The YouTube channel “Maximum Fury” conducted a technical test of the new Cyberpunk add-on called “Phantom Liberty” on an older AMD hardware system, testing it separately on Linux and Windows 11. The Linux system, specifically the Fedora distribution called Nobara, performed significantly better, delivering 31% more frames compared to Windows 11.
The hardware used for testing included an Asrock B550 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU from the first RDNA generation, along with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The CPU, RAM, and GPU were overclocked, and the system utilized undervolting to save energy costs.
When testing the game at 1080p resolution with high textures, the Linux system achieved an average of 63.72 frames per second (fps), while Windows 11 managed only 48.55 fps. This suggests that the game should run noticeably smoother on the Linux system.
No, it’s definitely working. Here’s proof (open the images in a new tab and zoom in on the reflections to see the difference in clarity):
With reconstruction:
Without reconstruction:
With reconstruction:
Without reconstruction:
With DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 and ray reconstruction enabled, reflections are much clearer and also resolve way faster during motion.
Could you tell me how to use these arguments?
Sure thing! Right click on any game in Steam and click Properties. Then in the General tab, you’ll see a Launch Options box where you can paste these arguments in.
What most people get wrong when first trying to use it is not knowing how to correctly specify environment variables vs launch options that get passed to the game executable. If you just want to pass arguments to the game, just paste them into the box. So for example with Cyberpunk, you can just paste in
--launcher-skip
and Steam will launch the game as if you were running
Cyberpunk2077.exe --launcher-skip
However, if you want to specify environment variables as well, you’ll need the %command% placeholder. So, in order to enable raytracing and bypass the driver check for ray reconstruction in Cyberpunk, I paste these launch arguments into the settings:
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command% --launcher-skip
which is like running
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 Cyberpunk2077.exe --launcher-skip
%command% is just a placeholder for the game’s executable path.
Hope that clears things up with regards to the launch options.
As far as knowing which environment variables to use, that’s on a game-by-game basis, but the two most common ones that I use for Nvidia GPUs are PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 which enables DLSS in games that are not on Proton’s NVAPI whitelist, and VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 which enables raytracing. I almost never bother with any other environment variables unless there’s special game issues I need to workaround (like Cyberpunk’s driver version check), in which case I check ProtonDB or the game’s issue tracker on the Proton GitHub page.
