A video for any doubters that Linux gaming is better than Windows in which it DESTROYS Windows by 25% in AC Odyssey. To put it in perspective, 25% improvement is like getting a new GPU. You can save $600 and instead use something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for free.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t really care to make Linux look better but I did a video some days ago and EVERYONE (on Reddit) told me Linux gaming CANNOT be faster or smoother. This is the proof it’s both and more videos will be coming.
This proves that AC Oddysey runs faster on Linux than on Windows with your specific hardware. What this doesn’t mean is that “Linux gaming is faster and smoother than Windows gaming”.
Counter examples are Overwatch, CS:2, GTA V and many more.
Nobody reasonable doubts that Linux can perform as good or better than Windows, but claiming that this is true for all games is simply misinformation.
Wrong general claims like these lead to posts asking why their specific games run worse on Linux since they switched because they want more fps.
Don’t get me started on older GPU’s like 1000 series Nvidia that have problems with any vkd3d games so the performance is abysmal.
Why is it not enough that almost all games work on Linux with ±15% performance difference?
I agree with what you’re saying, but I dont understand the games you used as counter examples. All of them run very well on Linux.
The reason I chose those games was because I played those popular games for dozens of hours or more on Linux and can confidently say they work great. Additonally they are running on different engines and were released over the course of many years.
Its still fucking embarrassing for windows
Not really. Games almost always have some bottleneck and maybe on proton a specific system call is faster. A translation layer doesn’t have much of an performance impact if the individual translations are as fast as native.
The great performance speaks more to the quality of wine, dxvk, vkd3d and other tools developed by very skilled individuals.
I never said ALL games run better on Linux. But on AMD most games do. I cannot fit ALL games in a video. You’re talking in generalities that cannot be proven. I did say more videos will come. Apart from Ray Tracing, gaming on Linux on AMD is both faster and smoother. Can you prove me wrong? Do it. :)
Yes, it’s great that you actually test Windows and Linux on the same system.
I’m just going off the title since it implies that Linux generally runs Windows games better, which isn’t the norm.
According to the german tech magazin ComputerBase, Linux generally performs much worse on the 1% low fps. Those largely determine how smooth the game actually feels.
german:
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https://www.computerbase.de/2023-06/diablo-iv-linux-benchmarks/
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https://www.computerbase.de/2023-07/star-wars-jedi-survivor-linux-test/
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https://www.computerbase.de/2023-08/ratchet-clank-rift-apart-linux-test/
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https://www.computerbase.de/2023-09/starfield-linux-benchmarks/
english (Google Translate):
This is very interesting. Keep in mind these are all DX12 games and VKD3D is still under heavy dev. Still nice to have it as information. Thank you very much! :)
Yes and iirc the benchmarks are from relatively short after the release so there might be room for improvement.
Imo new titles are important to look at when it comes to how people perceive gaming on linux for the first time.
It’s always suprising how well and consistent dxvk performs. I’m sure it’s a lot of work with many games requiring special attention.
Edit: typo
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To be fair, AMD performs better on Linux than Windows in general because AMD makes shit drivers.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, as a graphics programmer AMD’s proprietary drivers are unquestionably the buggiest which I have to work with on a regular basis. Seemingly innocent stuff which works perfectly fine on every other vendor (and on the same GPU using the open-source drivers) will cause the proprietary drivers to break horribly or run slower by multiple orders of magnitude.
Thank you, exactly my point.
This is a year ago on Ubuntu lol. XD
Goal posts: moved
I’m as much a believer that Linux can get better performance than Windows because the less bloat, the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux. That being said 25% increase on a game running on wine seems fishy.
Your video did not play correctly, also you didn’t synced properly between the two at the start so it’s hard to compare that both have the same settings, and on the screen at the end it shows windows is running in full screen and Linux in Borderless, not sure if this should make a difference but showcases that not every setting is the same. After the video crashed for the first time I skipped a bit ahead and saw that at one point you put the screen half-half, that’s a good approach, but I also noticed that the right side had a character the left side didn’t right at the start, that means that Wine is failing to render some stuff, or disabling some features which is usually what’s happening when you get this massive performance differences, so the comparison might not be valid. An example would be if DXVK ray tracing implementation bounces the light less times than DX12 does, it would be almost indistinguishable but would have a performance boost (at which point my question would be to show me the benefits of bouncing the light more, but that’s my opinion and not a technical analysis).
