The YouTube channel “Maximum Fury” conducted a technical test of the new Cyberpunk add-on called “Phantom Liberty” on an older AMD hardware system, testing it separately on Linux and Windows 11. The Linux system, specifically the Fedora distribution called Nobara, performed significantly better, delivering 31% more frames compared to Windows 11.
The hardware used for testing included an Asrock B550 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU from the first RDNA generation, along with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The CPU, RAM, and GPU were overclocked, and the system utilized undervolting to save energy costs.
When testing the game at 1080p resolution with high textures, the Linux system achieved an average of 63.72 frames per second (fps), while Windows 11 managed only 48.55 fps. This suggests that the game should run noticeably smoother on the Linux system.
A 30% increase in performance just might get gamers to switch over to the new operating system.
Hell that is the difference between a better graphics card for some people. It’s like getting a free overclock, just for going outside your comfort zone.
This is a rare and extreme case, which is probably caused by some sort of fluke in the testing method or due to a bug in the game that Linux is handling better. Usually gaming on Linux is like ~5-10% slower for GPU-bound games.
This is probably more common than you’d think, at least in my anecdotal experience. Converting directx commands to vulkan commands, especially for AMD GPUs, can result in better and more consistent performance on Linux.
Do you have any numbers or examples of games? I know that it’s generally the case that DX9 games often have greater performance through DXVK, but DX11 and DX12 should usually be a little bit slower. Also, CPU-bound games are often faster on Linux in my experience, but it’s rare for games to be CPU-bound (MMOs etc).
Additionally, OpenGL and Vulkan should be faster on Linux (Native or WINE+OpenGL/Vulkan), but I don’t have as much experience with them.
Edit: I found this video which has a few standout games where Linux pulls ahead even on DX11/DX12. Hopefully that’s a sign of future trends.
I haven’t done extensive testing on this as I’m just some dude. It’s been a long time since I’ve had windows running on anything, but the three that I remember are:
There was a tweet before the recent Cyberpunk update that essentially said “expect very high CPU utilization as we now use the whole CPU” which I thought just meant they dropped the ball somewhere.
Or faster. Depends heavily on the game. Some things wine + dxvk does better.
Yeah.
I’m personally lucky that my fav titles are CPU hogs, like ARMA 3 and X4: Foundations. Both run better under Linux.
Cyberpunk runs great too, I’m sure once we eventually get the updated drivers for NVIDIA we’ll get Ray Recon too.
Can relate 🤓
Only thing I’m missing is “real” head tracking. There is simply none in the Linux version and while I can map a virtual joystick driven by OpenTrack to each camera corner it’s just not the same. Sadly this is not exposed via LUA or I’d have wired up a UDP connection by now. So this feature sadly works only via Proton. Still sticking with the native Linux version though. It’s faster.
Sometimes there are also unimplemented/broken features on Linux which people don’t notice and save frames. Legit performance improvements over Windows do happen (especially on memory and cpu-limited systems) but I’d be skeptical of any particularly huge ones.
It’s not rare for games to be a few % faster, as long as they’re using features that are well supported in Linux. If the bottleneck is something that needs heavier emulation because the native implementation isn’t available or good enough then yeah you’ll see slowdowns.
On Nobara OS, I haven’t noticed any performance dip coming from windows.
Linux Experiment on youtube found it performs ~5% better overall in games than Fedora, so that’s probably why.
I kind of expect a patch for Windows that addresses the reason it is slower there now that they know there is a difference.
This is just one game with one particular graphics card, this might not be the same for example with nvidia cards.
I’d be surprised if it is.
I can’t see anything but something hinky with driver overhead mattering this much.
Cyberpunk 2077 runs faster on pop os on my Nvidia card compared to on windows 10
30 percent of real improvement is one hell of an overclock…
Is there a Linux distro specifically optimized for gaming?
SteamOS technically, but you probably don’t want it on a regular computer.
SteamOS is perfect on the deck. Honestly it’s probably fine on a PC if all you do is game and browse Firefox. Obviously some games won’t run in Linux.
Nobara is great, based on fedora so very stable and fairly up to date with many built in gaming features and no after install setup required to get gaming. https://nobaraproject.org/
Running it for over a year now on my gaming rig and very happy
Nobara and Pop!_OS do well in this regard.
Yeah but it still upsets me that “Fedora” exists lol. The name, that is.
Lol
linux users still coping
nobody likes linux yall are chatting in an echo chamber. lemmy feels like a comp sci major college party lol
And yet, Steam hardware survey shows Linux growing almost every month. By little, yes, but still growing almost every month, with Valve and Steam themselves betting more on Linux than on Windows and the Steam Deck being a thing.
If Lemmy feels like a computer science party, tell ya what: feel free to join us, everyone’s welcome. Just don’t claim “cope and seethe” when there’s actual growth here
it grew from 1% to 1.5% as a result of steam deck release? or what growth.
ive been to enough compsci parties im not abouta indulge in pseudocode on a whiteboard thank you very much.
Plenty of people like Linux, the real echo chamber would be some place you don’t have to hear how much better alternatives there are to garbage-ass windows.