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.

    •  Yote.zip   ( @yote_zip@pawb.social ) 
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      779 months ago

      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.

        •  Yote.zip   ( @yote_zip@pawb.social ) 
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • 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.

          • 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:

            • Fallout 76 - frame rate was about the same iirc. But way better input response and it didn’t crash in Linux like it did in Windows. Unsure if there were driver issues in Windows or what.
            • Borderlands 3 had a better frame rate and more stable frame pacing. But at the cost of increased loading screen time.
            • Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion, probably a CPU bound issue with all the individual units flying around. But it ran way smoother on Linux for me than Windows, no juttering when zooming around the map or when a buttload of carriers show up.
      •  Whom   ( @Whom@beehaw.org ) 
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        109 months ago

        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.

      •  OtakuAltair   ( @OtakuAltair@lemm.ee ) 
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        9 months ago

        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.