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.
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.
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 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. :)
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.
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.
Honestly, if you use Proton-GE’s FSR feature for games that don’t offer built-in FSR/DLSS + GameMode, you can def beat Windows performance in some Windows-only games. I know it’s kinda cheating, but it does net you higher FPS on the same graphics settings.
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
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.
No no, it is better. Take a real hpc library, install debian and test it yourself. No tweak needed. Linux as kernel and the overall OS manages resources much better. Linux is a better kernel than windows kernel.
I’ve been doing hpc for over 15 years now. People install standard distros on their workstations and clusters. No tweak needed
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.
cpu bound tasks on linux are usually completed much faster due to just how ridiculously overoptimised linux cpu schedulers are
and dxvk can be faster than dx11 and older, but that’s a pretty unusual case
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”.
A couple months ago I tried Age of Empire 4 and more recently Baulders gate 3 (which works great on my steam deck).
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.
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 see so many people struggling to get HDR working even on Windows I wonder if it’s really worth the trouble
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.
10 game benchmarks hardly are an argument when only 1 in 7 games on Steam are Linux compatible.
10 game benchmarks hardly are an argument when only 1 in 7 games on Steam are Linux compatible.
Proton runs the Windows version of games on Linux, including games using DX12. They don’t have to be marked Linux compatible. That just means those can run without Proton (Linux native binaries).
Those shown in the video are using Proton (e.g. there is no Linux build of RDR2).
From the dev on disc when someone asked about smart tv support:
Playnite currently has heavy Windows dependencies so it’s not even technically possible.
Long term there is a plan to look into Linux support, but mobile or TV (Android in general) is very unlikely to happen any time soon.
Something to note: if you’re VRAM limited, Linux will perform worse and it’s an actual issue.
Especially on laptops, where VRAM is halved in comparison to desktop models for whatever reason.
My Dell Inspiron showed me how worthless discrete GPUs are in laptops, so I’m powerful desktop + enough laptop to run Firefox now.
go AMD + Linux, this is the way
I prefer Intel GPU + Linux because they don’t have mandatory microcode, but AMD works too
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).
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.
Ended up returning it because it was that bad.
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.
So I guess it’s just your OS choice really.
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.
That’s nice. It’s interesting how many people say one works better than the other based on their own experience.
I think it’s a testament to why people should go with what works best for them, and not just what people on the internet say works best.
