Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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It actually depends on several factors. Surprisingly, games that are heavily CPU bottlenecked often run better on Linux under Proton than the native Windows version.
That being said, for games that are GPU bound, a 20% deficit on a Nvidia GPU is actually about what I'd expect.
I’ve found that it depends heavily on what game you’re playing. I wouldn’t say 20% loss is uncommon.
You could try using a kernel tuned for gaming but it probably won’t make up the difference.
Honestly you’re probably better off not comparing to Windows. You’ll often fall short performance and feature wise.
Edit: I’ve also found that people tend to oversell Linux. We desperately want more users but exaggerations do more harm than good.
You should also mention which nvidia driver you’re running btw
Probably Nvidia is too blame. With where things are now I would probably want an AMD card for a dedicated Linux gaming machine.
I use an RX6600 and I can tell you that I get a lot of loss when compared to Windows too.
I was seeing 30-40% performance loss in BG3 and the stutters were too frequent to play Apex Legends. After that I gave up on gaming on Linux. If I’m doing any dev work I use my Linux partition, but day to day I drive windows for gaming.
I was seeing 30-40% performance loss in BG3
Were you using the Vulkan renderer after Patch 2? There's a massive performance regression that got introduced with that Patch. DX11 still works fine tho.
the stutters were too frequent to play Apex Legends
This should be fixed after graphics pipeline library support was added to both Nvidia and AMD. If you tried it before that, it was indeed a stuttery mess. It is dramatically better now.
I actually got better performance in BG3 with my Arch system compared to Windows. The game crashes to desktop every 10 minutes in windows and runs relatively stable in Linux.
Ironically, I actually got better performance in Fedora than Win11, same machine, playing Monster Hunter World. I think in my case it was because of the background stuff running in Windows. I run Linux pretty bare.
I'm running AMD, not Nvidia, but I didnt notice much of any performance loss in the games I played during the brief time I had both Linux and Windows installed, before migrating fully to linux.
On games that worked well, at least. There was a couple games that didnt play great with proton at the time, that have long since been sorted out and run great.
hell, iirc, a couple games even ran better on linux.
We will never know what was the question
Deficit? That’s unusual. In most cases the performance is better on linux. Perhaps an nvidia issue?
It's usually within 5% or so in either direction. Turn again, I'm not pushing the limits of my hardware.
To be fair running through wine will be always slower than running native.
Not necessarily, as many badly optimized Linux games run worse than the Windows version through proton.
And even then it's usually not wine that makes games run slower, but the conversion of Direct3D to Vulkan (DXVK, vkd3d).