I mean this thread alone proves my point and my title. I have a video with 10 games coming up, DXVK, VKD3D, Vulkan on Proton and Native Vulkan. Let’s see how this goes with all the people that doubt that Linux Gaming is actually better than Windows.
You really feel like the only reason to use or not use Linux is how much you can game on it, eh?
I’d rather push Linux for its strengths than lie and spread misinfo to lead people to believe Linux is always better than Windows at gaming perf. There’s many times it’s not, or it’s incompatible, or you need to spend possibly hours finding the right community-developed launcher / recompilation to get it to run. Gaming on Linux is a mess, that’s the only certainty about it lol
The abject strengths of Linux are its command line, its customisability, its compatibility with various utility softwares, and its productivity. Instead of drinking copium over a fruitless effort, just focus on actual strengths lmao
But beyond that, I don’t care how Linux performs in games. I play CP on RT Ultra in Linux while on Windows it has double the performance. Too much of a hassle to reboot while Linux has liek 30 measurable advantages.
I just want to dispel the myth that Windows is better for gaming, cause it’s not.
Windows is more easily compatible for gaming, generally, and for 90% of people that’s all that matters. Specifically various anti-cheats do not play well with Linux.
I agree about the anticheat games. Beyond that if you don’t play some extremely niche 1995 game, Linux will most probably work fine and better on an AMD system.
Yeah, I’ll agree with that at least. Issue is how prolific kernal-based anti-cheat software is in multiplayer games. Hopefully some day they’ll become more generally linux compatible. Make that happen and get Playnite^no^ ^not^ ^Lutris^ ported natively to Linux and it’ll become my daily driver instead of just my development station and webserver.
I doubt it’s as noticeable as you make it out to be. I use the default kernel shipped with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and the system is acceptably responsive while under load, with the main exception being low memory situations (i.e. heavy swap usage). But I expect the Zen scheduler to have similar issues.
Then again, I probably have more tolerance for poor responsiveness because I rarely run my system to its limits (unless compiling) and rarely interact with other apps while playing games.
It’s only been noticeable while compiling and looking at animations. It might also just be placebo or I’m misremembering since it’s been many months since I “tested” it.
It wasn’t my intention to make it sound like it’s a giant improvement. It’s marginal but if it’s simple to install I’d say go for it.
I’m as much a believer that Linux can get better performance than Windows because the less bloat, the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux. That being said 25% increase on a game running on wine seems fishy.
Your video did not play correctly, also you didn’t synced properly between the two at the start so it’s hard to compare that both have the same settings, and on the screen at the end it shows windows is running in full screen and Linux in Borderless, not sure if this should make a difference but showcases that not every setting is the same. After the video crashed for the first time I skipped a bit ahead and saw that at one point you put the screen half-half, that’s a good approach, but I also noticed that the right side had a character the left side didn’t right at the start, that means that Wine is failing to render some stuff, or disabling some features which is usually what’s happening when you get this massive performance differences, so the comparison might not be valid. An example would be if DXVK ray tracing implementation bounces the light less times than DX12 does, it would be almost indistinguishable but would have a performance boost (at which point my question would be to show me the benefits of bouncing the light more, but that’s my opinion and not a technical analysis).
In any case, great video, even if something is different I couldn’t see any significant difference in the screen when doing the side-by-side, and I don’t think people who claim Linux is always worse would even know of the possibility of wine lacking some implementation therefore not rendering that.
The video is still being transcoded, check again later.
You can pause the video to check the settings, timing things like this properly is almost impossible but for next videos I will edit properly. Thank you for the feedback.
The character is also at the beginning on the Linux side but he just walks on Windows. This is a dynamic scene so details like that are expected to differ.
AC Odyssey doesn’t have Ray Tracing and DXVK is mature enough to render everything properly (and at better frames).
You are most welcome. I really think disbelief in how much better Linux is derives from a really cumbersome past. I’ve been benchmarking games on Windows and Linux for 3 years now.
At first performance was a little better/same on Linux, then it improved and then it improved vastly.
Don’t fear that Proton is a compatibility layer. Linux overall (with its lightness, better Filesystems and optimizations) can achieve great results like this in most DX11 games. I will do a MIrage Benchmark as well on Tumbleweed vs Windows 11 to see how things are on he DX12 side. Ray Tracing is not ready on Linux on AMD yet so that will have to wait.
Exactly this. I am willing to believe these people either don’t game on Linux or just use Nvidia which has less performance on Linux. In any case Apex is a good idea. After Mirage which is on the schedule perhaps Apex will be the next one.
Because just as many people have had a complete opposite experience
When I tried Apex on Manjaro a few weeks back I saw a ~15% decrease in frames and major stutters.
A single system, running untested benchmarks and without any external validation from a trusted source doesn’t mean anything. Just like my experience with it isn’t universal, neither is either of yours.
Yeah I got worse performance on some Linux OSs. This was on PopOS. Every Linux distro will be different, I suggest sticking with the current best gaming distro… not sure what that is currently, but I think Arch was previously one of the best distro for gaming. Once you have that and proton going, you will should see a difference.
