this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 164 points 1 year ago (6 children)

A 30% increase in performance just might get gamers to switch over to the new operating system.

Hell that is the difference between a better graphics card for some people. It's like getting a free overclock, just for going outside your comfort zone.

[–] [email protected] 118 points 1 year ago (6 children)

This is a rare and extreme case, which is probably caused by some sort of fluke in the testing method or due to a bug in the game that Linux is handling better. Usually gaming on Linux is like ~5-10% slower for GPU-bound games.

[–] Zeth0s 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is likely going to change as software support for gaming on Linux improves.

If you consider real high performance computing, with well optimized libraries that can properly use the hardware (including GPUs), 50 % difference between windows and Linux is not really surprising. This is the reason 100% of real high performance computing is done on Linux. It is a better OS for raw performances than windows. For some tasks we are easily talking over twice the performances. It is not always the case, but not surprising at all.

The differences clearly depend on the actual low level implementation of the code. But in general the current situation in gaming, with windows that competes with Linux on raw performances, is only due to lack of software support for gaming on Linux. As this is changing over time, we'll see games performances greatly improve in Linux. Hopefully until the physiological surpass of windows performances.

Currently most of gaming support on Linux is done via some kind of translation layer, that has itself an overhead. It means that the real linux performance would be even better than in all these benchmarks, if it was really possible to compare 1:1 Windows and Linux with native, well optimized code.

[–] batmangrundies 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah.

I'm personally lucky that my fav titles are CPU hogs, like ARMA 3 and X4: Foundations. Both run better under Linux.

Cyberpunk runs great too, I'm sure once we eventually get the updated drivers for NVIDIA we'll get Ray Recon too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

X4: Foundations

Can relate 🤓

Only thing I'm missing is "real" head tracking. There is simply none in the Linux version and while I can map a virtual joystick driven by OpenTrack to each camera corner it's just not the same. Sadly this is not exposed via LUA or I'd have wired up a UDP connection by now. So this feature sadly works only via Proton. Still sticking with the native Linux version though. It's faster.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Usually gaming on Linux is like ~5-10% slower for GPU-bound games.

Or faster. Depends heavily on the game. Some things wine + dxvk does better.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It's not rare for games to be a few % faster, as long as they're using features that are well supported in Linux. If the bottleneck is something that needs heavier emulation because the native implementation isn't available or good enough then yeah you'll see slowdowns.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I kind of expect a patch for Windows that addresses the reason it is slower there now that they know there is a difference.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

On Nobara OS, I haven't noticed any performance dip coming from windows.

Linux Experiment on youtube found it performs ~5% better overall in games than Fedora, so that's probably why.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is just one game with one particular graphics card, this might not be the same for example with nvidia cards.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'd be surprised if it is.

I can't see anything but something hinky with driver overhead mattering this much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Cyberpunk 2077 runs faster on pop os on my Nvidia card compared to on windows 10

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

30 percent of real improvement is one hell of an overclock...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is there a Linux distro specifically optimized for gaming?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SteamOS technically, but you probably don't want it on a regular computer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

SteamOS is perfect on the deck. Honestly it's probably fine on a PC if all you do is game and browse Firefox. Obviously some games won't run in Linux.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Nobara is great, based on fedora so very stable and fairly up to date with many built in gaming features and no after install setup required to get gaming. https://nobaraproject.org/

Running it for over a year now on my gaming rig and very happy

[–] Ado -2 points 1 year ago