I’m glad OP’s linux gaming experience is so much better than it is on windows. I don’t say this to cast aspersions but if the results were reliable and repeatable, people like christitus, gardiner and many others would make daily videos on the topic just to get all the views(dollars) it would surely generate. It would cause a seismic shift in the PC gaming space.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I don’t think OP’s claims are extraordinary. I think he’s only saying “I’ve noticed Linux can outperform Windows on programs that are optimized for Windows. Kinda unexpected, but here are the benchmarks.”
OP is not claiming that this is true in 100% of cases. For example, in this thread he points out that Windows outperformed Linux on Doom.
Have you seen protondb? A pretty impressive number of games just work. Really we are at the point now where games that don’t run are more the exception, and usually it is due to Anti-cheat incompatibility or some very specific issue.
what does “few” mean in this context? With proton the number of games (developed for Windows) now simply work. And without a bloated OS full of spyware they seem to run actually faster.
However, seeing as everyone has chosen to give me a tuneup with so many downvotes, I’m switching my Linux dual boot from Debian to Manjaro, a supposedly more game-friendly distro. So far Steam has installed just fine, but now I need to rearrange some partitions to make space to try out a few non-steam games and see if they work (stuff from EA/Origin and Epic).
Could you perhaps give us some examples of these games that don’t work? There aren’t really that many of these days, thanks to valve’s work on proton and thanks to the steam deck making developers want to at least not actively break their games the majority work out of the box. Even non-steam games and launchers
EA’s Battlefield franchise right off the top of my head. Tons of effort to get it to start, when it finally did start the sound was a wreck, couldn’t get the resolution set right and the FPS was probably 12-20.
I think I tried Elite: Dangerous, and that wouldn’t start at all.
Lutris appears to have installers available for both of those games. And I know some people that play Elite dangerous on Linux I asked them and they said they didn’t have any issues with it. Was that perhaps very close to its initial release or something? It could just be better now
I tried out all of this a couple times, most recently few years ago before COVID. While I realize nobody here on a pro-Linux sub wants to hear it, Linux is still a minefield of different distros and versions, many of which don’t work quite the same in various subtle ways that can be infuriating to someone trying to grab something off a repository that should work, but doesn’t for the aforementioned reasons. Whereas people here scoff at the premise that this is a flaw, for the vast majority of people it’s the very reason Linux isn’t mainstream outside the IT world. Yeah, unpopular opinion, but it’s from someone who’s been trying to love Linux for 25 years and gets put off by all the little issues.
i won’t argue with you there. i fucking hate people who push mint,Ubuntu, popos, or anything based on apt. it’s literally not designed to be up to date and rolling. People try to band-aid it on with repos but it just leads to systems eating themselves.
valve went with arch Linux on the steamdeck for a reason, it’s designed, from its core, to be rolling. which gaming needs. you need the latest drivers, libs, wine, etc. and there are easy to go arch installers. my favorite is EndeavorOS. sadly you get a similar problem in reverse with shit like manjaro. where they take a perfectly working rolling system and attempt to “stabilize” it with custom repos that arbitrarily hold packages back. and it tends to break a lot.
it’s the double edged sword of open source. i can do what i want, but so can everyone else. and the voice of the stupid is almost never a minority
Mines just a bit worse by that measure, and on the clickplay measure was about 20% tier 1, 20% tier 2, about 15% tier 3, and about 8% each tiers 4 and 5.
I feel like click play is a better measure for average users you’re trying to convert since it’s “how well does it work if I just try to start it” as opposed to “how well can it be made to work if I tinker with it enough”.
As someone who’s been using Linux for 3 years, the amount of bullshit I have to go through to make some of the games/modding tools work properly or having to look up launch commands for almost every game so it runs well enough definitely makes gaming harder compared to Windows “works out of the box” experience.
Linux desktop too isn’t that much better than Windows except in privacy and security. In terms of ease of use, it’s sometimes on-par with Windows but seeing how you need to troubleshoot stuff when setting up and potentially at update time, it’s insane to call Linux 10 times easier.
