I’m just going to go ahead and say this now, do not expect most windows games to run better on Linux than windows. Typically the case is when you find a well optimized game that is CPU bound, or is natively vulkan. Anything else, expect comparable framerates.
I will disagree and that’s why I made this video. Been benchmarking games for 3 years now, mostly on AMD systems. It went from about same performance, to slightly better, to this. 17% average improvement is nothing to laugh at. It’s the difference between a 4090 and a 7900XTX on Windows. So people can literally save $1000 just by using Linux.
What you say, does mostly apply to Nvidia users though.
Not enough people running nvidia realize just how much nvidia does to make sure you stick to their proprietary software. That you can close most of the performance gap with FOSS on AMD is an amazing finding.
Unfortunately it won’t convince many who haven’t already seen the benefits of a more open system.
Truer words have never been said.
how much nvidia does to make sure you stick to their proprietary software
Holy fucking shit you are extremely misguided. Are you not aware that the Linux nvidia drivers are proprietary? The only reason that the mesa drivers are awful is because they barely support the 10 series and they don’t support the new instruction set of the 20’s and above.
If you are running Nvidia on your system and it is above a 10 series, you are running proprietary software. Big whoop, steam is proprietary too, so are the vast majority of the games you play on steam.
Hell, nvidia used to be the ones supplying an open source driver on Linux like 14-15 years ago, AMD didn’t have that, only the proprietary driver. DO NOT OWE ALLEGIENCE TO ANY PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY, that’s exactly why we don’t have good FOSS drivers for nvidia now.
Are you not aware that the Linux nvidia drivers are proprietary?
Literally the point of my comment. Calm down. I’m not suggesting allegiance to anyone. The fact remains that AMD drivers are currently in the kernel.
Those are the mesa drivers, not the “amd” drivers.
Those very same drivers work on Intel cards and pre-20 series nvidia cards. Mesa is not an AMD project or an Intel project either, that is an independent team.
Even then, those drivers are for allowing the GPU to display to a screen and interact with the system. They are pretty much the same idea as the Microsoft basic display adapter. You still need the xf86 drivers to display X, the opengl drivers for opengl, cuda for cuda, vulkan for vulkan, etc. Those are all separate components because they have libraries included with them.
If all of those extras were built into the kernel, the kernel would be like 2 gigabytes, not 150ish megabytes. It is literally enough to get you going with a getty and that’s about it.
The drivers in the kernel (MESA) work with AMD out of the box. If you have AMD hardware, you don’t need anything else. What I said was “AMD drivers are currently in the kernel”. I did not specify that these drivers are developed by AMD – you seem to care a lot about that, but it’s not part of the argument I was making.
Again, you seem to have misread my first comment, which on the Linux side means: you still need proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux. This is also true for Windows, where many folks are perfectly happy to continually update GeForce Now and stay in that ecosystem. That was the point of the comment.
Not sure why you came at me with such hostility.
I’m not coming at you with hostility, I am informing you that what you are saying is incorrect. If you keep on skimming over everything I say, then perhaps I may get hostile because that is extremely annoying.
If you are so sure of yourself on the kernel driver front, then do me a favor and fire up gentoo or arch and try to run a desktop environment or window manager without the mesa packages installed. You’ll find that xorg has mesa as a dependency, and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s because that’s not what the kernel driver is for, mesa itself is larger than the kernel itself. The kernel driver is exactly what I said it is, it allows the operating system to see and interact with the device, it doesn’t tell the device how to do its job, it tells it “here are some pipes, you will receive information from certain ones, and send it through others”. That’s exactly what a kernel driver does, there are no libraries or anything of that nature which is the overwhelming bulk of what makes a graphics driver.
Also, geforce now is optional, you can as always install the drivers without the useless spyware application that nvidia provides.
Mesa isn’t a kernel driver. AMDGPU is the name of the kernel module and it’s primarily developed by AMD. Mesa provides OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. implementations and is funded by AMD, Intel and Valve (among others). There’s also AMDGPU-PRO which is a proprietary alternative to Mesa from AMD.
You’re absolutely right, it isn’t one.
That does not change my point in any way, mesa is not built into the kernel, which you need as a dependency to use X, which is required to run a window manager and/or WINE. I never ever said mesa was a kernel driver.
Man look, I’ve been using Linux as a daily driver for 18 years, people have been saying exactly what you’re saying since before performance was even comparable.
You’re not going to get 17% better performance on the GPU just because you’re using another operating system, it’s not going to happen unless you’re running a Linux native version of the game. Often times, that is not even the case.
