvements to the desktop environment, or some combination of the three, but at this point I actually think that for the first time I might actually prefer Gnome over macOS. I haven't bothered with Windows since Windows 8, but it does make me happy that Linux holds its own performance-wise, even still. It doesn't look like Linux is categorically better than Windows, but it looks like for the most part they're comparable.
- ahartmetz 2y agoI'm pretty sure that it's improvements in all parts of the stack. Kernel (drivers mostly - the rest has already been fine or hasn't improved that much, e.g. out of memory behavior), middleware and frameworks, desktop environments.
- cma256 2y agoI agree. I attribute that mostly to NixOS though. It reminds me of the old Prince of Persia game where I could make a mistake, rewind time, and try again. I find Ubuntu and others to be pretty fragile still. IMO, technologically Linux has been ready for years. If NixOS were packaged into an actual product experience it would be a great new entrant into the desktop operating system space.
- tombert 2y agoYeah, NixOS is admittedly kind of game changing. It's pretty hard to go back once you've gotten used to it.
- exe34 2y agoI hate nixos, but I can't imagine using anything else ever again, because I like that when I screw up while trying to install something, the end result is a nop instead of wiping and re-installing.
- almostgotcaught 2y agoi always think to myself how embarassing this must be https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/7320 https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/7320
- binkHN 2y agoI don't know exactly what's happening here from a quick glance, but it's well known that Windows' default file system, NTFS, does not perform as well as Linux does when it comes to working with a large number of small files.
- almostgotcaught 2y ago> well known Did we at some point redefine this to mean "good" or "appropriate" or "acceptable"? If not then, in context, I have no idea what your point is.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWell on my Lenovo P15 Gen 1, Windows 11 is substantially more responsive than Ubuntu. I had been running Ubuntu on it for a couple years and switched over to Windows to play some games. I was shocked. And games aside, I mean desktop, vs code, etc, non-GPU heavy things.
- longhinidas 2y agoProbably you were suffering from CPU throttle, trying with thinkfan and throotled projects should match or exceed your (non GPU) related problem
- bongodongobob 2y agoMy CPU was no where near being throttled. I'm talking about basic desktop responsiveness.
- longhinidas 2y agoIt could be, by default no turbo boost is enabled, and after a few activities you should feel the lag and maybe unresponsiveness of using small amount of CPU power, I can be bad guessing, but using some Intel CPUs after 8th generation, this was a recurrent problem. In summary, it feels like an underpowered machine; then enable turbo boost, starts to heat up and feel the new kind of unresponsiveness, nice until there is to much heat (like 60 celsius); then, unlock the fan to keep the temp low, this recover a little bit of responsiveness, but that temp limit seems low; then, you get throttled in to play, with it you can play with the limit up to 98 celsius, so you can have a better experience overall and tweak your preference.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoAds and telemetry?
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoNo power consumption info, no info on what governor settings Ubuntu setup. As happy as I would be to notch such a notable Linux win, also would like the real details on what's happening here.
- riskable 2y agoIf it hasn't changed since 24.04 the default power governor in Ubuntu 24.10 is "powersave". I'd be curious to see how performance improved if Phoronix tested with the "performance" governor.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoNice. Yup. These days I'd vastly prefer tests with declared tuned daemon profiles, as they cover a much broader amount of systems tweaking than just CPU governor.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jenscow 2y agoThe only thing Windows is better at (almost equal) is 7-zip decompression. I wonder why.
- apitman 2y ago[flagged]
- DonnyV 2y agoI feel like every performance chart should have a tag that says "Bigger is better" or "Smaller is better" Makes it a lot easier to scan the charts.
- haunter 2y agoThey are there?
- antisthenes 2y agoGreat example of horrible software eating up all the hardware performance gains. Windows benchmarks used to have parity for a very long time. XP/7/8/8.1/10* had performance benchmark results within the margin of error ~ 2% at most.
- bendhoefs 2y agoI'm surprised no one's mentioned Virtualization-based security in this thread. I suspect this is responsible for a big part of the gap. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-vbs-harms-performance-rtx-4090 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-vbs-harms-performa...
- haunter 2y agoI wish there was a benchmark with Windows 11 LTSC and showing if it has any actual performance advantage or not
- thrownawaysz 2y agoYet I still feel Windows is more fluid and responsive just by using it generally. I have a pretty up to date dual boot laptop and Ubuntu still feels like having some kind of "shadow lag" all accross the system.
- jeffbee 2y agoWeird because my experience is the opposite. I worked for a company that makes everyone use Windows, and I accessed my PC using Citrix. I always assumed that the incredible amount of lag and jank was contributed by Citrix. Then after I'd been working there a while I went to the office in New York where my actual desk was, logged into actual physical PC I'd been using the whole time, and it was exactly as bad in person! Right click, wait one whole ass second, context menu drifts into existence. Jank everywhere. I couldn't believe people pay real money for it.
- t0bia_s 2y agoThose bemchmarks are theoretical numbers. Results of calculation made by software that is not used for actual work. I want comparison of Photoshop or Firefox with bunch of tabs.