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Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games - Linux 17% faster on Average
Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games - Linux 17% faster on Average
241 comments
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I'm just going to go ahead and say this now, do not expect most windows games to run better on Linux than windows. Typically the case is when you find a well optimized game that is CPU bound, or is natively vulkan. Anything else, expect comparable framerates.
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I will disagree and that's why I made this video. Been benchmarking games for 3 years now, mostly on AMD systems. It went from about same performance, to slightly better, to this. 17% average improvement is nothing to laugh at. It's the difference between a 4090 and a 7900XTX on Windows. So people can literally save $1000 just by using Linux.
What you say, does mostly apply to Nvidia users though.
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Not enough people running nvidia realize just how much nvidia does to make sure you stick to their proprietary software. That you can close most of the performance gap with FOSS on AMD is an amazing finding.
Unfortunately it won't convince many who haven't already seen the benefits of a more open system.
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Man look, I've been using Linux as a daily driver for 18 years, people have been saying exactly what you're saying since before performance was even comparable.
You're not going to get 17% better performance on the GPU just because you're using another operating system, it's not going to happen unless you're running a Linux native version of the game. Often times, that is not even the case.
Performance can be a little bit better if the game is natively opengl or vulkan, but if it is directx (the vast majority of windows games) then it is going to be comparable at best in GPU-bound scenarios, I.E. most of the games people are playing on PC.
You can't just magically put more transistors in a GPU just because you are running a different OS. CPU bound games run better on Linux because of the god-tier scheduler, but a GPU is essentially a computer in itself, all drivers do is tell the GPU to take this information and translate it into something you see on a screen.
By the way, the Nvidia thing has been false for quite some time now. I primarily use AMD on Linux, but the only place you will run into issues with Nvidia is wayland, otherwise it works perfectly fine everywhere else.
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17% average improvement is nothing to laugh at. It’s the difference between a 4090 and a 7900XTX on Windows.
Just fyi, that isn't true, the difference is 20-30% on average, in most benchmarks at least
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It's comparable more often than not, but honestly even if it was 17% worse on average I would still stick to Linux and just build a better computer. Which is what I did before proton.
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No doubt and I'm the same way, I'm just trying to say that one shouldn't try to sell Linux solely based on "gaming performance" when it is definitely not the case most of the time.
Linux is not used like windows or macos at all, and new users will definitely be frustrated enough just learning to use the operating system. Believe me, I think it is awesome that we are finally getting another gaming revolution in the community (Linux gaming actually used to be pretty good before around 2010), but keep in mind that these efforts are for the community and steam deck users. Anyone who wants to have it too will ultimately have to join the community and learn the ropes.
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Honestly, if you use Proton-GE's FSR feature for games that don't offer built-in FSR/DLSS + GameMode, you can def beat Windows performance in some Windows-only games. I know it's kinda cheating, but it does net you higher FPS on the same graphics settings.
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That's not really even cheating, there's windows utilities that attempt to do the same thing.
Gamemode puts the game at an extremely low niceness value, among other things, which will make the system allocate more resources toward it.
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Is it linux is faster, or is it dxvk/vulkan is faster?
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Could be both. Who knows. For high performance computing Linux is the de facto standard because it has better performances than windows, and Linux distros are usually better, stabler OSes overall when one needs raw performances. In this case, who knows, someone should investigate further
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I think it has more to do with Linux being easier to tweak, not some inherent performance difference. You can tweak the scheduler, page sizes, and all manner of other things to get a bit more performance if you know what your workload looks like. So it being open source and ubiquitous is a bigger contributor imo than anything inherent to the design of the kernel.
Regular users aren't going to go through that level of tweaking, so the difference should be a lot smaller and will benefit more from general code-level optimizations than system tweaks. General purpose, high performance computing works just fine on Windows, it's just easier to tweak Linux for production compute use cases.
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Combination, and it depends on the game. Dxvk will add latency, but depending on the renderer and how the game runs the reduction in CPU overhead by using dxvk instead of native can provide performance gains, especially on certain CPU's.
On games with a native vulkan renderer, Linux will most often just be faster since you have less system overhead burden. This has been fascinating to see though.
- First the games started to become playable, but framerates weren't so great.
- Framerates started to improve
- Framerates started to become a wash between Windows vs Linux
- We are progressing into this step: it either runs comparably or better.
The results are mixed right now, and it's going to be real hard to nail down predictability as far as performance goes. More often than not, so long as DRM isn't involved, games run really well on day one. Older games are starting to see a performance uplift and reliability improvements through proton/dxvk/vkd3d.
I'm very happy though that what we're talking about is comparable performance metrics. We use to be content if the shit ran at all.
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