I find day-to-day desktop use easier with a better workflow in Linux, personally, but yeah, while there are plenty of games that run without any tweaking, there are some that will take extra time and effort to get running. Windows is def easier for gaming, especially if you're not familiar with Linux. There is a learning curve, for sure.
Any specific graphic card to recommend from your own experience or article with tests ? I don’t have same vision from reading forums, as some games seems to not work properly with amd… But I’m no expert & I try to take care about comments on internet. I’m a protondb user with nvidia gtx 1650 (laptop version).
It seems I can’t find those good graphics on laptops ? Because otherwise I have no clue, if anyone has a good laptop builder brand / website I’ll take it too
I bought an AMD GPU before and the experience was so horrible that it’s deterred me from ever buying one again.
I never knew how good I had it with Nvidia until I tried AMD. The main issue? Drivers. AMDs drivers were abysmally shit. I never had to ‘choose’ specific versions of Nvidia drivers to get them to work. I did with AMD, and some features would work while others would break depending on the version.
When I was due for an upgrade, I chose low to mid-range AMD card supported by new open source drivers on Linux. Literally 0 issues and nothing to install. Pure plug and play. Am not sure about performance gain or loss since I haven’t touched Windows for a while.
With nVidia it was annoying and occasionally painful experience. Annoying because you had to install drivers and sometimes nVidia stops supporting your card, so you have to chase older drivers which might not be supported on your OS now, etc. On occasion those drivers would break after update and my system simply won’t start and I would have to revert to Nouveau to get any work done. Didn’t happen often, but enough to be annoying and the fact they chose the worst moment to break made it painful.
One thing I really liked about AMD cards that makes me happy I have one right now is output ports. AMD seems to be pushing more modern connectors than nVidia. In same generation I had nVidia with HDMI and VGA, while AMD pushed for HDMI and DVI, which can push analog but is at the same time digital. Since I like having two displays AMD’s choice was better. These days I use fiber optic HDMI cable for TV and having card with 3 digital connectors is very nice. Pushing 3 displays with nVidia card at the time was problematic if impossible. My solution was usually to have built-in Intel card push TV HDMI and other two displays were on nVidia, but since nVidia likes stepping over open GL libraries there was no hardware acceleration for Intel.
Granted this is all thing of a past but I don’t think I’ll switch from AMD anytime soon as they seem set on providing good quality open source drivers.
Am well aware nVidia is better optimized for games, or rather games are better optimized for nVidia. However to me, gaming is a secondary concern and getting work done primary one. So not giving me troubles while using it scores highly on my necessity list. That said I also think people should get what they want and what works best for them. Even though figuring that out is probably a harder task than it sounds.
On Linux all the drivers are included with the kernel. No software to manage either, it just works. Nvidia drivers need to be installed separately on Linux and are generally very low quality with performance and technical issues.
Idk about Windows though, never used an AMD GPU on it personally. My Nvidia GPU has always worked perfectly on Windows.
That’s bizarre, I have the opposite experience ha. Nvidia drivers with my 1660 produced buggy video output nearly 100% of the time, even idling on desktop would randomly cause black bars to appear every few frames. I tried 3 different driver versions but each one broke something different. Both X11 and Wayland sucked. On the Nvidia forums the devs were basically apologizing and saying it would be fixed later in these huge threads of people documenting similar issues. To my knowledge a lot of my issues still exist with my hardware.
My 5700 worked flawlessly OOTB without any tinkering. Open-source MESA drivers were packaged with my Debian 12 install and they have never stuttered or bugged out on me. I literally do not even think about my GPU setup anymore, it just works and required 0 configuration on my end.
Did you just have a different hardware setup? Was this a brand new release of an AMD GPU that just didn’t have good driver support on your distro yet?
Sounds like they probably last used AMD devices shortly after the ATI acquisition, and yeah for awhile the drivers were absolutely shyte (as they were with ATI).
