[kderbe]

Steve Burke from GamersNexus tested eight games from their benchmark suite on Linux last month. Although his conclusion was generally positive, there were problems with nearly every game:

- F1 2024 didn't load due to anti-cheat

- Dragon's Dogma 2 and Resident Evil 4 had non-functional raytracing

- Cyberpunk 2077 with raytracing on consistently crashes when reloading a save game

- Dying Light 2 occasionally freezes for a whole minute

- Starfield takes 25 minutes to compile shaders on first run, and framerates for Nvidia are halved compared to Windows

- Black Myth: Wukong judders badly on Nvidia cards

- Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards, and the Windows build fails for some AMD cards

If you research these games in discussion forums, you can find some configuration tweaks which might fix the issues. ProtonDB's rating is not a perfect indicator (BM:W is rated "platinum").

And while Steve says measurements from Linux and Windows are not directly comparable, I did so anyway and saw that Linux suffers a 10-30% drop in average FPS across the board when compared to Windows, depending on the game and video card.

[tuetuopay]

AFAIK this comes down a lot to NVIDIA not doing enough efforts for the Linux drivers. There is a pretty well documented and understood reason for the perf hit NVIDIA GPUs get on Linux.

Honestly, considering where we came from, a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider. Especially for all the people that don't want to touch Windows 11 with a 11-foot pole (which I am), it's a more than decent path. I can reboot into my unsupported Win10 install if I really need the frames.

Really, Linux benchmarks need to be split between AMD and NVIDIA. Both are useful, as the "just buy an amd card lol" crowd is ignoring the actually large NVIDIA install base, and it's not like I'm gonna swap out my RTX 3090 to go Linux.

Thanks for the comparison! Would you have an apples to apples, or rather an NVIDIA to NVIDIA comparison instead of "across the board"? I'd suspect the numbers are worse for the pure NVIDIA comparison, for what I mentioned above.

[user34283]

To each their own, but Windows 11 runs flawlessly on my machine with high-end specs and a 240 Hz monitor.

The Start menu works great with no lag, even immediately after booting.

The only thing that I consider annoying would be the 'Setup' screens that sometimes show up after bigger updates.

---

Would I trade it all to get on Bazzite DX:

- lower game compatibility and potential bugs

- subpar NVIDIA drivers with the risk of performance degradation

- restricted development in dev containers relying on VS Code Remote

- Loss of the Backblaze Unlimited plan

+ system rollbacks if an update fails

---

That does not seem worth it to me.

[episode404]

>a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider

You are either trolling or completely out of your mind. You simply cannot be serious when saying stuff like this.

[vladms]

> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards

I played Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux on a GeForce GTX 1060 (which is almost 10 years old!) without a fan (I found later that it was broken) and I generally did not have issues (couple of times in the whole game slowed for couple of seconds, but nothing major).

[distances]

The key word was Linux build. There's now an official Linux version so that BG3 runs better on Steam Deck. Everyone else should keep using Proton to run it like they've done this far.

Which applies to all the games, basically. I nowadays make sure to select Proton before even running the game for the first time, in case it has a Linux build -- that will invariably be the buggier experience so want to avoid it.

[zapnuk]

Thats the whole problem. No consistency. Some configurations work, others not - eventhough they should be way more capable.

That's not even limited to linux or gaming. A few weeks ago i tried to apply the latest Windows update to my 2018 lenovo thinkpad. It complained about insufficient space (had 20GB free). I then used a usb as swap (required by windows) and tried to install the update. Gave up after 1 hour without progress...

Hardware+OS really seems unfixable in some cases. I'm 100% getting a macbook next time. At least with Apple I can schedule a support appointment.

[energy123]

It's a CPU bound game

[ozgrakkurt]

This sounds nothing like my personal experience. I was able for play every single game I tried including

Asetto corsa competizione

Basically all total war games

Cyberpunk

Witcher 3

Dishonored

Mafia 1 and 2

AC origins/odyssey

Civilization 5

Detroit become human

Prey

Crusader kings 3

Stellaris

Metro exodus

And more games I don’t remember

I don’t enable ray tracing or resolution scaling so that might be making the difference on games that have it.

Chances are you can run it if something is at least gold on protondb

Also my gpu is amd.

As a side note, I played cyberpunk for more than 400 hours on max settings without any major issue so saying it doesn’t work because of rtx is very silly imho

[utopiah]

> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards

Not at all my experience which makes me question the rest. Also https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 most people seem quite happy with it so it's not a "me" problem.

Finally the "10-30% drop in average FPS across the board" might be correct, then so what? I understand a LOT of gamers want to have "the best" performance for what they paid good money for but pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop, you just adjust the settings and go play. I think a lot of gamers do get confused and consider maximizing performances itself as a game. It might be fun, and that's 100% OK, but it's also NOT what playing an actual game is about.

[ThatPlayer]

Those are mostly reports for the Windows build of Baldur's Gate 3, running through Proton/Wine. He's talking about the newer Linux native build of the game from 3 months ago.

There's a few reports there for the native version of the game: https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940#9GT638Fuyx , with similar Nvidia GPU issues and a fix.

[Parae]

> pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop

I mostly play fighting games. A 7% drop in FPS is more than enough to break the whole game experience as combo rely on frame data. For example Street Fighter 6 is locked at 60 fps. A low punch needs 4 frames to launch and leaves a 4-frames window to land another hit. If there was a 7% drop in FPS, you would miss your combo. Even the tiniest drop in FPS makes the game unplayable.

It's the same for almost every fighting games. I know it's a niche genre, but I'm quite sure it's the same for other genres. It's a complete dealbreaker for competitive play.

[distances]

You're talking about the Proton version, parent was talking about the Linux native build that is optimized for Steam Deck.