Performance can be a little bit better if the game is natively opengl or vulkan, but if it is directx (the vast majority of windows games) then it is going to be comparable at best in GPU-bound scenarios, I.E. most of the games people are playing on PC.
You can’t just magically put more transistors in a GPU just because you are running a different OS. CPU bound games run better on Linux because of the god-tier scheduler, but a GPU is essentially a computer in itself, all drivers do is tell the GPU to take this information and translate it into something you see on a screen.
By the way, the Nvidia thing has been false for quite some time now. I primarily use AMD on Linux, but the only place you will run into issues with Nvidia is wayland, otherwise it works perfectly fine everywhere else.
I don’t see an argument which disproves my results apart from you disbelief. But I like the Nvidia comment. I’ll do a video of Linux vs Windows on my 3080M laptop. We’ll see how true is that Nvidia works as well as AMD on Linux. :)
Go right on ahead, I’ve done the tests myself already.
Keep in mind though that if you are using a laptop, nvidia tends to work better when paired with Intel vs amd for the sake of graphics offloading.
I don’t think you understand how this works, I’m not trying to disprove anything, you are the one trying to prove something. You chose 10 very specific games to run these tests, some of them being heavily CPU bound, and state that you are receiving an increase in GPU performance when it is simply not the case. All of these games are also optimized for proton, which does not help your case.
Tell you what, why don’t you give something like “Spec Ops: The Line” a test? Halo Infinite? 40k Darktide? Vermintide 2? Dying Light? Hell, infinite and darktide are very popular in the Linux gaming community, I was even one of the beta testers for darktide.
You say that like I’m afraid to do it. You’re missing the point that these games don’t have benchmarks lol. If you want I can do a gameplay comparison but don’t tell me, the areas or movements are not the same. :)
Also these games couldn’t be more diverse. I tested DXVK, VD3D and Vulkan (both on Linux and Windows) with these games. If you can find a more diverse benchmark please let me know, cause I haven’t found one.
Also, I’m already doing benchmarks on my i7-10870H and 3080 laptop. Linux won’t go above 80W, cause of the Nvidia Drivers (545 Beta btw) so the difference will be IMMENSE for Windows there.
You don’t need a specialized benchmark to do a benchmark, you can use a realtime rendered cutscene, you can do an average over several games. That’s how they have been done for like a decade and a half at this point.
Also, I’m not referring specifically to mobile graphics nvidia, but nvidia altogether. Linux laptop gamers make up a very very small amount of total Linux gamers, it is an incredibly small niche of two already small niches, both being Linux and laptop gamers. Yes, of course if you have a limit to the total amount of power, it will lag behind.
I gave you a list of games, start there, my list is also diverse and includes all of those except for vulkan, which if you want, throw doom eternal in there, though as I have already stated vulkan will get a small increase on linux over windows in terms of GPU performance, so that’s not really proving anything anyone doesn’t already know.
If you want a fair comparison, limit it to 80 watts in windows as well. Remember though that power is NOT EVERYTHING when it comes to GPU performance. All of the games I detailed above are GPU bound games and will be a fair comparison. Just a heads up darktide may or may not have graphical glitches on your system if you are running amd (both operating systems, it is hardware related), I’ve worked with the devs to fix it in the past but it seems like recently people have been having issues with it again.
I only have Doom Eternal and Vermintide 2 from the games you mentioned. I can do the opening sequences of those. Is that ok?
“works fine” is very different than “is equivalently optimized.”
Valve has done a lot of work to get games to work well on the Steam Deck, and that likely translates to other AMD GPUs. So it makes total sense that Valve would optimize the Proton translation layer for DirectX calls to the AMD driver differently than the NVIDIA driver (or rather, in a way that AMD handles better). A big issue in GPU optimization is keeping it busy, so perhaps the AMD driver working with Valve’s patches on the DirectX to Vulkan layer improve utilize m utilization. That could translate to a modest performance improvement even on well optimized games (perhaps 5-10%, probably not more than 20%).
I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here, but it’s a plausible explanation.
I can see why you’d think that, but what you fail to understand is that valve is not the only one working on proton, and valve themselves did not even make DXVK. Those are free and open source efforts and valve even pays external devs to commit to that software. I’m telling you that DXVK itself is not going to give a boost to graphical performance because it literally cannot, those are extra instructions that your GPU has to perform in order to send out frames.
