Earlier this month was a preview of the Ubuntu 26.04 performance benefits for NVIDIA Linux gaming while today’s article is providing an early look at how the open-source AMD Radeon gaming experience is looking for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.
Today’s benchmarks are providing a preview of the Ubuntu 26.04 gaming experience relative to Ubuntu 25.10. The default driver stack was tested on each Ubuntu release: Ubuntu 25.10 uses Linux 6.17 with Mesa 25.2 while Ubuntu 26.04 is currently on Linux 6.19 plus Mesa 26.0. Prior to the Ubuntu 26.04 official release, Linux 7.0 is still expected to power it and thus the potential of some AMDGPU improvements from the Linux 7.0 series. With Ubuntu 26.04 also comes the upgrade from GNOME 49 to GNOME 50 with Mutter optimizations and more.
The same hardware was used for all the testing with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D paired with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT RDNA4 graphics card.
This AMD Linux gaming comparison preview on Ubuntu 25.10 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 is more brief than I would have liked but, unfortunately, still experiencing various stability issues on the latest upstream driver code with AMD Radeon graphics. See December’s article AMD RDNA3/RDNA4 Go Down Hard On Linux 6.19, But Here’s How The Older AMD GPUs End Out 2025. Unfortunately that issue persists – the situation seems slightly better than before but still throughout the benchmarking process was hitting hard hangs (no remote SSH access, etc) and frustrating enough that I had to limit the game selection tested and just the Radeon RX 9070 XT.
In any event, with Ubuntu 26.04 there are some nice performance gains on the horizon for those using the default open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver stack.