Unless your on Nvidia: in which case I hear it’s hit and miss for performance gains, I see no reason why it shouldn’t perform better in the majority of cases.
There is absolutely no way 25% is realistic in this scenario, it’s most likely, as you said, a certain characteristic/feature is interpreted/skipped/handled differently by WINE.
the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux
People say this, but what exactly do you mean? I mostly model on windows because it's my primary system (I use applications that simply don't work well enough with wine), but mostly finish and render stuff on linux because of windows' retarded automatic updates etc. that can just cancel rendering without asking. And the only difference I've seen is how fast Blender starts - I'd say that's more than 2x as fast on linux, it's a huge difference. But rendering is the same (NVidia GTX GPU) and other work inside blender also seems to be about the same.
Nvidia drivers don't tend to be as performant under linux.
With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.
Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.
Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).
The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of "Nvidia optimised" games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce "good" vulkan calls.
Afaik Blender since 3.0 does not support OpenCL anymore and AMD rendering uses HIP instead. I have not found any information about dramatic performance differences, though CPU rendering does seem to be somewhat faster on Linux - but more like 10% faster and the amount of computation practically done on the CPU is not that big.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
Personally I use NVidia because of CUDA, gaming is an afterthought. I wish CUDA just fucked off and we got some universal compute API instead, because that's what would reduce the NVidia stranglehold on the market, perhaps OneAPI is going to catch on at some point, but at this moment those options are not practical.
We’re referencing a somewhat old video of a benchmark ran in both systems www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0 that’s likely not still true, possibly devs figured out what was the issue on windows and circumvented it somehow.
Yeah, don't do that anymore then. Firstly the video doesn't really find overall 2x speedup, but mainly Cycles X came out since then, where most of the codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and after that numerous significant optimizations happened as well. That video is pretty much irrelevant now.
Runs like hot garbage on medium 4K on a 6900XT. 25fps with an empty city. On launch, it defaulted to ultimate settings, and had the menus chugging at 3fps.
Feels like they accidentally shipped a debug/non-optimized build to customers.
They flatout said the performance is not where they wanted it to be. This state was to be expected. Nonetheless glad it’s on gamepads and hope that I’ll be able to run it some day.
I’d say Tumbleweed is what you’re looking for. They have some sort of automated testing process (OpenQA, I think) and are far more stable than Arch, while oftentimes having newer versions of packages before Arch.
In the absence of a gamersnexus video or phoronix article, I’m going to take this with a large grain of salt. Especially when a video like this one is showing much higher performance in windows. The different cpu shouldn’t account for much of a difference when playing at higher resolutions and the benchmarks shows the game being gpu limited.
How’s the state of Nvidia’s drivers? Do the shiny new features work? Things like RT, frame gen, ray reconstruction, and randomly crashing the game because the driver has tripped TDR yet again?
The 545 Beta drivers apparently support a ton of new features on Linux like VRR. Frame Gen is the only thing not supported by Proton yet I think.
Tbh though, if you’re on Nvidia I would stay on Windows. It’s definitey doable to use Linux and get equal performance. Until Nvidia is ready for Wayland though I wouldn’t switch.
Good news is NVK is a new Open Source Nvidia Vulkan driver so in like a year or two things should be as good as on AMD. The driver already loads most games with DXVK 1.5.1 but runs them at like 1 FPS if they have anything like Valheim Graphics and above. Reclocking should be coming soon though so the situation will improve. After that it’s just working to get all features in and optimize.
As someone who’s really into gaming and gives NVIDIA on Linux a try now and then, the one thing that really bugs me is DLDSR isn’t available at all, nor is plain, non AI DSR. The latter isn’t hard to replicate, but I miss the extra bang for your buck of the DL variant.
Granted, mine is a very niche use case but I rely on it a lot since it works great on older titles or ones with bad or no native AA and such.
I want to switch to Linux and I would love to game on it daily, but just like so many people, software incompatibility is holding me onto Windows.
In my case, it’s Parsec that I need, because I game a lot with friends who live in other countries. And unfortunately, Steam’s remote play together feature is very broken on Linux (I remember even filing bug reports about it when I was daily driving Linux two-ish years ago.
Longtime windows and Linux user, my last several machines have all been dual-boot.
I’ve tried multiple times to get gaming to work right with Linux, whether it be Unbuntu or just plain Debian, but something always gets in the way. Graphical issues, sound issues, controller incompatibility, platform incompatibility, unable to launch game, whatever. I give up and just stick with windows and use Linux for other things.
PSA you can download a savegame with a city pop of 100k to check how well the game will run in later stages. By doing this you can check it and refund it if necessary.
