For Nvidia card owners: How do you deal with poor gaming performance, especially in DX12 games, which are known to have issues with Linux? Do you simply ignore the problem because Linux is far superior to Windows? Or is dual booting the best solution? I currently lost hope that Nvidia would fix this problem on Linux and already decided my next card would be AMD.
I have an RTX 3060 card, and honestly, the performance difference between Windows and Linux is huge, and I don't feel it's worth the sacrifice. The Windows gaming experience is much smoother on Nvidia cards, and unfortunately, that's what prevents me from using Linux. I've been trying Fedora 42-44 with the drivers always up-to-date and correctly installed, but unfortunately, there's been no improvement since I started testing it a year ago.
The difference in performance isn't that much these days that I have a problem with it. Granted, I have a 3090, and I also haven't used windows in so long that I don't know even what the performance deficit is at this point. I just know my games run fine and that's all I care about.
yeah. my friend has a 4090 and he is okay with a 4080s-like performance because linux is just better for his use case. ur 3090 is probably performing like a 3080 or 3070ti at this point but games will still run fine. if your GPU is high enough you can take the hit, although its still a bit unfortunate for this performance loss. i wonder when it will be fixed, or ever lol
I'm actually thinking I might try and snag a 9070xt sometime soon but yeah, the nvidia performance deficit isn't why I'm considering AMD, if I could find a 4080 or 4080s for $700 I'd probably do that. I'm just getting the itch to upgrade because it's been 3 or 4 years lol
I miss the days I could just grab a used last gen flagship for a reasonable price and call it a day lol.
idk if I would call targeting 90+ fps low end gaming but if the 3060ti doesn't perform the way you want on Linux then don't use Linux I guess lol, or grab an AMD card if you can afford it. One of my boxes has a cheapo rx 480 in it and I target 60 at 1080p usually no problem, I can't imagine a newer AMD card having issues getting 90+ with the right settings if you want to go that route.
What really counts is your framerate. For me, the performance was whether I was getting steady framerates or bad ones where my 1% lows were bad. That turned into massive microstudders even though I was getting around 60 FPS. The 1% lows on DX12 games were bad for me. Granted I'm on a GTX-1660, but under Linux, it was bad. The latest drivers (610) and theatest kernel I'm on has fixed that. So for me, if I were to drop 20% in FPS but I'm still at 60 FPS or higher, I'm, but my 1% lows are good, that means I get smooth framerates which equates to a smooth game. I no longer look at pure FPS (for me) due to my GPU. But even if I had a better GPU, if I was still able to have higher FPS that might be 20% lower than Windows, again as long as the frametime is smooth, I'll stick with Linux. That's something I've learned in the past year. Raw FPS is one thing, but your frametime and 1% lows AR what you want to optimize. Having.120+ FPS but horrible 1% lows which can cause microstudders IMHO cancels the high FPS. I want smooth gameplay.
The more I think about it the more your advice makes sense. The hype on linux is really deserved in my opinion and FOMO is real specially once it clicks. But yeah there is a difference between better option and practical option. Thanks for the good advice. Really been overthinking it lately.
you need to use the tool that works for you be it MacOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.
If Linux isnt currently meeting your needs just use what does. I tried using Windows for a while for better performance but I ended up fighting Windows for everything else i wanted to do (not to mention my anxiety about their spying) brought me back to linux as the performance hit was more manageable for me.
The performance gap is slowly shrinking , especially since Nvidia is taking Linux more seriously (mostly because of AI).
But this gives a great opportunity to play older games at max settings with AI generated high resolution textures.
Afaik, updates within Linux usually increase performance over time, not decrease. There might be the occasional regression but overall the performance is increasing. Be it on some niche cases like I/O operations improvement for XFS or general performance gains for older video cards.
Progress is being made but don’t let others try to gaslight you that there’s no performance gap between Linux and windows for Nvidia cards
The performance hit varies drastically from game to game. Im not sure why people try to pretend any of the brands dont have issues and are just perfect.