In any case, great video, even if something is different I couldn’t see any significant difference in the screen when doing the side-by-side, and I don’t think people who claim Linux is always worse would even know of the possibility of wine lacking some implementation therefore not rendering that.
- The video is still being transcoded, check again later.
- You can pause the video to check the settings, timing things like this properly is almost impossible but for next videos I will edit properly. Thank you for the feedback.
- The character is also at the beginning on the Linux side but he just walks on Windows. This is a dynamic scene so details like that are expected to differ.
- AC Odyssey doesn’t have Ray Tracing and DXVK is mature enough to render everything properly (and at better frames).
You are most welcome. I really think disbelief in how much better Linux is derives from a really cumbersome past. I’ve been benchmarking games on Windows and Linux for 3 years now.
At first performance was a little better/same on Linux, then it improved and then it improved vastly.
Don’t fear that Proton is a compatibility layer. Linux overall (with its lightness, better Filesystems and optimizations) can achieve great results like this in most DX11 games. I will do a MIrage Benchmark as well on Tumbleweed vs Windows 11 to see how things are on he DX12 side. Ray Tracing is not ready on Linux on AMD yet so that will have to wait.
I don’t understand why people think 25% plus is “unbelievable”. It takes like 30 minutes to set up dual boot, just test it yourself.
I’m honestly surprised it’s not more.
I got over 25% increase in FPS, no micro stutters and I was on a higher resolution in Linux. Apex legends
Because just as many people have had a complete opposite experience
When I tried Apex on Manjaro a few weeks back I saw a ~15% decrease in frames and major stutters.
A single system, running untested benchmarks and without any external validation from a trusted source doesn’t mean anything. Just like my experience with it isn’t universal, neither is either of yours.
Yeah I got worse performance on some Linux OSs. This was on PopOS. Every Linux distro will be different, I suggest sticking with the current best gaming distro… not sure what that is currently, but I think Arch was previously one of the best distro for gaming. Once you have that and proton going, you will should see a difference.
Unless your on Nvidia: in which case I hear it’s hit and miss for performance gains, I see no reason why it shouldn’t perform better in the majority of cases.
Even Microsoft uses Linux over their own products… https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/microsoft-uses-linux-instead-of-windows-for-its-azure-sphere/
Exactly this. I am willing to believe these people either don’t game on Linux or just use Nvidia which has less performance on Linux. In any case Apex is a good idea. After Mirage which is on the schedule perhaps Apex will be the next one.
There is absolutely no way 25% is realistic in this scenario, it’s most likely, as you said, a certain characteristic/feature is interpreted/skipped/handled differently by WINE.
the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux
People say this, but what exactly do you mean? I mostly model on windows because it’s my primary system (I use applications that simply don’t work well enough with wine), but mostly finish and render stuff on linux because of windows’ retarded automatic updates etc. that can just cancel rendering without asking. And the only difference I’ve seen is how fast Blender starts - I’d say that’s more than 2x as fast on linux, it’s a huge difference. But rendering is the same (NVidia GTX GPU) and other work inside blender also seems to be about the same.
Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.
With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.
Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.
Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).
The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.
Afaik Blender since 3.0 does not support OpenCL anymore and AMD rendering uses HIP instead. I have not found any information about dramatic performance differences, though CPU rendering does seem to be somewhat faster on Linux - but more like 10% faster and the amount of computation practically done on the CPU is not that big.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
Personally I use NVidia because of CUDA, gaming is an afterthought. I wish CUDA just fucked off and we got some universal compute API instead, because that’s what would reduce the NVidia stranglehold on the market, perhaps OneAPI is going to catch on at some point, but at this moment those options are not practical.
We’re referencing a somewhat old video of a benchmark ran in both systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0 that’s likely not still true, possibly devs figured out what was the issue on windows and circumvented it somehow.
Yeah, don’t do that anymore then. Firstly the video doesn’t really find overall 2x speedup, but mainly Cycles X came out since then, where most of the codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and after that numerous significant optimizations happened as well. That video is pretty much irrelevant now.
