Is Linux gaming performance comparable to Windows now with top end hardware?

[IcyTorrent]

With the advent of proton I've been tempted to finally leave Windows, but I'm scared of loosing performance and doing endless troubleshooting rather than having things just work.

[Omega]

It depends on the game and the hardware.

Some games perform about the same, others perform a lot better, and again others perform a lot worse.

Nowdays, from my experience, games performing massively worse is a rarity, it is more common to have better performance than worse.

The only thing really worth mentioning regarding games is overly agressive kernel-level anti-cheat, they often do not work. This mostly affects the big multiplayed-focused AAA games such as Fortnite and Call Of Duty.


It really depends on your hardware configuration, but modern Linux with modern hardware usually just works and requires no setup or tweaking from you as a user.

One big exception however, Nvidia. Nvidia is the only major GPU manufacturer which does not have an proper open source kernel and userspace GPU driver, meaning you have to manually install their GPU driver, and until you do the hardware may have major issues. And then there is also the risk of the Nvidia driver just breaking after a kernel update.

Some distros like Pop!_OS ship the Nvidia driver out the box to make this as easy as possible. And many others provide easy tools which can download and install the drivers for you.

So for GPU, get Intel or AMD. AMD is typically the better supported because it is more widely used, and because Valve uses on in the Steam Deck.

[Viking2121]

Well, on some things you are gonna have to do some endless troubleshooting regardless of what anyone says, Linux is still not exactly what I'd call plug n play yet, its much better than what it was even a year a go. I find its mostly drivers thats more annoying to get working than anything thing, like my board, the USB 3.1 chipset and the wifi and my soundblaster card refuses to work under any linux distro without typing a million different things into the terminal and its not quite right when it does work, where windows it just works.

I've also installed a game from steam on PopOS and tried to run it, and it pretty much destroyed the entire Install of the OS so theirs that lol. Most games I've tried played just as well or worse under linux where it has to go under compatibility layers to work, others it was the launcher or anti cheat, but I was surprised at how many games did just work with little effort really, I've never really seen one run noticeably better on Linux than windows, but more the same performance.

I'd dual boot or if you got an extra SSD laying around, I'd install Linux on that just in case it isn't for you, or your not happy with it.

[Trout]

if you pick a distro designed to just work (i.e. mint) then there isn't much tinkering required. running artix with xfce + picom on a 5700X3D and a 3080, most of the time I get nearly identical performance compared to windows, in rare cases a game might run marginally worse (about 2-3 fps less). I don't play any game which has a kernel anticheat that stops me from playing through proton
protondb is also a valuable tool to see if your games will work ootb or if they need some setup before you can play
tl;dr yes

[DevaVictrix]

I’m another Linux user that gets the performance I see on YouTube videos which are using windows. Even nvidia drivers are as simple as any other package to install. Because of secure boot I have to type in my root password on first boot after install but that’s no sweat. I use OpenSUSE. The only issue I have is if I use Wayland with my nvidia gpu.

[mtono]

question: is the control panel of the gpu software in linux the same as in windows? i mean the range of functions...all of them. not the ingame finetuning menus.
thank you!

[DevaVictrix]

No, very limited options in the Linux drivers. It kinda made me realise I didn’t need/want all the options anyway! Never missed them. Crucially, you can turn gsync on though.

[mtono]

DevaVictrix původně napsal:

No, very limited options in the Linux drivers. It kinda made me realise I didn’t need/want all the options anyway! Never missed them. Crucially, you can turn gsync on though.

nice information, because i had the same experience and i am not wrong. thank you!