CachyOS vs. Fedora 45 vs. Ubuntu 26.10 Performance On AMD Ryzen 9

With the recently released Ubuntu 26.10 and the nearly-released Fedora Workstation 45, Phoronix readers have begun inquiring about fresh benchmarks looking at how they stack up against the performance-optimized, Arch Linux based CachyOS. Up today are our first CachyOS vs. Fedora 45 vs. Ubuntu 26.10 benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D2 desktop system. Both Ubuntu 26.10 and CachyOS are currently on the Linux 7.3 kernel as the latest stable release while Fedora 45 is still on Linux 7.2 but with then rolling out Linux 7.3 as a post-release update. The Mesa 26.2 graphics drivers are present across all of the tested distributions. Both Fedora 45 and CachyOS are using GCC 16.2 by default where as Ubuntu 26.10 stuck to using GCC 15. The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D2 with ASRock X870E Taichi motherboard, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, and WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe SSD were used for testing. Graphics tests were omitted this round of testing because the Radeon RX 9070 GRE in use had to fallback to using LLVMpipe on Ubuntu 26.10. On this particular system, when the AMDGPU driver loaded with the RX 9070 GRE at boot the display would stop working as a regression compared to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. So for the Ubuntu 26.10 run on this system "nomodeset" was used for getting the display to successfully light up. Dozens of different CPU/system benchmarks were carried out on this AMD Ryzen 9 desktop for seeing how Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45 are competing with CachyOS that tends to be on the leading-edge of out-of-the-box performance optimizations.