Performance benchmark shows Windows 11 totally dominates Linux in one absolutely key area

Windows 11 is superior to Linux in terms of AI processing and output. However there's some cases where Linux dominates too.

Recently, we covered an interesting story wherein Microsoft's own Surface device with 8GB of memory was found struggling to perform well even though it easily meets the system requirements of Windows 11.

Now, here is where Linux fans argue about its advantages, that Linux is typically more lightweight, and thus should offer a better experience than a Windows PC. However, that may or may not be true, depending on what kind of workload we are looking at.

Phoronix recently tested Windows 11 against Linux by comparing Microsoft's desktop OS with two popular Linux distros, Ubuntu and CachyOS.

What is quite intriguing is that the device, a Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 workstation laptop, that was used for testing here, easily meets and far exceeds the hardware eligibility of both Windows 11 and Ubuntu. This is a $5400 device we are talking about.

If you recall, Ubuntu now has similar or higher requirements than Windows 11. Also, interestingly, the Razer PC is set to become the first device from the brand to be officially Ubuntu Certified, and that means users should expect very good performance from it.

One area where Windows 11 consistently dominated was in the case of AI processing, be it text generation or prompt processing on an LLM.

As you can see above, the token rate of Windows 11 was significantly better across all tests. So if you are looking for a local AI processing device, this is it, and in one case, it was three times faster than Ubuntu.

The same is seen on Mozilla's Whisperfile as well, which tests speech-to-text performance and is based on OpenAI's Whisper. Seeing how AI and LLM processing is so very popular nowadays, there is a real potential for Windows 11 here to absolutely dominate the market. There is some real catching up Linux would need to do here.

Moving on from AI, up next, we have OpenAPV benchmarks.

APV, short for Advanced Professional Video, is a codec developed by Samsung, and it looks like encoding is the strong suit of Linux. Here, both Ubuntu and CachyOS easily outperform Windows 11 irrespective of the encoding settings.

It's a similar case for AV1 encoding as well, as you can see above. We wonder if Linux will continue to lead on the next-gen AV2 codec as well.

Phoronix ran many more tests, but here we only highlighted the ones which show the biggest gaps. Overall, as can be seen from the geometric mean of all 99 tests, Windows 11 actually ties with CachyOS, which is pretty impressive, considering that the latter is said to be a highly performant distro.

As mentioned above, overall, things are looking pretty bright for Windows 11 since the AI performance lead it holds over Linux could actually translate to a lot of wins in the real world. You can check out the rest of the data at source link below.

Source and images: Phoronix

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Posted Monday 20 July 2026 at 7:21 am AEST (my time).

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