I’m sorry, but if you see a 25% difference in a benchmark, that means your methodology is somehow flawed. A few percentage in either direction would be believable, but this difference would be so comical if true, that extra wariness is needed.
There’s a few thing that look a bit off to me, but most importantly it seems like your OBS settings are wildly different between systems. It’s a bit hard to make out, but it seems like you’re doing CPU-based encoding on Linux and GPU-based encoding on Windows.
I am not doing CPU Encoding on any system but there is a difference indeed.
Linux is Gstreamer VAAPI H265 and Windows GPU Encoding H264. In fact, Windows should have had an easier time encoding, I didn’t realize that until now. Also asI have commented on the video the game is on a 980 Pro on Windows and on an HDD on Linux so Linux can be much faster. I will rectify that by getting an SSD to put all my games on in the future.
Beyond that, the methodology is not flawed, if you can even believe that. Everything is on the video for comments exactly like this one.
I see. As I said, it was a bit hard to make out in the video.
In fact, Windows should have had an easier time encoding
Granted, I don’t know too much about AMD’s video encoding solutions, but from a cursory glance on the internet, it seems like their H.264 solution is quite bad compared to H.265. Given that the game is GPU-bottlenecked and your CPU isn’t stressed at all anyway, I’d recommend recording these tests using the CPU to eliminate more variables.
Beyond that, the methodology is not flawed, if you can even believe that.
Well, yeah. As much as I’d like to believe, these differences are way too big for me to do that, even with everything you’ve shown in the video. Occam’s Razor would suggest that it’s much more likely that the benchmark/setup is simply flawed in some way, rather than multiple teams of OS-, hardware-, and game developers not realizing a gigantic 25% performance improvement on the table that’s somehow more or less “accidentally” fixed just by using Linux/Proton/DXVK.
Not saying you’re wrong, but it’d need a good chunk more evidence for me to believe that.
More videos like this will be coming. I can’t send you my PC to check its innards to believe, sorry.
I just edited my comment right as you posted, so I’ll put it as a separate comment now:
It would also be interesting to see this game running through DXVK on Windows. That way the calls made to the GPU should be virtually identical, eliminating possible problems with DX11 in the AMD driver.
It was a easy 25% plus gain for me. Apex legends win 10 :1080 upscaled to 1440 AVG 93 FPS
Vs Apex Legends PopOS 1440 AVG 121 FPS
That’s a lot better than 25% when you factor in the resolution difference.
But yeah, windows is a massive resource hog
This is ragebait.
If this enrages people they are morons
Oh I agree, but “For all the doubters” is deliberately provocative. We can agree on that, right?
I mean it obviously subverts expectations and that’s the point.
I mean this thread alone proves my point and my title. I have a video with 10 games coming up, DXVK, VKD3D, Vulkan on Proton and Native Vulkan. Let’s see how this goes with all the people that doubt that Linux Gaming is actually better than Windows.
You really feel like the only reason to use or not use Linux is how much you can game on it, eh?
I’d rather push Linux for its strengths than lie and spread misinfo to lead people to believe Linux is always better than Windows at gaming perf. There’s many times it’s not, or it’s incompatible, or you need to spend possibly hours finding the right community-developed launcher / recompilation to get it to run. Gaming on Linux is a mess, that’s the only certainty about it lol
The abject strengths of Linux are its command line, its customisability, its compatibility with various utility softwares, and its productivity. Instead of drinking copium over a fruitless effort, just focus on actual strengths lmao
Linux gaming is definitely not a mess. XD
But beyond that, I don’t care how Linux performs in games. I play CP on RT Ultra in Linux while on Windows it has double the performance. Too much of a hassle to reboot while Linux has liek 30 measurable advantages.
I just want to dispel the myth that Windows is better for gaming, cause it’s not.
Windows is more easily compatible for gaming, generally, and for 90% of people that’s all that matters. Specifically various anti-cheats do not play well with Linux.
I agree about the anticheat games. Beyond that if you don’t play some extremely niche 1995 game, Linux will most probably work fine and better on an AMD system.
Successful ragebait at that.
Dude, honestly stop making such “crazy” things.
Prople will debunk you then hit you to the ground. Just say the truth of the gimmiky things you do because a 25% performance boost is unreal.
