I have this question. I see people, with some frequency, sugar coating the Nvidia GPU marriage with Linux. I get that if you already have a Nvidia GPU or you need CUDA or work with AI and want to use Linux that is possible. Nevertheless, this still a very questionable relationship.
Shouldn’t we be raising awareness about in case one plan to game titles that uses DX12? I mean 15% to 30% performance loss using Nvidia compared to Windows, over 5% to 15% and some times same performance or better using AMD isn’t something to be alerting others?
I know we wanna get more people on Linux, and NVIDIA’s getting better, but don’t we need some real talk about this? Or is there some secret plan to scare people away from Linux that I missed?
Am I misinformed? Is there some strong reason to buy a Nvidia GPU if your focus is gaming in Linux?
You’re misinformed, mostly.
NVIDIA had driver issues, incompatibility with gamescope (which was required for HDR) and a few instances of bugs, in WINE/proton, that caused performance problems in specific games/configurations.
Now, the driver issues for the mainline cards (the most common ones on Steam’s hardware survey) are about the same frequency as AMD hardware and we use Wayland’s native HDR, so gamescope isn’t a concern.
I’ve been using NVIDIA on Linux for 2 years now and I have never seen anything like a 30% performance reduction on any game, and I can also run local AI with acceleration.
As long as you’re using current hardware then you’re fine. If your graphics card was released 2 days ago, or is from the ‘00s then you may experience issues but otherwise NVIDIA cards work just fine.
So are you saying that those are false claims?
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207
Sorry the Reddit links: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nr4tva/does_the_nvidia_dx12_bug_20ish_performance_loss/
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/179t3zi/i_dont_think_this_has_been_talked_about_enough_if/
As you can see people report this from 2 years ago and also 14 days ago.
There isn’t a global 30% performance loss. There are specific games/configurations that have performance issues and bugs, but it isn’t all games.
For example, there is a current bug, if you’re using some features in VKD3D(like ray tracing) which NVIDIA has identified and is creating a fix. The problem isn’t Linux specific, if you use VKD3D on Windows it also has this problem.
The second Reddit link is a user confusing a Baldur’s Gate 3 bug, where vulkan was implemented in a buggy way, with a performance problem.
There are always bugs and performance issues that appear and get fixed, that’s the nature of Linux. The social media meme “NVIDIA sucks on Linux” is based on old issues when NVIDIA cards had bugs that broadly affected games and other software to the point where it required a lot of effort (like patching your own software using git).
This is not the case now, NVIDIA works without major issues. The strongest reason to use NVIDIA over AMD would be if you used CUDA to run local AI. AMD doesn’t work with CUDA and the projects that fix this are in the alpha stages.
Gaming-wise, unless you play video games by staring at MangoHUD and comparing your historical frame-time graphs across multiple OSs, it works just fine.
That was not what I said. I don’t recall saying that there is a global 30% performance loss. I’m sorry if I gave margin for that interpretation.
This one in particular seem to be taking some time for Nvidia to fix.
I don’t think I was implying that it doesn’t work. My point is that for certain games that relies on certain technologies the Nvidia drivers are not optimized to reach Windows level or even AMD level on Linux for equivalents cards. It may worth reviewing the Nvidia forum link that I posted first.
I still give the benefit of the doubt that I may be missing something and need to learn better something although I’m not following your reasoning completely.
Finally, I just want to also point that I don’t have strings attached to any GPU maker. I wish we had more options but it sounds that if we want something reasonable with good open source driver support for many different types of combinations of games, hardware and technology, AMD seems our only choice in Linux given this incidental bad performance present on DX12 combined with Nvidia GPUs on Linux.
I have freezes on the latest Nvidia drivers as recently as yesterday on wine. Also Wayland wine is not ready, doesn’t even full screen properly
Osu! linux version is ten times slower than wine using the same graphics back end. Yes, I get over 1000 fps on wine and only 100 natively. It would be fine if it didn’t get choppy and drop lower during the busiest part of the game.
Just because it works for you doesn’t mean it doesn’t have issues
Conversely, just because it doesn’t work for you that doesn’t mean that there are issues. I use Wayland Wine for everything, it works fine for me and even eliminates hitching caused by XWayland.
If you’re using a graphics card driver that’s newer than the version of wine then you could have problems, but this is true if you’re using AMD, NVIDIA or Intel.
Comparing osu native vs wine has nothing to do with NVIDIA or AMD hardware.
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