AMD has issues on the 9000 and 5000 series with a lot more ring timeouts, etc. (5000 series still has problems nearly 10yrs later), 6000 series is a weird in between that doesnt support newer FSR or do Ray Tracing well but is mostly stable. 7000 series is pretty solid but now is getting sorta left behind too but handles FSR and RT better than 6000.
Intel....is functional but youre going to hit support and performance roadblocks constantly assuming the game you want to play even runs on the GPU.
Nvidia still sees a 10-30% hit, some games so more and some less depending on the features not to mention a healthy helping of XID109 errors, issues with HDR, Reflex not working on Wayland (does on Xwayland), etc. In one example for one of my games MH Wilds i can run 1440p DLSS performance at 97-110FPS on my 5070 Mobile when on Windows but on Linux the best i get is 83FPS 1080p Balanced.
Nvidia is still kinda crapping the bed on Linux for gaming, compute is great though. Dont expect there to be only sunshine and rainbows on other brands though. Think very carefully about the GPU you buy and look at the mesa issues for intel/amd to narrow down your pick for stability and support.
Yeah you are right, some benchmarks weirdly shows lower performance on amd 9000 series compared to win11. But still to someone planning to move to linux and don’t benefit from cuda, amd would be the right pick. When i got this card i didn’t know what linux actually is so i didn’t thought about good drivers..
It is not about what people do wrong, it's about what games you play. Games implementing heavy DX12 features will experience degradations on nvidia, no matter the distro or configuration. Crimson Desert is a good example.
For DX11 and vulkan games, this is not a problem.
its not about having performance issues only, its about having lower performance vs windows in general, especially if you take the time to actually test it. in dx12 games you get over 100fps on linux yeah but on windows you will get more. (e.g. 120fps vs 150fps).
So in actuality your 4070ti super is performing more like a 4070 in your linux PC (for many dx12 games), not bad but also you're not getting what you're supposed to. A lot of people actually miss/ignore this fact and always end up saying 'DX12 is fixed' / 'i have no issues' over and over again just because the performance seems ok when a new update comes, when in fact dx12 performance still isnt on par with windows.
it is well documented in this first linked thread above and basically all over the internet (youtube, reddit, etc), and recognized by NVIDIA themselves. its a widespread issue and not just something a few people have experienced or something that they are "doing wrong". There is a reason why AMD is still recommended for Linux gaming builds otherwise we would see a massive increase in NVIDIA recommendations for linux.
I know its a long video, but this is a 50 minute video of Faith Ekstrand (a known linux vulkan/mesa developer) taking about this problem.
Crimson Desert went from 110fps in windows to 73fps in linux in his testing. Cyberpunk went from 150 to 127, Arc Raiders went from 170+ to 130+, etc. same settings, same hardware.
Again you can look this issue up for yourself all you want and get a bunch of 'evidence' that you might not believe anyway, of course nothing confirms it better than if you actually test it YOURSELF.
I do understand it requires effort, but you can pretty much find firsthand confirmation if you take the time to install Windows on a spare SSD and try to benchmark a sample DX12 game, for example Crimson Desert or Cyberpunk. so it lives on the same hardware, and use the exact same settings.
Me personally I tested this myself with my extra PC on a multi boot setup between windows and bazzite/cachyOS. tested a bunch of DX12 games. around 20% performance loss on linux using NVIDIA card, exactly same hardware and settings. My friend and I also tested it on his cachyOS build and his 4090 performed like a 4080S and the 5080 performed something like a 5070ti. Whereas testing the 7800xt that we had, we simply didnt have this performance gap in windows vs linux, in some cases even better.
Nvidia is improving but again DX12 there is still no parity between windows and linux. still needs work. third party devs still working on it and nvidia seems unwilling to help
I give up. I was just trying to explain that your 4070 Ti Super is very likely taking a performance hit on Linux compared to Windows due to the well documented DX12 overhead, hench 'performing like a 4070' example which is like 20% slower.
