Windows 11’s WSL 2 does fairly well against native Ubuntu, most of the time

When AMD first revealed its Ryzen 7000X3D processors, the company promised new chipset drivers optimized for Windows. The drivers were released a month later and as the Santa Clara company had promised, we saw major performance per watt improvements, as the flagship Ryzen 7950X3D completely blew Intel’s i9-13900K out of the water.

Phoronix tested the 8-core, 16-threaded Ryzen 7 7800X3D recently on Ubuntu and compared it against Windows 11. While it was a close-fought battle overall, Ubuntu managed to come out on top. Following that, it was time to look at the performance of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) to see how well it did against Ubuntu.

Just like when it was tested back in 2021 with original Windows 11 21H2, WSL put up a decent show as it mostly traded blows did fall behind in some scenarios. For example, in x265 video encoding, it was far behind native Ubuntu, both 22.04.2 LTS and 23.04. A similar situation was seen in MariaDB database benchmark. However, it was also faster in memcaching tests.

Here’s how Phoronix concluded the comparison:

For many different practical workloads, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) performance continues looking quite nice on Microsoft Windows 11. Overall it was a fairly pleasant experience with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on WSL2 with the latest Windows 11. For many workloads there is similar performance to running bare metal Linux if due to corporate protocols or other reasons you are otherwise stuck to be using a Windows host. Plus Microsoft continues extending WSL2 functionality for supporting graphical/3D applications, video acceleration, and other functionality too.

You can find more details on Phoronix’s website.