I haven’t seen too many positives regarding Radeon on Linux
Funny you say that, because Linux users have a lot of hate for Nvidia due to its poor support and closed-source drivers, and lots of love for AMD with it’s great support and open source drivers.
I think i’m just naive. I did a bit of searching but didn’t find much. I didn’t realize the drivers are built into the kernel which makes me feel much better.
One warning, if you use a display over HDMI, then you might have a bad time with Radeon on Linux. I use an LG C2 TV as my monitor, and there is a bug in the driver that forces it to a crappy ycbcr mode that ruins text clarity. I did try all manner of workarounds like hacking up the EDID profile, but I gave up and went back to Windows for now.
It’s a very specific issue, but a showstopper if it affects you
That’s the display advertising a specific function set, not the card, and it has to do with the large panel size and pixel density. If you used a proper monitor I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have that issue.
Ok, then why does the same display work perfectly in windows? The display supports full RGB both 8 and 10 bit uncompressed. There is an open issue for this on the driver gitlab repo.
Don’t monitor shame me please. Also, the pixel density is within 5% of my 27" 1440p monitors.
For how great AMD usually is on Linux, it's not without it's issues. RDNA2 (the entire RX 6000 series) still suffers to this day from this 2 years old issue that can cause stutter in games as the GPU constantly downclocks itself aggressively. I still prefer it over Nvidia (having owned one and now using AMD) but just be aware, it's not all as perfect as some Linux users would have you believe.
While this is true the linux kernel + Mesa package versions needs to be new enough in your distro too
this is the case for Ubuntu 22.04.02 and Ubuntu 23.04 but not for the older but still supported Ubuntu 20.04.04
I used to buy Nvidia cards, but since AMD providing support for teams building in-kernel drivers I’ve mostly walked away from team green.
Unfortunately when it comes to stuff like laptops the selection with AMD kit is a bit limited, do I do have one with an NVidia card there and it’s still a huge pain. In Linux I have to worry about the driver stub borking every time there’s a kernel update, and in Windows they seem to want you to login to their app to do damned updates.
I’m happy to see Nouveau getting better accelerated support but it would be even nicer if NVidia could step up to the plate themselves.
In a way, I think it’s also best if the community would work this driver out, because if Nvidia steps in and gets involved in this project, chances are that they might update their Linux kernel driver to become incompatible with Nouveau/NVK.
Would that necessarily be bad. If they made a proper open-source Nvidia driver - similar to the in-kernel AMDGPU - then Nouveau could still build off that or be merged in to add functionality.
I don’t miss the old fglrx drivers now that AMDGPU is around.
Definitely would not mind having an AMDGPU equivalent for Nvidia. It’d be awesome if things like proprietary CUDA could be an optional installable package alongside an open graphics driver.
Tbh all nVidia should’ve done was to make their firmware available and easily redistributable. Them locking down their hardware down to the firmware level is what killed the development of Nouveau.
They don’t need to step up to the plate, just don’t block the guys who are willing to do the necessary work themselves
Yes, but that license change took them quite a while after the first release of the open kernel module, and still, that’s only for the GSP firmware. Nothing of the sort is the case for the PMU firmware that could be used for Maxwell and Pascal*.
(*Fun fact, there is actually some code for power management for Maxwell series at least (not upstreamed I presume), Nouveau devs even demonstrated NVK via playing Hollow Knight on a GTX950m, which ran the game pretty smoothly, the main issue seems to be not being able to control the fans of the GPU due to the firmware, something that was not really a problem for the particular laptop they’ve done the demonstration on)
Yeah the APU availability isn’t bad (and I’d choose AMD for an APU over others) but selection with dedicated graphics chips is pretty limited, especially if you’re looking for both an dedicated AMD GPU and CPU.
I have definitely had DKMS not play nicely with my Nvidia drivers, as well as the “which Nvidia driver actually supports this older GPU… oh look it’s dropped” issue, but that’s also on Ubuntu variants so you might have better luck in arch.
To be fair, I do some weird shit on my environments. One thing I’d love if NVidia had reasonably supported native drivers is to have a PXE-boot system that plays nicely regardless of whether one is one is team green or team red. I used to maintain one which contained a decent catalog of games but had to do some quirky overlayfs stuff to make both viable.