I do all my gaming on Linux EXCEPT there is this one niche game that, at a certain point, needs so much repetitive grinding for resources that pretty much everyone uses macros for it. Guess what? I have gotten to that point, and unfortunately, the only macro that’s efficient enough (because it uses AutoHotKey for detecting elements in a window) is Windows only, because AutoHotKey is Windows only. And no, it cannot be rewritten in AutoKey, it cannot be rewritten in Python (it probably can, but the project is so massive that it would be a near-impossible task, and there is neither enough supply of people willing to do it, nor enough demand from users), it cannot run under AutoHotKey in the same WINE prefix OR in a different WINE prefix as the game (I tried both, Window detection doesn’t work), I have tried everything and nothing seems to work. In terms of less efficient macros, there are 3 projects listed on the official “[Insert game here] Macro Community” Discord server under the Python-macros channel: 1 of them is supposed to be a macro working for both Windows and Linux, but it has been abandoned (I even contacted the developer), the 2nd one is MacOS only, with the Dev stating “retina display” as the reason behind it. Still , I tried it and couldn’t get it to work. The third one was a project that started some time ago, but then there is now a message by the dev stating “I’m now pausing the development of this macro” so I contacted them a few weeks ago to see if I can get their incomplete source code to use as inspiration when writing my own macro, no response. And yes, I tried writing my own macro, and failed miserably. It is far more difficult than I thought.
So yeah. I’m dualbooting a debloated Windows 10 (thank you CTT and winutil) alongside Linux. And Windows is, in fact, the secondary OS i.e I installed Windows after Linux.
Cause those are nothing more then distros that come with some prepackeged apps. Nothing I can’t easily do myself and prefer more vanilla experience and minimal bloat distros.
Bazzite is just an immutable fedora image with preconfigured containers, among others an arch container for running steam and adjacent apps.
Overall fedora (whether immutable or regular) feels like a rolling release. By the time a new release comes out, most packages are similar, except maybe a big suite (e.g. new gnome version). Upgrades are also pretty seamless too. My grandpa’s pc has been running Fedora since 27 (or 29) and it’s now on 38. Never reinstalled
The last time I used Fedora was almost 15 years ago, and back then release upgrades took forever (45 min IIRC) and stuff often broke. That was the main reason I switched to Arch and why I stick with rolling releases these days. Their packages were usually really fresh, so that is still the same.
I think I used Fedora last around 18 or 20 (can’t remember exactly), and I remember it being the first major distro to use GNOME 3 and systemd. My main gripe was the upgrader, fedup, and yum was really slow, but other than that it was a fine distro.
I’m on openSUSE Tumbleweed now and have no intention to try Fedora again, but I like that it’s an option.
If your Arch breaks down it’s likely any rolling release distro will also, because it means you’re likely not doing part of the maintenance a rolling release needs, such as ensuring the config files you’ve changed get properly updated.
Any rolling release distro is unstable, because unstable doesn’t mean what you think it means, it means that any library can be updated.
That’s a fair point, but I think the definition of “breaking” tends to correlate with experience.
There are certain things that will “break” in Arch that are trivial to fix for me now, but were a real pain when I first started using it (GPG key errors come to mind).
Even things like the Grub issue from around a year ago – that’s something I could probably fix with a little reading now, but at the time I just ended up re-installing.
Fair. I used Arch when I was already quite familiar with Linux, so I really didn’t have any issues. I would just read the update notes before running updates, and the only one that gave me trouble was the switch to systemd some 5-10 years ago.
I have since switched to Tumbleweed because I wanted my server and desktop to use the same tools, but I want my server to run stable Linux. I use Leap on my servers and I’ll probably switch my server to MicroOS one of these days.
So far, Tumbleweed has been less of a pain than Arch, but that doesn’t mean Arch was unstable, it just required a little hand holding from time to time.
I love endeavour, really can’t go wrong with it. Is super lightweight, rolling-release, archbased (so you have AUR) and more robust than arch I’d say. It has never failed me.
However, my dad’s endeavour system broke once, idk if it was because no maintenance or what… I guess no system is perfect.
Have you considered a fixed release in combination with rolling applications (i. e. Flatpak, Snap)?
If you choose Fedora (preferably one of the atomic variants, like Silverblue), you would also get a rolling kernel and rolling KDE Plasma desktop, so overall the experience can be quite close to a rolling release distribution if you install the desktop applications via Flatpak.
Ubuntu “interim” (non-LTS) releases are usually also fairly current and could be a good choice if you don’t mind Snap. There’s also the option of following the Ubuntu “devel” branch, which always refers to the current pre-release version of Ubuntu (e. g. 24.04 at the moment) and is rolling.
Just wanted to give you a different direction to think about. ;)
Just FYI, if you like EndeavourOS, you should know that it’s essentially an installer for Vanilla Arch (unlike Majaro which is Arch-based).
So you may have just had bad luck when you tried Vanilla Arch that you didn’t have with EndeavourOS – but there’s no real difference between the 2 besides manual vs GUI installer.
Depending on what you want, OpenSUSE’s OBS is a great alternative to the AUR. It works by building software given a script, so you still just download binary packages, unlike the AUR where you download build scripts.
I honestly haven’t needed much since switching from Arch to openSUSE, though I’ve played with some OBS packages here and there. I used to maintain some AUR packages, and I haven’t needed to on Tumbleweed.
Give it a shot, you probably don’t need both. I prefer Tumbleweed these days, but I’ve used Tumbleweed and Arch both for about the same amount of time (5-ish years) and can recommend both.
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