Directx to vulkan translation is exactly that, translation. It receives directx calls and translates them to vulkan. For one, it has overhead, two, if the game is optimized, it is already going to be running at max performance on windows, using DXVK is going to slow the GPU time down because it will have to perform more calculations. No scheduler will save you from that, not even the Linux one, because it isn’t something that is handled by the scheduler.
Two things:
- I never said Valve built DXVK or even WINE, just that they have a vested interest to ensure it works well on their AMD-based hardware
- I never mentioned anything about the scheduler or any Linux imtrinsics other than the AMD GPU kernel module
DirectX -> Vulkan isn’t a direct translation since the APIs aren’t 1:1, so there’s going to be some tuning in how APIs are mapped, and the tuning can differ depending on the GPU driver you’re using.
It’s the same with processors, you can optimize a compiler to work better on AMD vs Intel or vice versa (look at Intel C++ compiler benchmarks for an example of that), even if they use the exact same set of instructions because the microarchitectures are optimized differently. This is because the way the instruction set gets mapped to the microarchitecture can impact performance significantly (something like 10% is possible, depending on the benchmark).
GPU drivers are complicated, and there are a lot of areas where the interaction between the driver, software, and system services can be optimized. AMD’s drivers are open source, which helps with those optimization efforts. Then you throw in a big, well-funded, and motivated company like Valve funding development (both through salaries and donations) and you end up with AMD GPUs getting extra attention for things like DXVK.
So I would expect AMD on Linux to perform better vs NVIDIA on Linux when compared to AMD vs NVIDIA on Windows. As in, the performance difference on Linux vs Windows would be more favorable for AMD cards than NVIDIA ones because AMD on Linux gets more attention than NVIDIA on Linux. I don’t expect the same for compute, since NVIDIA invests heavily in that space on Linux, so it’s not an inherent advantage of the platform (e.g. the scheduler discussion), but a question of where optimization efforts are focused.
Alright look, I’m not going to argue about who said what because we both know what we said and it is unrelated to the topic at hand.
The reason the windows amd driver is bad is not due to performance, it is the very same reason why the proprietary driver is bad on Linux, it is horrible reliability.
There are circumstances where they trade blows and circumstances where they perform similarly. If you really want to compare the two based on OS alone, you need to compare the equivalent drivers which is the proprietary one.
We’re already not doing an apples to apples comparison here because we’re comparing WINE+DXVK vs DirectX. Comparing the OS itself isn’t that interesting, at least from an end-user perspective, what is interesting is comparing the typical user experience on both platforms. As in, no tinkering with stuff, just installing in the most obvious way.
Valve is optimizing for that typical user experience on their Steam Deck, and that translates to the desktop fairly well. They’re not really doing the same on Windows, so it’s interesting to compare devs+manufacturers optimizing stuff on Windows vs the community+Valve optimizing stuff on Linux.
It sounds like some time in that 18 years, you solidified this impression, and are choosing to not recognize the advancements in Proton and drivers that have occurred post-Steam Deck.
I’ve been using Linux since before Xwindows existed, and I am open to OPs research. Just because we’ve used it longer, doesn’t make either of us right without proof. OP supplied evidence. Prove them wrong.
I’ve been using Linux since before Xwindows existed
Why are you blatantly lying like this? X came out seven years before the Linux kernel was even released. And even then, there wasn’t a working system for the Linux kernel when it was released. Keep in mind I said DAILIED Linux for 18 years, I didn’t say USED, I’ve been using Linux for 27 years now. I actually remember a time when Linux was not an operating system that people would use to play games on.
I’m using my time specifically in the community as an example to show that this is not the first time I have heard this. OP supplied evidence in ten very specific games here, there are over 12000 games on protondb that are “playable”, not even verified. I have run across myself quite many games that run at half to three quarters the performance that it does on windows, and that is absolutely fine.
Telling people that using Linux will get you a “free performance boost as much as 17%” when it very likely will NOT, will create a lot more angst towards the Linux community than it already is. The elitists are already doing that for us, we don’t need more of it.
We should be pushing people towards Linux for digital privacy+security and free software, not cherry picked performance boosts.
Yes, I very well recognize the black magic sourcery of proton and wine, but you are sitting here and trying to tell me that proton is somehow going to make your GPU somehow physically push more calculations per cycles just because it is running Linux. Not even giving me the “mesa drivers” spiel which is also BS, as performance is not the main area that the Foss drivers are better in.
