Tldw: guy tests the RX 6800 at 1080p, 1440p and 4k across 19 games on Windows 11 vs Nobara 41.
Allegedly, nobara beats windows on all games except 2 (witcher 3 and CS2), across almost all resolutions, by around single digit percents.
This is what I came for. The fact it’s close and reading blows is good enough for me.
I have a steam deck and I’ve been impressed. Linux gaming has come a long way.
Also: This was on kernel 6.11, which does not have the new NTSYNC driver (coming in 6.14). It’s going to get even better soon.
CS2 was tested on proton, but CS2 runs natively. It’s not a useful comparison.
Edit: Someone pointed out that Nobara has already manually backpatched NTSYNC into its kernel.
I used to play CSGO on both Windows and Linux for a while, and Linux always outperformed Windows by a solid margin. It wasn’t even close, I never even thought to try running it through Proton.
Nobara uses a custom kernel with lots of performance tweaks and wine-compatibility patches. It has had NTSYNC for almost a year already. Also, NTSYNC is not much faster than FSYNC, that many kernels and distros (including SteamOS) have been using since 2021.
NTsync won’t change much for performance compared to Nobara with Proton. Proton has used esync and fsync for many years now which provide similar performance, but with flaws that prevent them from being upstreamable to Wine. NTSync will allow upstream wine to match fsync performance and hopefully fix some bugs.
NTsync is not the same as Fsync, it allows for kernel acceleration of NT sync primitives, increasing speed over current wine/Proton builds.
It’s not the same, but it provides similar performance. The performance gains are being compared to stock wine, not to Proton with esync or fsync.
CS2 was tested on proton, but CS2 runs natively. It’s not a useful comparison.
He said in the video that he tried to run it natively, but it just wouldn’t start somehow.
Still, it’s quite impressive. A translation layer in between and still it’s on par. It would be interesting to see native vs proton versions only.
Depends on the game.
Linux-native Rimworld and Stellaris are (by my measurements) 1.5x-2x slower than Windows. Not by pure FPS, but by simulation speed, which is much more detrimental. The frametimes spikes are awful, tool.
Running them though Proton seems fine, but they still aren’t any faster.
Modded minecraft and Starsector are the opposite. Old java games freaking love linux, apparently.
For reference, I’m running CachyOS (a distro focused on optimization) and used game-native measurement tools.
of the few games I’ve played that had linux versions (Cities Skylines 1, Eurotruck Simulator, American Truck Simulator, Rimworld from what I can recall off the top of my head, there have been others that i cant recall off the top of my head i’m sure), None of them were worth a god damn.
At best unstable and slow, at worst laden with bugs and issues.
Either way, playing the windows version via proton offered a better, more stable, more reliable experience.
Yeah.
People turn their nose at this, but devs have to develop for windows. If they can give their users a better experience targeting Proton, with less time and more refinement and better support than a native port, that’s a-okay with me.
A hilarious situation would be linux superseding Windows for desktop gaming… And Proton still being the standard target. I would love that future.
I agree.
I’d rather time and polish be given to making sure it runs via proton.
Then a half assed linux port, that doesnt work, thats a waste of time, that will be unused and hated, and be held up by devs as an example of “Well, users don’t use the linux version, there for linux isnt a viable target for us to bother with”
I couldn’t even get the Linux version of ETS to run on Linux. The Windows version runs flawlessly.
Yeah I’ve found java and Linux seem to get along very nicely. Minecraft with distant horizons and shaders runs way better on Linux for me than windows.
Do you have more info on how you tested Rimworld’s simulation speed, or maybe a source that has tested this? I always used the native linux Rimworld version when I was playing because I assumed it would be better for simulation lag.
It’s horrendously worse, just look at the TPS on the same save.
But specifically, I used the Dub’s Performance Analyzer frametime graphs. It’s nice since it separates out rendering and simulation.
One note, I am on Nvidia. It’s possible AMD (or Intel?) cards would behave differently.
Of course, but the video is pointing out that of the games tested, most of them perform better on Linux.
Is that rimworld with or without rocketman?
Tested with rocketman, performance fish and performance optimizer. And modded in general, on a big colony save.
It wasn’t super recent though, not 1.5. But should still be applicable, I suspect.
tl;dw? I assume it’s clickbait nonsense and nothing has changed but I’m not about to watch 19 minutes of video to find out they’re lying.
E: my complaint is related to the use of “now” in the title, as if something has changed, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
For games with no native client and run through proton: 4% faster at 1080p, 3% faster at 1440p, and 0.8% at 4k average
How many games did he test? It seems some games work better in Proton than others, based on past testing I’ve looked at.
According to this comment higher up, 19 games were tested on an RX 6800 and every game was faster on Linux except for the Witcher 3 and cs2
19 or 20
🌎🧑🚀🔫👨🚀
Is this the year?