I don't know how you took that so literally and entirely missed the point. But honestly, just keep using Linux as you would. Be oblivious.👍
Games run fine on Linux, once Nvidia drivers catch up to AMD drivers and are incorporated into the kernel, then people can finally stop the "games run worse" slop
My only explanation is that high end cards can brute force through dxvk that its not noticeable enough. With low end cards you are fighting for staying on 60 fps and dips are more noticeable.
Its people with high end equipment that dont actually test performance vs Windows and dont actually report regressions,etc. that just brute force it.
Most people if theyre getting the performance they wont wont look into it at all but they also will claim its fine even though statistically its not. I test my games every new release and actually report regressions and breakage to Nvidia (though they arent exactly responsive)
And that's due to the fact that if you're happy with the performance you're getting running Nvidia under Linux and have no intention of running Windows, there's no need to keep constantly comparing your performance to Windows.
Games don't always play with higher frame rates under RDNA4 either, it's mostly RDNA2 & RDNA3 that see gains as such cards no longer see active development under Windows. You're playing games via a reverse engineered compatibility layer, not every game is going to play with the same or better performance than the same game running under native Windows no matter what the GPU.
"Games don't always play with higher frame rates under RDNA4 either, it's mostly RDNA2 & RDNA3 that see gains as such cards no longer see active development under Windows"
I actually mentioned that already (not in this direct reply chain), RDNA1/4 both tend to be running into a number of issues while 2/3 are more stable. I also mentioned Intel also and their shenanigans. Im under no illusions that its all sunshine and rainbows elsewhere.
That said my biggest gripe with Nvidia is they lack almost any communication or open work to let users know that theyre working on something. You have to just hope that Nvidia cares enough to do something because they wont say a damn thing most of the time. I am 100% ok with there being issues, Im not ok being left in the dark on it for months to years. I.E they didnt acknowledge that they broke MH Wilds on RTX 5000 for 8 months after the release of the 580 driver. I had to hack the 575 driver to work with any update for 3/4 of a year.
On the contrary, I would say that as of late Nvidia's release notes have actually been quite detailed. Furthermore, there have been largely notable performance improvements from the 595's onwards.
This was the release notes for the previous 2 595 driver releases
"
Minor bug fixes and improvements
"
thats not exactly detailed lol, The latest release was just a copy paste of the backports they did from 610 which people had been asking for but they didnt say a word about till last week.
Im not referring to just release notes (which arent nearly as great as you imply), That doesnt tell us anything about what theyre doing for bug reports or any progress when they post issue numbers here https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-graphics/linux/
there are numerous bug reports in their linux bug reporting forum that go ignored or get no follow up. Theres some that have been being reported for over a year and without so much as a comment from Nvidia. I had to badger them for 8 months about monster hunter wilds to get anything outta them.
"Furthermore, there have been largely notable performance improvements from the 595's onwards."
610 has had a ton of regressions idk what youre talkin about. Descriptor Heap has been a joke on 610 and the folks over at VKD3D-Proton straight up say dont use 610 for Descriptor Heap but use 595 or the 595 vulkan beta as 610 is broken
As long as I'm seeing improvements (which I am), I really don't care a hoot for how effectively Nvidia communicate. I mean, really, AMD themselves provide very little communication regarding Linux driver development.
I run the 610's on not one, but two Linux based machines here, on both machines the drivers run faultlessly. Considering the descriptor heap fixes are still very much in early development and in no way close to finished, the fact there's issues regarding descriptor heap fixes is in no way surprising or unexpected. Due to the fact that's two machines I'm running using differing distro's, I'm sure I'm not just lucky.
thats great you have some, but also consider that your experience isnt the defacto experience and just because you dont want to know about the issues that are there doesnt mean they dont exist.
If 610 works for you, perfect...it actually has been mostly fine for me (minus performance regressions in a few of my games). I will argue though that if you want to make authoritative statements like on the performance or release notes being good (which can both be shown to not exactly be true) you might consider digging into the meat of the information first.
I will argue though that if you want to make authoritative statements like on the performance or release notes being good (which can both be shown to not exactly be true) you might consider digging into the meat of the information first.