Linux is not going to break the laws of physics buddy, I’ve already said what I said, boost in CPU bound games, little to no boost in GPU bound games. If you’re seeing a boost, it’s because you have a CPU bottleneck and you are getting it because of the scheduler.
It’s comparable more often than not, but honestly even if it was 17% worse on average I would still stick to Linux and just build a better computer. Which is what I did before proton.
No doubt and I’m the same way, I’m just trying to say that one shouldn’t try to sell Linux solely based on “gaming performance” when it is definitely not the case most of the time.
Linux is not used like windows or macos at all, and new users will definitely be frustrated enough just learning to use the operating system. Believe me, I think it is awesome that we are finally getting another gaming revolution in the community (Linux gaming actually used to be pretty good before around 2010), but keep in mind that these efforts are for the community and steam deck users. Anyone who wants to have it too will ultimately have to join the community and learn the ropes.
Is it linux is faster, or is it dxvk/vulkan is faster?
Could be both. Who knows. For high performance computing Linux is the de facto standard because it has better performances than windows, and Linux distros are usually better, stabler OSes overall when one needs raw performances. In this case, who knows, someone should investigate further
It doesn’t take the smartest motherfucker at an MSP to rip Linux down to the bare essentials. It’s extremely easy to conceptualize, audit, and nit pick any part of it from the metal to the display.
Windows is a multilayered monstrosity with complexities that rival a starship for no good reason.
Hey now! Starships aren’t nearly as complicated!
That’s true. I doubt the EPS conduits from a class D would run on ol 1701 prime.
Unfrozenmeat popsicle Scotty confirmed it!
I think it has more to do with Linux being easier to tweak, not some inherent performance difference. You can tweak the scheduler, page sizes, and all manner of other things to get a bit more performance if you know what your workload looks like. So it being open source and ubiquitous is a bigger contributor imo than anything inherent to the design of the kernel.
Regular users aren’t going to go through that level of tweaking, so the difference should be a lot smaller and will benefit more from general code-level optimizations than system tweaks. General purpose, high performance computing works just fine on Windows, it’s just easier to tweak Linux for production compute use cases.
Combination, and it depends on the game. Dxvk will add latency, but depending on the renderer and how the game runs the reduction in CPU overhead by using dxvk instead of native can provide performance gains, especially on certain CPU’s.
On games with a native vulkan renderer, Linux will most often just be faster since you have less system overhead burden. This has been fascinating to see though.
- First the games started to become playable, but framerates weren’t so great.
- Framerates started to improve
- Framerates started to become a wash between Windows vs Linux
- We are progressing into this step: it either runs comparably or better.
The results are mixed right now, and it’s going to be real hard to nail down predictability as far as performance goes. More often than not, so long as DRM isn’t involved, games run really well on day one. Older games are starting to see a performance uplift and reliability improvements through proton/dxvk/vkd3d.
I’m very happy though that what we’re talking about is comparable performance metrics. We use to be content if the shit ran at all.
One comment to add to your post, Linux is better on performances not just because of the less overhead, but because manages resources much effectively. You could have a bloated linux, it still would perform better because resources are properly managed
That’s an absolutely correct and very relevant point. On any equivalent computational loads, Linux comes out ontop. Better scheduler, better I/O, better stack.
Does windows have anything like cgroups?
Yes but it’s very much an afterthought. Their notion of using containers and the Job Objects is largely a bolted on approach. If you look into the Job Objects, that would be what I can think of as the closest equivalent.
Proton (DXVK/VKD3D) is faster. The lightness of the system also helps.
I think it’s mostly DXVK/Vulkan
This should get cited every time there’s a “I’m waiting to switch until Linux ‘gets there’ for gaming” post.
They are only sampling ten paaticular games. If they included all games or even just games that run poorly then it would be far behind. I use Linux on my desktop but will still boot into windows rather than fussing with it.
When was the last time you tried “fussing with it”? I’ve been gaming on Linux for over a year now, and it’s been incredibly seamless. The only game that gave me any trouble at all was Assetto Corsa (the first).
Edit: and I did get it running. I won’t lie, it was a PITA. And it ran, and I played it for maybe 30 mins. :)
Not everyone has the same repertoire of games and not every game will run natively on linux. Depending on your flavour, messing with a compatibility layer can be fussy for some people and depending on your choice of games, your ratio of native/near-native:compromise:does not work will vary. It can’t be “it works for me so it should work for thee”.
Of course – but that works the other way as well. It doesn’t mean Linux gaming is lacking somehow if your library happens to be filled with the few remaining problem cases.
