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.
Not enough people realize how much AMD does to make sure people stick to their proprietary software. Nvidia software that is.
A lack of ROCm support on consumer hardware is simply inexcusable. Nvidia makes a shit ton of money with the AI boom, because people like to work with stuff they already know. And it’s infuriating, because Nvidia cards have way less VRAM.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
