Phoronix testing reveals CachyOS and AlmaLinux outperform Windows 11 in workstation benchmarks, with CachyOS in performance mode leading the geometric mean and Windows 11 Pro trailing by 14.9%.

Tests ran on a $46,000+ HP Z4 G6i workstation featuring a 48-core Intel Xeon 678X, 128 GB DDR5-6400 memory, and an NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU. The suite covered 3D rendering, video encoding, fluid dynamics, and compression workloads.

In Blender and Indigo Bench CPU rendering, CachyOS and AlmaLinux beat Windows by up to 12%, while Ubuntu and Fedora lagged only 3-4%. V-Ray 6.0 showed Windows ahead 6% in RTX and 2% in CUDA GPU tests, but CachyOS led CPU rendering by 18%. CachyOS also pulled ahead in Neatbench, Gravity Mark, Unigine Superposition, and Octane Bench. Fluid X3D results were nearly identical, OSPRay and LuxCore Render produced mixed outcomes, and 7-Zip compression favored Linux distributions broadly.

The mixed results suggest an application-specific OS choice is warranted, as Windows retains advantages in certain GPU-accelerated rendering engines.