My point is simply that, by and large, it’s ready and seamless, and things like Protondb support this.
A couple months ago I tried Age of Empire 4 and more recently Baulders gate 3 (which works great on my steam deck).
Yeah, I’ve played both with no issues as well. Curiously, BG3 ran better for me with DX vs Vulkan, but iirc the devs said the Vulkan build had issues at first.
Are you saying you had issues with them? If so, would you mind sharing your specs? BG3 in particular has a Gold rating on Protondb, but even AOE4 is Silver.
Yes, I had issues. I have a 3080 and some recent generation i5, 32gb ram. I’m sure I just need some configuration for my video card or something. It just takes about 5 seconds to boot into windows with nvme sticks. Every game works perfectly every time. I can’t be bothered.
Got it. I suspect it’s something related to nvidia tbh. Their Linux support leaves a lot to be desired. Valve’s (and many other’s) work on Steam Deck or Steam Deck adjacent stuff has made the AMD world a lot more Linux friendly as a result. I’m on an all-AMD system (Ryzen 5 7600X, RX 6600XT) which is probably why I’ve had a very smooth time.
But totally understand not wanting to waste time with it if Windows is still working fine. I think that will be harder to do, however, as MS continues to move down the path of OS as a service.
A few years of linux and the game becomes finding stuff that doesn’t work and making it work. Once you get it working you don’t bother using it, because it’s more fun to go find the next thing that doesn’t work and figure out how to make it work.
I don’t even check protondb anymore. If it’s a single player game with no anticheats involved, I know it’ll work.
The only reason I still have a windows Partition, is due to the lack of HDR support on Linux.
Is HDR just so amazing that it’s worth the hassle of using windows though? Games get shinier all the time, it’s not really exciting to me anymore. Give it a year and it’ll be in anyway, and people will be on to the next randomnhotness that they can’t possibly live without that somehow they were fine without the year previous.
I see so many people struggling to get HDR working even on Windows I wonder if it’s really worth the trouble
It’s not even implemented well in very many monitors. I think a lot of people just turn it in cause it’s supposed to be “better” even if it doesn’t make much of an actual difference.
If you’re using an actual HDR capable display, HDR is pretty amazing. I know it’s weird reading about it online, but the lighting seems so much more “real” when you’re playing games on HDR. You actually have to “see it to believe it” as you can’t see it from screenshots or from people taking pictures of their displays.
Windows 11 actually has a calibration tool similar to the ones at the console so you can get good HDR on Windows.
I occasionally do, but mostly if I’m intending to play it on my Steam Deck and it’s marked as unsupported or untested. That’s still pretty rare though.
With proton and all the work value (and others) put into it, we’re at the point where it’s weird if something doesn’t work on Linux.
That… is what I’ve been trying to say all afternoon but never quite got there. Thanks.
I just tested DayZ Standalone and can confirm for this title. Not only do I no longer have visual artifacts but it runs smoother
Awesome! I can’t wait to generalize the average of 10 cherry-picked games with tons of Linux work against the 2k+ in my library! I bet I can pick up CS2 with this knowledge and get 10%+ better performance!
The video is pretty neat. I’m just not sure what we gain from it.
How are these cherry picked games? Did you maybe want me to benchmark the 2k games in your library? XD
Also CS2 is slower on Linux.
I really like that you are benchmarking. I feel like there should also be something actionable here. What do I, as a Linux gaming consumer, need to look for? What are the things that will tell me a game will run better or worse?
Usually on an AMD GPU things run better. Then you look at the API. If it’s a DX9/DX10/DX11 game it will most certainly run better on Linux. On the other hand if it’s a DX12 game you will probably get the same performance most usually and ±10% in a few cases.
So the main thing to remember is to use an AMD GPU on Linux. If you’re on Nvidia you’re better off with Windows most probably, unless you care enough for the workflow benefits Linux offers.
After that, it should be smooth sailing.
I find it rather ironic that I can’t watch it because of the error of
Error
Too many requests, please try again later.
on a domain named hardlimit.com lol
Yes, 2 viewers at once is the hard limit.
YouTube is dead, right, guys?
More and more, but they’re losing creators to other mainstream platforms with monetization instead of the fediverse.
Something to note: if you’re VRAM limited, Linux will perform worse and it’s an actual issue.
Didn’t expect a follow up this quick. Anyway, a few random observations:
- I would’ve tested Assasins Creed Mirage without adaptive quality, as it might smudge the results. Shouldn’t make too much of a difference though, at least at these framerates.