A 5% to a maximum 10% is more believable but your stuff is a quarter of a video card processing power and this should ring you a bell of alarm because the doodoo you are eating there is pure BS.
Say what you will, I posted ALL the settings and updates and OBS Settings in video form. I am not obliged to do any of these things. People have come here stating that they don’t believe this is real without ANY arguments. When you want to talk seriously, maybe, we can do it.
Linux gaming is a little hit or miss. Some games have a performance boost. Some are about the same. And some games perform worse. This is the reality. And this is what should be expected.
Your post is still true for your specific hardware and this specific game, with these specific drivers, but let’s not go crazy here. Linux is good, yes. Fantastic even, on the Steam Deck. On PC most people are better off sticking with Windows, especially if you play a couple of competitive multiplayer titles. Or if you want to stream games from one device to another in house. Or if you have limited time and just want shit to work. Linux is getting closer, but the out of the box experience need to become way better and I don’t doubt it will sooner rather than later.
The Linux gaming experience is better than Windows on AMD. Period. I’ve been testing games on many systems (mostly on AMD) through the Proton years. I just want t debunk the myth that Linux gaming is worse. Cause it’s not. It’s better.
Depends. I need Parsec as host. Or something equivalent. And I couldn’t find it. So I’m stuck where I am.
It is amazing that person’s entire argument amounts to “nuh-uh”. Like okay… they’re confident someone will debunk it, but they aren’t going to?
Sounds like they shouldn’t be so confident then.
Inform yourself what a “video card core” does, how many “transistors” has, what “clock core speed” does and what cache levels is and does.
Out of the bat this guy has 25% more transistors in his core then the entire original GPU and LOOKS FISHY AF.
Straight out of the bat 25% more transistors! Outrageous.
He also got more likes than me with his no-post. Be reminded of that. People live on copium.
You’ll rarely be more downvoted than when you’re the OP of a thread where people disagree with you I’m afraid.
I don’t mind that but what I do mind is people not believing the video without any reason. It goes to show how deeply rooted the bias is.
@ReverseModule @Excrubulent is it only me, or the video has no sound at all?
Sound works fine for me.
Obligatory I play exclusively on linux.
In the absence of a gamersnexus video or phoronix article, I’m going to take this with a large grain of salt. Especially when a video like this one is showing much higher performance in windows. The different cpu shouldn’t account for much of a difference when playing at higher resolutions and the benchmarks shows the game being gpu limited.
Thank you for your non-argument.
Can’t we just stop trying to be “a better Windows”? Just leave the poor fella alone – he already killed himself anyways. :^)
That’ll be in windows 12 if it “goes cloud”.
That article/leak was debunked, stop jerking off over it.
Honestly I would prefer Linux even if I lost 25% of the performance in games and that’s like the main thing I use a computer for. Windows 10 was such a hassle to set up so it wouldn’t annoy me that I don’t ever want to do it again.
Installing Windows 10 and then some graphics drivers was a hassle? Please elaborate.
I guess its all the debloating
There are like 30 GPO setting needing to be set on a fresh install plus 3th party software to fix issues. I can’t 100% remember what all of it was since I used Windows years ago last but these were some of the issues needing fixing with those:
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Setting updates to manual. Once it rebooted to update when I was hosting a server during a lan party, never again.
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Disabling driver updates via Windows update. It installed wrong drivers for my sound card so whenever it tried to play a sound I got a BSOD. It also unistalled the correct drivers just to install the wrong ones.
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Fixing the start menu search. After Windows 7 that search has been very buggy and it commonly finds a folder or a Web page instead of a locally installed application. In Windows 8 a software named Classic Shell fixed that issue along with making the start menu normal but I can’t remember if I used that in Windows 10 or something else.
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Printer compadibility. May be reversed now but one update for Windows 10 broke old printer compadibility intentionally and you needed to add 2 registry settings for my printer to be usable.
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One bug windows 10 had that I never did fully solve was my ethernet connection would hang if I tried to transfer a lot of data over local network and the only way to get the connection back was rebooting so the only solution was to limit transfer speed via 3th party software. This issue did not exist in any Linux install or Windows 7 and 8.
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I want to switch to Linux and I would love to game on it daily, but just like so many people, software incompatibility is holding me onto Windows.