It’s always the year
Nah, that was last year really.
People are still migrating. It’s going to take a while. I hope they take the time before October though.
Anyway…
Windows 10 sun setting gonna bring a decent bump.
I think we get our year once critical mass of gamers make that switch
That’s what was said when Windows 8 launched, and then again when support ended for Windows 7, and again when extended support ended for Windows 7.
The only thing that ever really had an effect on Linux user numbers was the Steam Deck.
Windows 10 hangers on’ers are probably also more technically savvy than those who get told by a machine that they “have to update”, and then do so.
Ahahahahahhaha what?
Lets be honest. Only the most tech savy of them will actually install Linux. Most are just not going to care they’re not getting updates on their >6 year old machines.
Definitely!
I was recently playing Super Danganronpa 2, a Japanese animu game from 2010 that originally came out for the PSP and later Vita and was then ported to Windows.
PC port from 2010 is enough to raise red flags, but Japanese PC port… Oof!
The game luckily had no issues apart from cutscene lag spikes, which sucked, seems like decoding those was all on one core that would build up and eventually spike to 100% causing stutters.
Well… somehow it just didn’t do that via Proton. It didn’t seem to matter if it was in gaming mode or desktop mode, via gamescope or just rawdogging in Xorg.
All in 1440p.
It. just. didnt. lag.
Holy shit maybe it really is the year of the Linux gaming desktop methinks.
Would love to test this, but my Steam install seems permanently screwed up now and I genuinely don’t have the energy to start from scratch and have to go through setting up the Nvidia drivers again.
Not to repurpose this into a “convince me not to uninstall Linux” thread, but… you may try at your peril.
What distro?
See, I feel you just failed in that attempt already.
But for the record, I landed on Manjaro with KDE Plasma and Wayland because I have an Nvidia card and HDR monitors and that’s the first one I tried where everything worked at once (I think on attempt five). And yes, I tried Mint first. Not everything worked at once on Mint.
Look, I don’t think the fix here is getting tech support. I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup (because that’s terabytes of space and I’m not made of NVMes and bandwidth) and I bumped into some combination of spotty Windows FS support and Steam’s weird bugs around temporary download storage on Linux (which has been a known issue since the late 2010s, btw).
Not all of that is Linux’s fault, technically, but it is broken and annoying, and if I lose the dual boot setup I have to keep Windows for a number of reasons, so that’s where we are.
Manjaro was buggy in my experience (used it for a year), and seems to be a well hated distro at this point. I am not suggesting that will fix your issues, just mentioning. I had a friend switch from Windows to Linux for the first time and Bazzite was the one that worked the best for their Nvidia card. As the other commenter said, dual booting on the same drive with Windows makes it a headache to manage.
I tried Bazzite, too, but there were issues there. Admittedly, they’ve updated their Nvidia support since, so I could give it another go.
But also, I’m not using this PC just as a gaming station, it’s a workstation, too. I’m not sure a gaming-focused immutable distro is going to be it.
The irony of it is that Manjaro has been best at this. I can run my workflow on it fine, and it’s snappier than Windows at that (and for other stuff, like retro gaming). It’s gaming-on-Linux savior Steam that gave up the ghost.
And frankly, I find when something like this happens everybody jumps to distro hopping as a solution. In my experience, if you’re trying to do something with sketchy support like this all distros are quirky.
Well I tried. Sharing the same drive between Windows and Linux is a big no-no. It’s just not a thing Windows is designed to be able to do.
Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”. It isn’t, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and… it kinda wasn’t. Same exact set of foibles.
The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it’s part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.
Been using Linux for almost three decades now. Just use Linux for what you need it for. Use Windows for what you need it for. Stop using either OS for the sake of using either OS. Gaming on Linux has come a hell of a long way in the last couple years. In a couple more years, the gaming landscape will be wildly different. You can always reassess at that time. If you have a couple games that are your number 1 must plays and they only work on Windows, then just use Windows. Trying to cobble together some janky mess, it’s just not worth it at all. Personally, I just played the games that played on Linux for a lot of years. It’s great what Proton has done for gaming on Linux. But if your games or your work are still on the fringe for Linux, no hard feelings. Just use what OS you need. That’s how this is all supposed to work. 30 years ago before Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. We bought pieces of software because we needed that software. Then we bought the OS that that software needed and bought the hardware that that OS worked on. Then you’d look and see what games were available to you and that was it. You should do the same. Linux is taking over anyways. Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy is coming to an end if they don’t do something soon. In 3-4 years from now, you will see a lot of investment into the desktop side of Linux. You can always come back then.
I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.
Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.
And yet Everspace 2 still plays like a slideshow…