The second possibility it’s - as you mentioned -, running bleeding-edge (i.e. trying to run a video device just released). I got a 6900XT early when they came out and drivers were a bit finicky for maybe the first 1-2mo. I think I had to manually download the firmware files to get it running. However, I’ve had the same issues - or worse - with other vendors in that regard.
Apart from that, then anything in the last half decade shouldn’t require any driver installs and minimum to no tinkering. It’s all
I think instead of damage control for AMD, you could try to open your mind to the possibility that their drives may not be so superior that they work for everyone just because they work for you.
Funny, I was very much in camp NVidia until the RX480, which ran just fine. So did my Vega56, and my 6900 as well as numerous APU’s (one was a bit annoying for overscan on the attached TV). No driver installs, just what came with the OS.
I’ve also got a tablet with an Intel Iris chipset that works fine with the in-kernel driver, and a laptop with an Nvidia chip that most of the time worked but periodically after a kernel update fails to output video requiring me to manually piss around with it and figure out why the stub didn’t build properly.
Maybe you should stop being an ass and consider that when the product/brand has worked for MANY people, maybe the issue is you
Maybe you should stop being an ass and consider that when the product/brand has worked for MANY people, maybe the issue is you
Hmm. You’re right. It’s me with my exotic hardware and configurations, not the drivers that many other people outside of /r/linux routinely complain about. My bad. Different AMD drivers breaking some things and fixing others (while never being fully functional) is because of me. The drivers are literally perfect, and have been for years.
Lol. Delusion is just not a river in egypt. Keep fanboying, gonna block you now.
Everything worked fine with my Nvidia 660ti. When I switched to an RX 580, I had issues with refresh rates and Freesync (that I can remember, it’s been awhile and I don’t care to keep all this recorded.) Some versions of drivers would fix issues but cause others. Some versions required certain configurations to fix issues but cause others. It was a mess.
Switched back to the 660ti, no issues. Bought a used 1070, no issues.
Haven’t gone back to AMD since that horrendous experience, but maybe they’ve improved.
I think it’s sad how few people here are willing to acknowledge that AMD’s drivers may not have been adequate for most users even if they worked for them. I bought AMD listening to ya’ll, and was horribly disappointed.
I guess that’s part of why theory is no substitute for experience.
I think the counter argument is also valid and the open source drivers are in the kernel, but proprietary drivers that… I actually dont know how to get, so I use Nobara… Proprietary drivers seem key to some of the performance gains I’m getting with my AMD + Linux rig.
I don’t think it can be considered malware unless its doing something malicious that you don’t expect. I don’t want or need it on my system, but people who want to play these multiplayer games have a valid use-case and can make that decision themselves.
Of course, you may have just intended to snarky and I’m just being tedious.
There was one game (ECHO) where I had weird performance issue on Windows but not on Garuda. The game is not CPU bound i think. If someone has an explanation as to why this is happening, don’t hesitate to tell me : piped.video/watch?v=ODL-jpZgy_M
Any scheduler optimisation ? Cryotool ? Feral Gamemode ? Linux has its own bunch of optimisation tools.
But I’d still doubt a 100% difference, unless you played a game with known problems under Proton. For my own experience after almost a year playing on Linux I gained between 5% and 20%, depending on the game.
That’s the other issue. “Depending on the game” 60% of all titles doesnt work on Linux and the rest 40% works badly. There is about a handful of games that could perform better than windows but with windows everything works. I am not trying to defend windows, fuck Microsoft. I just want you guys to stop with this delusion that linux is superior. In most ways it is but in the way thag counts the most, windows is still superior.
Your doubts re completely unfounded. Linux was set up in 5 mins, I just installed OpenSUSE, installed Steam and ran the games, since the AMD/Intel drivers are included in the kernel.
On Windows I had to set up for like 45 mins until the installation and all the updates and drivers were done.
Windows is closed source so it has to do extra stuff to hide it’s internal behavior. Linux isn’t. This allows better drivers in Linux. This means in some cases emulating windows games on Linux is literally faster. You don’t have to emulate the entire system, only the parts you need to run the game on your computer.
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