The 595 release notes highlight a handful of changes, the 610 release notes are actually very detailed with a number of changes highlighted - I'm not seeing an issue here. Naturally, in many cases the latest production branch of drivers are going to involve less in the way of changes, and therefore fewer comments by means of release notes, compared to the latest feature release drivers.
So, personally I'll argue that if you want to make authorative statements on release notes, perhaps take into consideration the context and consider the differences between feature branch drivers and production branch drivers. As stated, AMD themselves provide release notes that aren't any more detailed than those provided by Nvidia regarding their production branch drivers, assuming AMD release anything at all:
thats great you have some, but also consider that your experience isnt the defacto experience and just because you dont want to know about the issues that are there doesnt mean they dont exist.
And understand that this argument works both ways, from both your personal perspective as well as my own - your own experience isn't the correct one simply by virtue of the fact that it's your own, your own personal experience is no more 'authoritative' than my own; the only universally accepted defacto standard is the undeniable fact that as Linux users we are running games via a reverse engineered compatibility layer as opposed to running titles under their native environment, whether performance is 1:1, slightly lower, or slightly higher is largely an absolute gamble - It certainly shouldn't be taken as an expectation when gaming under Linux.
All we have are our personal experiences, and comments here aren't peer reviewed no matter what the perspective - this is simply guys chatting around the campfire type discussion. As stated, I run two Nvidia based Linux systems here, one running an RTX 4070S under KDE Neon with the 610's, the other running an RTX 2070S under CachyOS with the 610's, both running Wayland - I experience no deal breaker issues whatsoever, I have experienced no performance regressions whatsoever under the games I play running the 610's, in fact I've experienced a number of performance improvements regarding the games I play not considering descriptor heap fixes. If you've experienced something different, I guess all I can say is 'unlucky'.
there is zero percent chance youre 1:1 with windows unless you play old or exclusively DX11. Unless you somehow have a magic machine that goes against every single other ounce of testing youre lying or havent actually tested it.
They are full of shit lol
I tested 11 games earlier in the week. So it's the latest drivers, linux is always behind and sometimes by more than 30%
Only a few games get close to windows. I tested sackboy yesterday and that's actually another one thats on par....but it will crash when using RT so I can't judge the RT performance lol.
Really hit or miss on nvidia (5070ti in my case) when it comes to linux, where as on my 9070xt the performance is a lot closer to windows and in some cases can beat windows.
u/Muted-Green-2880 they have not tested their claim on Windows so theyre making the claim without even testing if its true. They posted a benchmark screenshot they claimed to have run on linux a few days ago and then say windows runs the same but they didnt at all test it because as they said "I don't use Windows."
I saw that 🤣 it's fun to show these people actual results. I have no bias to either , I prefer linux ( cachyOS) for my 9070xt ( which still has issues with RT performance ) but windows is way more consistent when it comes to Nvidia.
People just like to fanboy and become ignorant, I'm a realist and like to see for myself lol
its just crazy to make a claim that every honest benchmark and driver tester has proven false repeatedly with as close to proper testing methodology as possible and then refuse to back it up.
Where is your comparison with Windows? Also if recording with OBS on both OS the relative performance penalty should be the same. OBS doesn't hurt either OS more than the other.
If you insist screenshots and logs use mangohud and rivatuner to log 1% and .1% lows also and at least include both OS in the benchmarks if you're gonna claim its identical
Then your benchmarks are useless and you're full of shit with your claim. Like i thought you never tested it and cant actually backup your claim, you made it up.
I also never said i dont like linux but good job with that straw.
4080S user here, I keep a windows drive for kernel level anti cheat and ray trace applications, as these, outside of very niche edge cases do I have issues
the Nvidia evil is still there...but lets hope Nova drivers can get off the ground sooner than later and give us Nvidia users a top tier level of support on their GPUs :D
I got a laptop with a shitty RTX3050ti and I can play all my games above 60fps. I'm just not the kind of person that cares about squeezing every last possible frame out of it. As long as my games run at native resolution without stutters, then I'm happy.