Well I’m not atm because I really like the setup at the moment, but I was hoping it was a known quick fix just in case I feel like hopping on something else for whatever future reason. That being said I am pretty happy with my pop experience.
I’m on Linux full time for programming and gaming. I play battle.net games (WoW, hearthstone, overwatch, HoTS, WoW classic), League of Legends, and a lot of steam games. I have virtually no issues. I have a ryzen 5900x and a RTX 3080.
The key to Linux gaming (outside of steam) is Lutris. You just search the game you want to install, and it installs all the dependencies needed automatically and you can launch the game from one place. They even have a simple 1 click button for adding steam games too if you want a single launcher for every game you have (this is what I do).
The only issues I really have are with EAC, like DKO didn’t work for a bit after it came out (but does now), and Valorant/Fortnite don’t work (they can easily enable Linux EAC but choose not to). I happen to not play these games so it’s a non-issue for me, but worth mentioning.
League of Legends is also worth mentioning as having more issues than the rest. Usually I can run the game for months or even a year+ with no issues, but earlier this year the game was virtually unplayable on Linux for about 6 days due to a bug Riot Games added. This bug also effected Windows users, but to a much less extent. They would get disconnected once every couple games, while Linux users would get disconnected once every couple minutes. The League of Linux community is amazing though, and people were troubleshooting it constantly and making it more and more playable (getting to Windows parity on the bug), until Riot Games fixed it on their end.
I even helped my brother swap from Windows to Linux recently. He isn’t super into Linux or anything, but he was having consistent issues on Windows with his monitor turning off in games, specifically League. We tried reinstalling drivers, watching temps, reinstalling League (since it didn’t happen in other games), and uninstalling certain apps that can add overlays (though they were disabled). Some of these issues seemed to fix it until it returned usually hours or days later. Eventually we gave Linux a try and the issue is entirely gone. It’s likely that resetting windows would work too, but he dual boots and it’s easier to not have to reinstall everything.
I was using linux for gaming until recently. I need to repair it, and also have been using some windows centric software. So booting mainly into windows right now.
But one thing I noticed was that on nvidia blob drivers at least (cannot attest to amd), in FPS games, where every millisecond does count. There's definitely a bit more latency on linux compared to windows. Enough to feel it for sure.
Otherwise almost everything (windows store games being mostly the exception) worked fine or could be made to run fine in linux and performance aside from what I am feeling as added latency was on par and sometimes better than windows.
No Microsoft GamePass. Or none that actually matters, as the only solution is to pay for the higher tier and stream the games - so no game actually runs on the desktop. No, thanks.
Why “no thanks”? I use GamePass with xCloud and it works pretty well on Linux, and it’s a perfectly viable option - unless you’ve got really poor internet, or you’re into competitive FPS games or something that requires ultra-low latency.
NVIDIA support for Linux is far from being on-par with that on Windows, especially the open-source drivers. Is this still true?
Yes. If you’re planning to game on Linux, I’d highly recommend getting an AMD card instead, the AMD open-source drivers are excellent and see frequent improvements - both in terms of features and performance.
Many devices, especially those for gaming, might not have good (or even working) compatibility drivers for Linux. I know my UWQHD monitor works flawlessly on Windows, but requires quite a bit of tinkering on Ubuntu
“Many” -> citation needed. In my experience, depending on the hardware, you may find a better out-of-the-box experience with Linux compared to Windows. For instance, on my ThinkPad Z13, everything worked out-of-the-box on Nobara (Fedora) - including Fn keys, Wi-Fi, accelerated graphics/video drivers… everything. Same with my AMD desktop, didn’t have to install any special drivers or anything. But when I tried to install a fresh copy of Windows on my Z13 (dual-boot), there were almost no drivers - I had to manually install the Wi-Fi drivers first, and then grab the rest of the drivers via Windows Update, which was painful - took like 3 reboots to get everything installed, with long reboot times cause of updates. Painful.
In saying that, I’m surprised that your monitor - of all things - needed tinkering, when they’re usually mostly dumb devices that need no drivers or anything. But then again, it’s Ubuntu so… ¯*(ツ)*/¯. FWIW, I have a fairly recent QHD monitor from AOC and it worked just fine on Nobara, no tinkering required.
The advantages: What else am I not thinking about?
