I recently spent some time with the Framework 13 laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results!
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The Framework 13 is perfectly capable of gaming even with its integrated graphics, provided you’re willing to compromise by lowering the resolution and quality presets for more demanding games. (It’s also a testament to how far AMD’s APUs have come in the past decade.)
Summary of results:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Linux wins
Total War: Warhammer III: Windows wins
Cyberpunk 2077: Linux wins
Forza Horizon 5: Windows wins
These results are an interesting slice of the Linux vs Windows gaming picture, but certainly not representative of the entire landscape. A few shorts years ago, however, I never would have dreamed I’d be writing an article where even two games on Linux are outperforming their Windows counterparts.
Bazzite for me, runs all my games basically 2x as good as Windows. A game that I'd run on low-med graphics and get around 60-70 fps on Windows I can usually run at med-high and get 100.
I7-5930k and an Rx5700 with a 3440x1440 resolution.
Ubuntu 24.x, because that's what I'm most familiar with, and it's one of the officially supported distros. Admittedly, this was from a Live USB, and not installed on my system.
On my Windows desktop, I had dual-boot with Linux (Ubuntu again), and it refused to work with my wifi card. I spent endless hours trying to get it working and just gave up.
This is almost unheard of for me with Windows. 99% of the hardware just works, and the other 1% often has a very simple driver installation process.