Linux 5.16 Has A Nice Performance Gift For AMD Ryzen Laptops With Radeon Graphics

For those making use of integrated Radeon Vega-based graphics with modern Ryzen laptops at least, the Linux 5.16 kernel is offering some nice performance gains noticed recently as part of the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U benchmarking with the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2. Here is a look at the AMD Radeon Graphics performance for that Zen 3 laptop across varying Mesa and Linux kernel versions while then expanding the comparison to multiple devices given the Linux 5.16 performance boost.

This comparison started out just looking at the Radeon Graphics performance on the AMD Ryzen 7 5850U mobile SoC across varying versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa with the intent of providing that insight to the user over whether a performance upgrade for either of those software components is worthwhile. Most interesting though out of this comparison was noticing some very nice uplift when making use of Linux 5.16.

The comparison started off using the Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS release with its Linux 5.11 kernel and Mesa 21.0.3 for the open-source AMD Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. From there the testing moved onto newer versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. The combinations tested were:

Linux 5.11 + Mesa 21.0.3
Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 21.0.3
Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 21.2.6
Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 21.3.2
Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 22.0-dev
Linux 5.16 + Mesa 22.0-dev

All testing from the same Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop with Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and just changing out the above-noted components between runs. At the end of the article is some Linux 5.15 vs. 5.16 data from a secondary laptop featuring a Ryzen 5 5500U for looking at similar performance uplift there too.