Performance. Thanks to no bloatware like unnecessary background services/Defender/telemetry/Cortana/Bing etc, Linux in general would perform better, at least in theory. YMMV of course, depending on the game/hardware/distro. The good thing is if you use the right distro, or are willing to go the extra mile with tweaking, you can eke out way more performance, such as by using custom gaming-optimised kernels, fstab mount option tweaks and more. Using a gaming-optimised distro means most of these tweaks are built-in, saving you some time.
Arguably, a better gaming-focused experience, when you go for a gaming-focused distro like Nobara, or if you want to go the full mile and make an exclusive gaming box, you could install something like ChimeraOS, which is basically a community Steam OS. Imagine your PC booting straight to Steam, in the fastest possible time, with no distractions like Windows Update, Defender or other nonsense. Basically a console experience, with the power and flexibility of PCs and Linux.
What distro?
Nobara. It’s based on Fedora but optimised for gaming, made by the same guy who makes Proton-GE and Wine-GE (GloriousEggroll), so you know it’s the good stuff. Obviously comes with ProtonGE/Steam/Lutris etc out-of-the-box, custom kernel, patched Discord, codecs, nVidia drivers and more. Definitely give it a go if you’re considering Linux for gaming.
I don’t understand why, but I don’t see your message on the post, only in my notifications. Anyway, thanks for the feedback!
Why “no thanks”?
Because I have a powerful enough desktop to run games that I would be streaming then. It takes away some of the rights I have regarding my collection of games and creates a need that I did not have. I also just bought an NVIDIA GPU, I won’t buy a new one to be able to switch to Linux.
“Many” -> citation needed.
On two different computers running Ubuntu, my DELL monitor was not correctly recognized. I had to switch from Wayland to Xorg and define the actual monitor resolution through xrandr - not impossible, just quite annoying. Similarly, my Logitech G403’s buttons to change the sensitivity never have never worked correctly on Ubuntu, and there is no official Logitech software to make them work. Those buttons are just not seen by an Ubuntu computer.
Performance.
That’s one I didn’t think of! Although I don’t think backgrounds services impact that much performance nowadays on a higher end PC, it leaves that much more headroom to be used on the game instead. On the other hand, isn’t performance on a non-native software already impacted negatively? So all in all, which would have the greater impact?
Nobara
Thanks for the recommendation! I know have examples of Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch based distros optimized for gaming. As for which to choose, I will probably get as many answers as persons I ask. And ChimeraOS seems to be a nice project, it just doesn’t fit my needs.
I used Nobara for the past year or so and liked it for the most part but it had too many issues. Most annoying is every update broke my controller it was something to do with their Xbox configs. Then there were a few games that wouldn’t work despite working on my steam deck. Most notably it was uncharted. Finally I’m just done with RH and needed to move away. I switched most of my machines to Debian but the TV gaming rig is on Solus now that they finally updated their image. It boots way faster than nobara and uncharted and controller work flawlessly. So far I’ve been happy with it.
Good to know! Which version of Solus are you using? Although it doesn’t seem to really matter as I don’t think any of them are really dedicated to gaming.
4.4 budgie it was just released. Not a gaming distro but they do have a custom steam runtime app that used to work wonders but I find breaks things more than helps now that proton is a thing. So make sure to turn that off if you go that route. I like it for the TV PC as I don’t want to do as little maintenance on I as possible. Just launch steam or some light web browsing but i didn’t want to go the steam os route.
For your screen, try a live ISO of another distro that’s not based on Debian. I struggled for years with my 1440p monitor on Wayland when plugged in to my laptop. Turns out, there’s something wrong with the way Debian’s kernel decodes my monitor’s EDID. On Fedora, it worked out of the box.
About Nobara, I’m not sure it’s better than vanilla Fedora for a beginner. Sure, there are a lot of nice things baked in and rpmfusion enabled by default, but the dual system update thing is… not great. I’m still running my gaming rig on Nobara tho. YMMV.
About nVidia and their drivers… yeah, they suck. And they will continue to suck for the foreseeable future. That’s why I built my system around an AMD GPU from the start. People like to complain about Wayland and that it’s not ready for prime time and that Wayland sucks. Well, nVidia drivers are to blame. I’ve been running Wayland almost exclusively for the past 4 years on Intel iGPUs and AMD GPUs, it’s always been nice and reliable.
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