[PoshBreeze]

It depends on the games you play and what you are doing. It is a mixed bag IME. If you are installing a game that is several years old it will work wonderfully. Most guides assume you have Arch Linux or are using one of the "gaming" distros like Bazzite. I use Debian (I am running Testing/Trixie RC on my main PC).

I play a lot of HellDivers 2. Despite what a lot of Linux YouTubers say. It doesn't work very well on Linux. The recommendations I got from people was to change distro. I do other stuff on Linux. Game slows down when you need it to be running smoothly doesn't matter what resolution/settings you set.

Anything with anti-cheat probably won't work very well if at all.

I also wanted to play the old Command and Conquer games. Getting the fan made patchers (not the games itself) to run properly that fix a bunch of bugs that EA/Westwood never fixed and mod support is more difficult than I cared to bother with.

[esseph]

Fedora 42, Helldivers 2

Make sure to change your Steam launch options to:

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=84 gamemoderun %command%

This will use gamemode to run it, give it priority, put the system in performance power mode, and will fix any pulse audio static you may be having. You can do this for any game you launch with steam, any shortcut, etc.

It's missing probably 15fps on this card between windows and Linux, and since it's above 100fps I really don't even notice.

It does seem to run a bit better under gnome with Variable Refresh Rate than KDE.

[PoshBreeze]

I will be honest, I just gave up. I couldn't get consistent performance on HellDivers 2. Many of the things you have mentioned I've tried and found they don't make much of a difference or made things worse.

I did get it running nice for about a day and then an update was pushed and it ran like rubbish again. The game runs smoothly when initially running the map and then massive dip in frames for several seconds. This is usually when one of the bugs is jumping at you.

This game may work better on Fedora/Bazzite or <some other distro> but I find Debian to be super reliable and don't want to switch distro. I also don't like Fedora generally as I've found it unreliable in the past. I had a look at Bazzite and I honestly just wasn't interested. This is due to it having a bunch of technologies that I have no interest in using.

There are other issues that are tangential but related issues.

e.g.

I normally play on Super HellDive with other players in a Discord VC. Discord / Pipewire seems to reset my sound for no particular reason and my Plantronics Headset Mic (good headset, not some gamer nonsense) will be not found. This requires a restart of pipewire/wireplumber and Discord (in that order). This happens often enough I have a shell script alias called "fix_discord".

I have weird audio problems on HDMI (AMD card) thanks to a regression in the kernel (Kernel 6.1 with Debian worked fine).

I could mess about with this for ages and maybe get it working or just reboot into Windows which takes me all of a minute.

It is just easier to use Windows for Gaming. Then use Linux for work stuff.