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider compares HBAO+ vs inferior BTAO, so not really that useful.
- The frame graph for Watchdogs: Legion on Windows looks… weird, to say the least. Even though it ultimately comes out on top it might be worth investigating into, as it might have an effect on the other games as well.
- I completely forgot how useless the benchmarks in Final Fantasy games are. At least there’s the overlay.
- Yeah Adaptive quality aims for 60 FPS. In this particular situation it shouldn’t matter at all.
- Still the difference is quite high to even get close to Linux. I didn’t even notice that sorry.
- The aim of this video is to show fresh installs. What a user would do. You install OpenSUSE on an AMD system and fire up the games. You install Windows, run the updates, install the drivers and fire up the games. That’s whta most people would do and I think they care about. Both installations are fresh out of the oven and I just ran the game son them. This is the result.
- Yeah without an overlay FF Benchmarks are pretty bad. XD Great series though!
Well in my case I get intermittent audio issues in games like the classic Alan Wake. Audio will disappear for like 4 seconds straight then work as usual for 30 seconds only to repeat again. Can be very infuriating if it’s in the middle of an important dialog.
That explains part of why Steam Deck is so good.
If nothing else, ths is a good example of why youtube should continue to exist. At least it plays a video in full when I click on it, instead of playing 30 seconds or so, then pauses for eternal loading. I suppose having funding to improve infrastructure does have some practical value.
The video is just being transcoded, if you check in some hours it should be fine and you can always download it.
Still a issue with the platform, if a video isn’t ready for playback, it should clearly indicate as such.
It does say with huge letters the video is transcoding when it does. XD
Not sure when that was supposed to happen, but I never saw it. Possibly should consider waiting to make your post until all transcoding is actually done, instead of expecting everyone to check back in a few hours.
You’re right, I will do that for the next ones. I just couldn’t hold my excitement. XD
Understood, and thank you for taking the suggestion, will be less confusion that way!
No worries, hopefully I can do it today! :)
Sigh, guess I have to get serious about gaming on Linux then. I wonder if the nVidia drivers still locks up my boot sequence.
Don’t switch to Linux for better performance. It varies a lot by game, and there’s no guarantee that the games you play will run any better.
Switch to Linux because you prefer it. Performance is good enough that you shouldn’t notice a huge difference either way.
Prefer it?
Damn Microsoft creeped me out with all that spyware so they drove me off, I was perfectly happy on Windows up until the telemetry updates in 7. I’ve gotten used to Linux simply because that’s the only viable alternative for personal computing. Gaming doesn’t reveal that much personal information as compared to day-to-day personal use.
I don’t prefer either Linux or Windows for gaming, I prefer the one that gives me the most FPS. (Perhaps outdated) experience is that it’s Windows systems by a large margin. And they also have support for a wider ranger of peripherals.
And if your only use case is gaming, you should use Windows because that’s the platform game developers target. Linux will behave differently (sometimes better, sometimes worse), and you’re unlikely to get support if there’s a Linux-specific issue, and multiplayer gaming still isn’t great on Linux due to anticheat either not working on Linux or anti-cheat flagging Linux users on accident.
That being said, if gaming was truly the only thing I used a computer for, I’d switch to console gaming. The experience is usually smoother since devs only need to target a handful of hardware configurations.
However, if gaming is secondary to the main purpose of the computer, Linux is a great option if it fits your workflow. It fits mine and I’ve been Linux-only for ~15 years now (I keep a Windows install for testing stuff, not gaming), and I actually switched to Linux knowing that gaming wasn’t really going to be a thing (I played a handful of games, like Minecraft and Factorio, but mostly used it for school+work).
I think Linux is great, but don’t switch just because of some benchmarks, switch because it fits with your overall computer use cases.
If you have an Nvidia GPU don’t switch to Linux, especialy if it’s a pre-Turing model. If you have a Turing+ GPU though wait for a year until NVK is actually usable, then look into it imo.
Or take a different plunge when you’re ready for a GPU upgrade: get more bang for buck with an AMD card and do the switch to Linux at the same time.
That’s the plan, I can’t run Waydroid on the current hardware and that’s a big bummer. I got the rig when Intel+nVidia had a large lead on AMD and it was primarily for Windows gaming. But it’s a midrig at this point so the CPU would bottleneck. I’m hoping to come back to all AMD with a full upgrade at one point.
93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
It has less overhead so it should
Right then.
But is it easy to use?
Probably not.
You mean Linux? It’s 10 times easier and better than Windows lol.
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.
