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.
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.
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.
Usually gaming on Linux is like ~5-10% slower for GPU-bound games.
Or faster. Depends heavily on the game. Some things wine + dxvk does better.
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.
I kind of expect a patch for Windows that addresses the reason it is slower there now that they know there is a difference.
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.
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…
Yeah but it still upsets me that “Fedora” exists lol. The name, that is.
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
5600
“Older”
Ha that hit hard. This is basically the system I just upgraded to. Well at least it’ll run the game well.
There isn’t a single piece of software that I use that makes me think I should upgrade my 5600. Not a single game fully utilizes it (on 1440p res)
Older hardware is fine.
Me with my i7 2600 playing with oblivion level graphics: yeah, older hw is just fine
I mean… is that what you want ?
cries in
.blend
Don’t mind me and my ThinkPad X220.
Modern computers cost too damn much
It is just unfortunate that it does not run on Nvidia hardware. The benchmark runs if you disable all RTX features, but it crashes on a new game before you even have full control of the character.
Looking at protondb it looks like all people with Nvidia have issues since the 2.0 update. I hope there will be some fix soon. I don’t want to replace the GPU yet it would be a waste (2080 Super).
For now I am playing it on my Steam Deck instead.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, It run very well on my Nvidia GPU on Linux before and after the patch and DLC.
Create a new character, select corporate start and once the other person enters the room the game crashes just for the easiest 100% reproducible crash. Other people have the same problems and even if they get past that (different game start) it still frequently crashes due to Nvidia driver bugs as far as I understand it.
If it works so well for you what’s your setup? I heard some older Nvidia cards might work better.
Downgrade to the 510 Nvidia driver. Runs absolutely solid on my rtx2080. It should be noted that this crash seems to be quite correlated to the rtx20x0 cards - my speculation is that something about dlss is a bit borked on them since they’re the first dlss 2+ cards. It’s not even exclusively Linux either, reports indicate that there’s some sort of overlay (I blame the call overlay myself) that is tanking fps on windows as well. The 510 driver works great because dlss isn’t available for it as I understand it.
I never had an issu with this game on steam, my setup is a basic dell gaming laptop with Intel i5CPU and Nvidia GTX 1650 from 3 years ago and my OS is an Arch based distro, Garuda, but I also played on other distros without problems.
Looks like it really is just turing cards affected then. Bummer!
No issues here, more than 20 hours on Linux on a 3080 latest drivers, wayland, , dlss, ray tracing or not, works great.
Can you do ray tracing on Linux? I played today a bit and the option was grayed out. I’m on X though, using official drivers.
Thanks Stadia. No wonder it performed so well.
Casual vulkan W?
Windows 11 is trash. Microsoft kept boasting it was “faster” than 10, but it is (unsurprisingly?) heavy in some weird areas, including a less snappy start menu, more telemetry, invasive integration with their software, you name it. Tried one machine in my collection to try it via an upgrade (a Microsoft Surface Pro 6), and the performance was so bad I ended up going back to Windows 10. Multi-second lag just to get to the program shortcuts is a really bad sign.
Hey that’s a similar setup to mine, except I have 6700XT, on ultra settings, worst case scenario I get ~60FPS, on average it’s 80
By the way, the “rendering at lower resolution and upscaling” thingy, is there a way to force AMD’s version on any game in Linux? I want to play Satisfactory and got a 5700G, fat iGPU but only 2GB VRAM.
Forcing FSR1 is possible (and was even possible before it was on Windows), FSR2 is not.
Thanks! FSR it is. Saved.
There’s no such thing as magic. Some computation is absolutely getting skipped.
Sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; if the Linux version is missing useful output that would be bad, but if the DX to Vulkan translation ironed out a performance regression, or the scheduler works better in this scenario, or filesystem access had issues with NTFS it could also cause performance differences in Linux favour.
NTFS is pretty outdated, btw
I guess I agree, but because the title felt a lot like a youtube channel clickbait promo, I bit. In an opposite way.
Yeah, that’s usually called optimization ;-)
Also don’t know how much stuff runs in the background on W11, maybe there is now more stuff needing memory and CPU time
No, that is not what optimisation is.
Was meant with tongue in cheek - at least that was meant with the smiley
But still, could very much think of some hungry background processes. I’m just guessing, as I don’t run Win11 anywhere
well, unfortunately i have the opposite but it’s not too bad. high settings with motion blur etc.,fsr disabled but with chromatic aberration on i get like 10fps less than windows gtx 1660 ti and ryzen 5 3600 prolly a nvidia issue
Chromatic aberration drops my fps too, on windows 10
i should’ve rephrased that,normally the high preset disables chromatic aberration, i enable it and i use the same settings on both operating systems
@cron
I couldn’t get the link to work–I get a server error–but I was able to look at the video on YouTube, so this might be useful to others with the same issue:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWrGRVMDXg
Edit: I did get the link to work one out of five times. I guess the site is just congested? I don’t know. But anyway, there’s a link to the YouTube video directly anyway.
@cron Oh wait what is feddit a alternative network federated or just a alternative reddit client ?
Just another lemmy instance. Due to the similarity with reddit, many lemmy instances are called feddit, e.g. feddit.de, feddit.co.uk and feddit.se