Foreign media tests Ubuntu 26.04, comparing it to version 25.10; RTX 5090 gaming performance soars up to 12%

IT Home, March 13 — Technology media Phoronix published a blog post yesterday (March 12), testing the NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics card. In the comparison between Ubuntu 25.10 and Ubuntu 26.04, they found that the gaming performance of the Ubuntu 26.04 release increased by up to 12% (average 4.4%).

IT Home quotes the blog post, stating that to ensure the rigor of the test data, the media set up a top-tier hardware testing platform equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor, and installed two high-end graphics cards: NVIDIA RTX 5090 and RTX 5080.

All tests were conducted under the NVIDIA 590.48.01 version Linux driver environment, covering popular games and benchmarking software such as Counter-Strike 2, Hitman 3, and 3DMark.

According to the test results, compared to Ubuntu 25.10, the RTX 5090’s speed in Counter-Strike 2 increased by 8% in the Ubuntu 26.04 environment, and in Hitman 3, it achieved a significant gain of 11%.

Based on various benchmark tests, the average performance increase of the RTX 5090 reached 4.4%. However, the performance of the RTX 5080 varied greatly; aside from a slight 4% increase in Hitman 3, it remained consistent with the older system in several games including DIRT Rally 2.0.

The media explored the technical reasons behind this, pointing out that Ubuntu 26.04 has deeply optimized its underlying components. First, it is the first Ubuntu system to feature the Mesa 26 graphics library, which not only fixed many historical vulnerabilities but also introduced ray tracing optimizations specifically for Vulkan API.

Secondly, the new system integrates the Gnome 50 desktop environment. Phoronix emphasized that Gnome 50 includes multiple targeted optimization schemes, successfully extracting additional performance potential from NVIDIA Linux 580 series drivers.