Fedora 45 Beta Performance: The Satisfyingly Boring Benchmarks
While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it's largely boring but here are some to illustrate.
With Fedora sending down new Linux kernel versions as stable updates on existing Fedora releases along with other package upgrades like to Mesa that will move to new feature releases, comparing Fedora releases is far less exciting than say the likes of Ubuntu where there are the larger version bumps every six months given their more conservative SRU policies. With the spring releases of Fedora quickly moving to the latest GCC compiler feature release of the year, it also makes for the autumn Fedora releases to be less eventful with just then shifting to a new GCC point release.
There are some exceptions such as for Python's major release in the autumn so Fedora 45 is shipping Python 3.15-rc2 compared to Fedora 44. For some releases they also have work on targeted compiler optimizations and other changes that can influence the overall system performance, but typically with Fedora's more liberal stable update policy to new Linux kernel and Mesa versions, there tend to be less widespread performance changes between Fedora releases.
In any case I ran some benchmarks recently looking at Fedora Workstation 44 with all available updates as of 23 September compared to the Fedora Workstation 45 Beta. All tests were done on the same System76 Thelio Major workstation running with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X 64-core processor, 4 x 32GB DDR5-5600 memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics.
Both Fedora 44 and Fedora 45 Beta were on Linux 7.2, Fedora 45 Beta uses GNOME 51 by default rather than GNOME 50, both were on Mesa 26.2, both on GCC 16.2.1, and using the Btrfs file-system. Fedora 45 Beta does have Python 3.15-rc2 compared to Python 3.14.7 on Fedora 44.