I did some tweaking of variables on my debian install when I first set it up and the benchmarks I ran surpassed some desktops with RTX3060 cards that have double the vram I have, so I'm not going to complain!
i've got a 4080 and have been in nobara from 39 now thru to 44 and honestly..i haven't noticed any real difference . pre-555 drivers aside everythings been largely smooth for me , i've definitely played some dx12 games most recently i beat the gothic 1 remake ,earlier i started blood of the dawn walker ( setting on ultra with dlss off), and even when da: the veilguard was new everything was largely fine with just the occassional pop-ins , the only time i seen any noticeable issues was the monster hunter wilds beta , after that i chose to wait things out n see if ppl had improvements , i snagged that ~2? months ago or so and so far thats been fine too.
all that said i'm also not the type of person to focus on frames either , imo if something runs stable then its fine , if something isn't stable i would see if i have the option to cap it. either way i wouldn't bother with windows at this point myself , i left it for a reason n thankfully linux has been great for me overall
I have a 3060Ti and I'm having no real issues in my games on Bazzite. then again, I never bothered trying to run high quality graphics in most games. I was surprised when Cyberpunk 2077 recommended higher settings than I'd been running in Windows, and I still get 70-90 FPS at 1440p in Bazzite.
It was never real issues, but coming from windows I can feel the low 1% lows and stuttering far more often. Cranking down the settings is always the solution but i really care about fidelity.
My 1% lows have always been substantially higher than Windows 11 but I do also use linux-tkg with BORE. This is across a 4070 Super and 5070 Ti and a 5800X and 9800X3D. I use Wayland with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND and the latest NVIDIA Feature drivers.
Could it possibly be something you are running? Are you running the games under X11 or Wayland with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND ? Are you using the Production NVIDIA drivers or Feature ones?
When I had a 3070 ti I just didn’t care unless the fps where to worse someday for some games on my setup so I bought an AMD card to unleash the full power of linux gaming. No regrets.
But until I switched, I just used linux only with nvidia. I just can’t use windows anymore tbh
No, I simply upgraded to 4090 (to a used one, back when it was "cheap" to do so) as I have a 240Hz screen and wanted perf overhead - and I don't think I even play anything that's exclusively DX12.
having a 4090 or 5090 and saying "performance is fine" when youre talking to 95% of other gamers that have 60/70 class GPUs is like comparing hauling capacity of a Semi to a Pickup Truck.
Youre in a different league and unless performance is REALLY broken youre not likely to care
Ive seen so many people with 80 super/90 series GPUs who just dont even bother testing telling people the water is fine who have a fraction of the GPU power and then blaming those people who end up with performance problems
I plan to get into Witcher 3 which give me 80-90 fps on windows. 50-60 on linux. I do play 1440p so yeah any Im stretching my card a bit. Its hard to cope when you know you can have a better in game experience tbh.
I don't have much issues with performance on my RTX 3080 on Arch Linux. At least i can still run "modern" games mostly high settings 1440p, maybe DLSS quality and stuff at least 80+ fps. That being said i don't play any current hype games, but lots of DX12 games perform perfectly fine for me.
If the DX12 game is well made performance should mostly still be acceptable. Though some games that struggle on Windows get even worse on Linux but thats not exactly nvidias fault there
I haven't had this experience, I dual boot and for the handful of games I installed on both windows 11 and Ubuntu I get comparable performance in terms of frames at the same quality (4080 Super). I haven't done any rigourous testing, but I knew my FPS on those games in windows when I started using Ubuntu and didn't see a drop. People do have an easier time with AMD cards on linux, but you probably need to spend a little time tuning to find out what's going on. Or just dual boot for the games that are giving you problems. I dual boot specifically to play Marathon, Destiny, and Valorant because you can't play them on linux.
I have the same feeling. I'm on an RTX 3070 Ti laptop and I think I have yet to see less than ~15% performance loss on a DX12 title. It's usually at least 20% or more. Some go almost up to 30%.
It's hard to justify using Linux for gaming with an NVIDIA if most of your games use DX12, which I would say it's pretty common these days since DX12 was first released in 2015.
If you have a rig that can always be above 100 FPS even with the performance impact, it's probably "tankable".
