A video for any doubters that Linux gaming is better than Windows in which it DESTROYS Windows by 25% in AC Odyssey. To put it in perspective, 25% improvement is like getting a new GPU. You can save $600 and instead use something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for free.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t really care to make Linux look better but I did a video some days ago and EVERYONE (on Reddit) told me Linux gaming CANNOT be faster or smoother. This is the proof it’s both and more videos will be coming.
Haven’t watched the video yet but I’d like to add from my very limited experience. I recently switched to Kubuntu (still have my windows boot) and the one game I play (Red Dead Redemption 2) seems to be running worse. I haven’t done much testing at all so it could be something I can adjust and get running better.
Having said that, general day-to-day performance is miles ahead of my Windows install.
If I could get RDR2 to run better on Linux and DaVinci Resolve to run I’d have no need to keep my Windows install.
Have you tried something like Nobara? I’m pretty sure DaVinci Resolve works on Fedora (which Nobara is based on) and you will get the latest optimizations as well. I am on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed just cause best performance on my system.
Nobara comes with DaVinci Resolve out of the box (or in the post install configuration screen at least).
That said I saw problems on Nobara I don’t have in arch that made me almost switch back to windows.
Decided to try arch before I switch back to windows, long story short have been on linux for two months without any plans of going back, the idea of windows now makes me wince.
I might try running arch as well. I’ll test it out before I move to a bare metal install.
I haven’t tried that yet. I tried running it as a container via distrobox.
How’s the state of Nvidia’s drivers? Do the shiny new features work? Things like RT, frame gen, ray reconstruction, and randomly crashing the game because the driver has tripped TDR yet again?
Okay, Linux doesn’t need the last one.
The 545 Beta drivers apparently support a ton of new features on Linux like VRR. Frame Gen is the only thing not supported by Proton yet I think.
Tbh though, if you’re on Nvidia I would stay on Windows. It’s definitey doable to use Linux and get equal performance. Until Nvidia is ready for Wayland though I wouldn’t switch.
Good news is NVK is a new Open Source Nvidia Vulkan driver so in like a year or two things should be as good as on AMD. The driver already loads most games with DXVK 1.5.1 but runs them at like 1 FPS if they have anything like Valheim Graphics and above. Reclocking should be coming soon though so the situation will improve. After that it’s just working to get all features in and optimize.
As someone who’s really into gaming and gives NVIDIA on Linux a try now and then, the one thing that really bugs me is DLDSR isn’t available at all, nor is plain, non AI DSR. The latter isn’t hard to replicate, but I miss the extra bang for your buck of the DL variant.
Granted, mine is a very niche use case but I rely on it a lot since it works great on older titles or ones with bad or no native AA and such.
I’m as much a believer that Linux can get better performance than Windows because the less bloat, the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux. That being said 25% increase on a game running on wine seems fishy.
Your video did not play correctly, also you didn’t synced properly between the two at the start so it’s hard to compare that both have the same settings, and on the screen at the end it shows windows is running in full screen and Linux in Borderless, not sure if this should make a difference but showcases that not every setting is the same. After the video crashed for the first time I skipped a bit ahead and saw that at one point you put the screen half-half, that’s a good approach, but I also noticed that the right side had a character the left side didn’t right at the start, that means that Wine is failing to render some stuff, or disabling some features which is usually what’s happening when you get this massive performance differences, so the comparison might not be valid. An example would be if DXVK ray tracing implementation bounces the light less times than DX12 does, it would be almost indistinguishable but would have a performance boost (at which point my question would be to show me the benefits of bouncing the light more, but that’s my opinion and not a technical analysis).
In any case, great video, even if something is different I couldn’t see any significant difference in the screen when doing the side-by-side, and I don’t think people who claim Linux is always worse would even know of the possibility of wine lacking some implementation therefore not rendering that.
- The video is still being transcoded, check again later.
- You can pause the video to check the settings, timing things like this properly is almost impossible but for next videos I will edit properly. Thank you for the feedback.
- The character is also at the beginning on the Linux side but he just walks on Windows. This is a dynamic scene so details like that are expected to differ.
- AC Odyssey doesn’t have Ray Tracing and DXVK is mature enough to render everything properly (and at better frames).
You are most welcome. I really think disbelief in how much better Linux is derives from a really cumbersome past. I’ve been benchmarking games on Windows and Linux for 3 years now.
At first performance was a little better/same on Linux, then it improved and then it improved vastly.
Don’t fear that Proton is a compatibility layer. Linux overall (with its lightness, better Filesystems and optimizations) can achieve great results like this in most DX11 games. I will do a MIrage Benchmark as well on Tumbleweed vs Windows 11 to see how things are on he DX12 side. Ray Tracing is not ready on Linux on AMD yet so that will have to wait.
I don’t understand why people think 25% plus is “unbelievable”. It takes like 30 minutes to set up dual boot, just test it yourself.
I’m honestly surprised it’s not more.
I got over 25% increase in FPS, no micro stutters and I was on a higher resolution in Linux. Apex legends
Because just as many people have had a complete opposite experience
When I tried Apex on Manjaro a few weeks back I saw a ~15% decrease in frames and major stutters.
A single system, running untested benchmarks and without any external validation from a trusted source doesn’t mean anything. Just like my experience with it isn’t universal, neither is either of yours.
the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux
People say this, but what exactly do you mean? I mostly model on windows because it’s my primary system (I use applications that simply don’t work well enough with wine), but mostly finish and render stuff on linux because of windows’ retarded automatic updates etc. that can just cancel rendering without asking. And the only difference I’ve seen is how fast Blender starts - I’d say that’s more than 2x as fast on linux, it’s a huge difference. But rendering is the same (NVidia GTX GPU) and other work inside blender also seems to be about the same.
Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.
With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.
Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.
Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).
The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.
Afaik Blender since 3.0 does not support OpenCL anymore and AMD rendering uses HIP instead. I have not found any information about dramatic performance differences, though CPU rendering does seem to be somewhat faster on Linux - but more like 10% faster and the amount of computation practically done on the CPU is not that big.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
Personally I use NVidia because of CUDA, gaming is an afterthought. I wish CUDA just fucked off and we got some universal compute API instead, because that’s what would reduce the NVidia stranglehold on the market, perhaps OneAPI is going to catch on at some point, but at this moment those options are not practical.
We’re referencing a somewhat old video of a benchmark ran in both systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0 that’s likely not still true, possibly devs figured out what was the issue on windows and circumvented it somehow.
Yeah, don’t do that anymore then. Firstly the video doesn’t really find overall 2x speedup, but mainly Cycles X came out since then, where most of the codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and after that numerous significant optimizations happened as well. That video is pretty much irrelevant now.
I want to switch to Linux and I would love to game on it daily, but just like so many people, software incompatibility is holding me onto Windows.
In my case, it’s Parsec that I need, because I game a lot with friends who live in other countries. And unfortunately, Steam’s remote play together feature is very broken on Linux (I remember even filing bug reports about it when I was daily driving Linux two-ish years ago.
Only the client part though, hosting is disabled on the linux version for some reason.
Ditto.
Longtime windows and Linux user, my last several machines have all been dual-boot.
I’ve tried multiple times to get gaming to work right with Linux, whether it be Unbuntu or just plain Debian, but something always gets in the way. Graphical issues, sound issues, controller incompatibility, platform incompatibility, unable to launch game, whatever. I give up and just stick with windows and use Linux for other things.
I have been enjoying gaming on Linux for many years, I am glad you’re sharing that for the windoze users.