In my case, it’s Parsec that I need, because I game a lot with friends who live in other countries. And unfortunately, Steam’s remote play together feature is very broken on Linux (I remember even filing bug reports about it when I was daily driving Linux two-ish years ago.
Only the client part though, hosting is disabled on the linux version for some reason.
Oh I didn’t know that, thanx for letting me know! :)
Yup, it sucks they haven’t implemented it yet. I’d switch in a heartbeat
That’s as a client, not a host. What I need is hosting :p Thanks tho
Ditto.
Longtime windows and Linux user, my last several machines have all been dual-boot.
I’ve tried multiple times to get gaming to work right with Linux, whether it be Unbuntu or just plain Debian, but something always gets in the way. Graphical issues, sound issues, controller incompatibility, platform incompatibility, unable to launch game, whatever. I give up and just stick with windows and use Linux for other things.
Only one HoYoverse game made fully compatible with Proton-GE
And you uploaded it to peertube. Good lad! Thanks for the video
I have been enjoying gaming on Linux for many years, I am glad you’re sharing that for the windoze users.
Apex legends was a good 30% increase for me.
I just have to comment here about the “like getting a new GPU”, because do people really upgrade that frequently? I generally see a much bigger jump in performance when upgrading.
How’s the state of Nvidia’s drivers? Do the shiny new features work? Things like RT, frame gen, ray reconstruction, and randomly crashing the game because the driver has tripped TDR yet again?
Okay, Linux doesn’t need the last one.
The 545 Beta drivers apparently support a ton of new features on Linux like VRR. Frame Gen is the only thing not supported by Proton yet I think.
Tbh though, if you’re on Nvidia I would stay on Windows. It’s definitey doable to use Linux and get equal performance. Until Nvidia is ready for Wayland though I wouldn’t switch.
Good news is NVK is a new Open Source Nvidia Vulkan driver so in like a year or two things should be as good as on AMD. The driver already loads most games with DXVK 1.5.1 but runs them at like 1 FPS if they have anything like Valheim Graphics and above. Reclocking should be coming soon though so the situation will improve. After that it’s just working to get all features in and optimize.
To be honest, given the virtually undiagnosable driver crashes that plague some people I wouldn’t recommend Windows users to go with Nvidia, either.
But it’s good to know that a new OSS driver is being worked on.
As someone who’s really into gaming and gives NVIDIA on Linux a try now and then, the one thing that really bugs me is DLDSR isn’t available at all, nor is plain, non AI DSR. The latter isn’t hard to replicate, but I miss the extra bang for your buck of the DL variant.
Granted, mine is a very niche use case but I rely on it a lot since it works great on older titles or ones with bad or no native AA and such.
Haven’t watched the video yet but I’d like to add from my very limited experience. I recently switched to Kubuntu (still have my windows boot) and the one game I play (Red Dead Redemption 2) seems to be running worse. I haven’t done much testing at all so it could be something I can adjust and get running better.
Having said that, general day-to-day performance is miles ahead of my Windows install.
If I could get RDR2 to run better on Linux and DaVinci Resolve to run I’d have no need to keep my Windows install.
Have you tried something like Nobara? I’m pretty sure DaVinci Resolve works on Fedora (which Nobara is based on) and you will get the latest optimizations as well. I am on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed just cause best performance on my system.
Nobara comes with DaVinci Resolve out of the box (or in the post install configuration screen at least).
That said I saw problems on Nobara I don’t have in arch that made me almost switch back to windows.
Decided to try arch before I switch back to windows, long story short have been on linux for two months without any plans of going back, the idea of windows now makes me wince.
I might try running arch as well. I’ll test it out before I move to a bare metal install.
Archinstall is perfectly fine, or EndeavourOS, they will make installing easy, i only use pacman and AUR for packages, anything not there Ive managed to build myself. This is the main reason I love arch, pacman + AUR are amazing.
You will probably want an AUR helper like yay or paru (doesn’t really matter which one for you, i prefer yay for sounding fun).
And of course RTFM - archwiki is amazing.
I haven’t tried that yet. I tried running it as a container via distrobox.
Huh, doesn’t DaVinci have a native Linux port? Is it that bad?
Technically they do but it isn’t supported on all distros. They officially support centOS 8, RHEL and one other that I’m forgetting.
