this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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I remember back in the day, running Quake3 on linux provided better FPS than on windows. I haven't compared the two since then on any game.
Is it still the case? And is this difference (mostly) there in other games too?
On AMD, it’s not uncommon for games to perform better than on Windows.
For Nvidia, games almost always perform worse than on Windows.
Well, no surprise, AMD's cooperation with Linux/Mesa/etc. devs is longer and deeper than Nvidia's. In fact, when Linus Torvalds was asked about how cooperative Nvidia are, he gave them the finger.
For all the flak they (rightfully!) get, a 1st party open source nvidia driver is in the works.
Altough it's only the userspace part and it's not compliant (yet?) to be upstreamed into the kernel. It is still something.
Your nvidia information might be outdated since driver version 560.x. And I'm getting tired of the anti nvidia circlejerk in the Linux communities on lemmy.
At least Shadow of the Tomb Raider (+20fps) and Cyberpunk (+5fps) run better than they did on windows with the same settings, for me. And those are the only games I tested, because they are the only AAA titles I own that come with a performance test.
I'm not defending nvidia here, there are still issues like missing multi monitor vrr or a few (!) titles that are too broken to play. And it's not as much of an out of the box experience as it is with AMD.
But for most people that own an nvidia card it's probably already a good idea to make the switch from windows.
So, to anyone owning a nvidia card having doubts: feel free to try things out!
I'm not calling anyone jerk. I just don't like that every discussion involves 'nvidia bad' on here. That, to me, is a circlejerk. And repeatedly summing up the situation as 'nvidia is so bad, don't use it' puts people off from making the jump and consequently doesn't help the growth of linux in general, which doesn't help you, me or anyone else.
If I had feared about nvidia drivers, I wouldn't have been using Linux for 4 years straight now. Mint supported my 1060 and 2060 before now, PopOS was fantastic aside from a quirk with waking the screens with the 2060, and honestly those issues have worsened with AMD now. Admittedly I haven't tried much to remedy it as it's as simple as turning off my monitors.
But if you never try, you can never know 🤷♂️
To provide some additional anecdotes to support jul's comment. I've personally been experiencing better performance than windows even with nvidia. Though it does vary per game, with the occasional workaround especially when going outside the realm of plug and play to mod games.
I'd say most games are great, the "10% low" games are still good, and the "1% lows" where things just don't work are pretty rare but sometimes there is a fix. Proton.db is a good resource for those instances.
And being honest... windows has those moments too, people just ignore them because windows is the ubiquitous gaming OS.
It's a lot better than when I had last "tried" and it may be more impactful to bring up that this time I haven't gone back even once, and I actually went ahead and pulled the plug on my windows partition.
Linux is just better now, there's one thing windows had but I gave it up. Linux is just better for most things now and to make that win even better.. windows has increasingly been becoming worse than itself.
Borderlands 3 performed better on Linux for me with a 1650
there are edge cases where linux performa better, especially with older apis because dx9/dx11 to vulkan allows for more draw calls than thr native language can do.
then you have rare situations like elden rings launch ehere shader caching was broken on windows and vulkans shader caching on linux worked making elden ring play better on linux
Do you think most games might perform better on linux in the future? When game makers put more effort towards optimising for linux considering linux has less bloatware etc?
maybe, depends on steamOS hardware adoption rate. You're far more likely going to see windows regress in performance rather than linux get better upper tier performance on average (imo)
theyll optimize for linux whent he market grows enough for it, which I personalyl believe will only happen when Linux gets at least ~30% of the steam hardware survey OS market.
Given that quite a few consoles use Linux or a variety of it, it's definitely coming around. Plus s lot of video game creation engines now have a Linux export option.
The Sims 2 performs better on Linux than it ever did on Windows.
Y'know, for what it's worth.
Mad Max too, my computer doesnt heat up and the framerate is smoother when I'm not running 6gb ram worth of bloatware before the game
@LunarLoony @neidu3 At this point it's a 20-year-old game, it'll fly on anything. I was playing The Sims 3 on Linux for years under what is now an ancient beta version of Wine, and the only issue was a bit of instability.
Now, The Sims 4 does run better on Linux than Windows (and runs even better on macOS under Apple Silicon). I mean, it's 10 years old and will run on a toaster as long as it has four slots and a bagel setting, but there has been a lot of system requirement creep.
You'd think so, but it really doesn't. Try running it on a modern Windows machine - even after all the tweaking you have to do, it still runs like a snail with a broken leg
@LunarLoony That's more because The Sims 2 (and especially The Sims 3) has always been slow because of bad programming decision. I recall The Sims 3 was such a massive I/O hog that moving to an SSD didn't change the fact the I/O code was simply slow and couldn't keep up with the demands on it.
The only reason The Sims 4 was so fast was their lower-end target was bottom-end disposable Net Books with a Dorito for a CPU, which means running it on a real computer would make it fly.
Quite a few games work better on Linux now than windows.
World of Warcraft was a big one, it was faster on wine than native windows
I remember playing Neverwinter Nights and running it on Linux providing a more stable and clean experience than on Windows. Even modding it was easier.