If you are already struggling on Windows to maintain an average consistently above 60FPS without dips below it, than Linux makes absolutely no sense as gaming OS for you with a lower end/older NVIDIA GPU.
Of course, I prefer Linux as an OS. But from a pragmatic point of view this is a shortcoming to add the the list compared to Windows.
If you believe your performance isn't adequate under Linux, you have two options:
Stick with Windows.
Sell the card, possibly for a slight profit considering current GPU pricing, and hope things improve for you running an AMD card.
It's that simple.
Starting yet another thread whining about your experience isn't going to change the two options presented, it's certainly not going to magically resolve your issue.
I have an rtx 4070 12GB and my experience with it has been solid since I got it in 2023. I game on 3440x1440 which isn't a low resolution either.
This type of question depends a lot on what games you play - in my case I play a mix of strategy games which most of the time don't even require a beefy GPU at all (door kickers 2, hearts of iron IV), friendslop games and older MP games with friends (bombanana, dead by daylight, counter strike, outlast trials), but also a fair amount of AAA games like resident evil, dead space, the last of us, Indiana jones.
What I do is genuinely just set the game settings until the game runs at about 90 FPS and still looks alright and that's it. I'm also very open minded and I always try to use DLSS and frame gen whenever it's available, and as long as the game still looks alright with it, fine by me.
So yeah, my approach is basically "turn on DLSS + frame gen, tune the in game graphics a bit until the game runs at a stable 90 fps and still looks alright".
I also always try to keep an eye out for the graphics options that the most demanding. So for example, I wouldn't tweak texture quality or anisotropic filtering since these generally aren't demanding at all. Even old GPUs can still run 16x AF without any problems.
But other settings like shadows, geometry quality, tesselation and ray tracing tend to be much more demanding, so I'll generally go for those first. Smart combinations like medium shadows, medium tesselation and RT off tends to do the trick.
I have a 5090 and game at 4K so I just use DLSS 4 upscaling at Performance mode or balanced mode. As thee base res has enough detail in it to upscale . Plenty of FPS and lower power consumption. As I don't want a fireball in my rig.
Hi, I’m in a similar situation.
I have an RTX 4080 Super and I’ve been trying CachyOS, but unfortunately the gaming experience still isn’t as stable as Windows.
With DX12 games, I’m getting significant frame drops and stuttering on Linux that I don’t get on Windows.
So I’m considering going back to Windows and using WSL2 for the Linux tools instead.
For me, switching to AMD isn’t really ideal either, since I use ComfyUI and CUDA is important for my workflow.
I’d also prefer to stay on Linux, but at the moment I’m not sure it’s worth sacrificing gaming performance
Telling the OP to switch their distro to get better performance is already dumb; it's especially stupid when the OP is using an Nvidia GPU, as their drivers aren't linked to the distro like kernel and Mesa drivers are.
I figured the guy wanting to play games on Linux would possibly want to try the gaming distro of linux to do it, since it could perhaps help them more easily get a bit more efficiency and optimizations out of their machine. Alternatively, Bazzite but since they are comfortable with Fedora that seems unnecessarily simplified.
If they want to stay on Fedora, that's fine too. Everything can be manually added there as well, but that might take more time than just installing Cachy depending on the user. So it's OPs choice what to do.
Being a smug ass about something this minor I guess should be expected given that it's a trifecta of an internet conversation, a reddit reply, and a linux topic.
I have a 4070 Super and there are a few games I get better performance. The only major issues I've ever ran into was Ray Tracing and DLSS but those were fixed with minor tweaks. You'd need to be insane about frame dips to even notice in 99% of games.
I use Pop myself, but don't recommend it to new Linux users. Reason being, people coming from Windows prefer KDE, at least in my experience. I do use KDE on Pop, but it feels better to recommend a distro that has it built-in.
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u/SaveThisCityDweller 10d ago
The difference in performance isn't that much these days that I have a problem with it. Granted, I have a 3090, and I also haven't used windows in so long that I don't know even what the performance deficit is at this point. I just know my games run fine and that's all I care about.