As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 in its near final state compared to Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS with its HWE stack on an ASUS Zenbook S16.
Long story short, the AMD Ryzen AI 300/400 series also benefits from greater performance on Ubuntu 26.04, beyond just Strix Halo. The AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics performance especially is enjoying very nice performance gains compared to where the open-source driver support was just six months ago with Ubuntu 25.10 and in turn the Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS HWE stack. Some of the Radeon 890M graphics gains are quite magnificent, especially for Vulkan ray-tracing.
The laptop hardware used for this round of testing was an ASUS Zenbook S16 (UM5606WA) with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M Graphics, 32GB of LPDDR5-7500 memory, and 1TB NVMe SSD storage.
A clean install of Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS with its hardware enablement stack was tested followed by a daily install of Ubuntu 26.04 in its near final form ahead of the official Ubuntu 26.04 release next week. Going from Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS to Ubuntu 26.04 means leaping from Linux 6.17 to Linux 7.0, Mesa 25.2 to Mesa 26.0, GCC 13.3 to GCC 15.2, Python 3.12 to Python 3.14, OpenJDK 21 to OpenJDK 25, and many other worthwhile software upgrades.
