With the Linux 6.16 kernel that will be debuting as stable as soon as this coming Sunday there are some minor performance benefits for the Radeon integrated graphics with the incredible Strix Halo SoC. Here are some comparison benchmarks of Linux 6.15 vs. Linux 6.16 Git for the AMD Radeon graphics of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop.
In addition to Mesa 25.2 helping ray-tracing and other select areas for the RDNA 3.5 graphics with Strix Halo, over in kernel space the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel release has some minor improvements out of the revised AMDGPU kernel driver.
On the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics I ran some comparison benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 when using Linux 6.15 stable compared to a recent daily snapshot of Linux 6.16 in its near-final state.
For various graphics workloads there were some nice subtle improvements to find out of Strix Halo on this new Linux kernel version… Nothing too shocking but continued movement in the right direction with the Strix Halo graphics performance already being in very captivating shape under Linux with the open-source AMD driver stack.
For Vulkan compute performance was small but consistent with Linux 6.16 edging out past Linux 6.15.
With the graphics workloads on Strix Halo Linux 6.16 wasn’t always delivering a gain but at least no regressions.
The most significant gains out of Linux 6.16 on Strix Halo were found to be with the HITMAN game.
While no significant performance gains found with Linux 6.16, movement continues in the right direction with AMD Strix Halo on Linux.
