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?
Edit: I’m adding some links with the issue in question because I see some comments talking about Nvidia to be working flawless:
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207
Please let me know if this is already fixed on Nvidia GPUs for gaming in Linux.
If you want to use Linux, please choose AMD. I helped install CachyOS on my sister’s RTX 5080 system and its horrible. 40% performance loss. She’s going back to Windows.
Nevermind, she’s sticking with Linux. Tinkering with it actually fixed most of the major issues.
no
No, nvidia are evil unreliable pieces of shit.
I use AMD, where ever it is possible. Simply because they support Linux. There’s really no other reason needed. I don’t care about CUDA or anything else, that is vaguely not relevant. I’d rather drive a medium car, that gives me freedom, than a high end car, that ties me down.
I’d say given the AMD contributions to Linux better to support them with your money instead of NVIDIA.
yes, HDMI 2.1. if you use a tv as a monitor, you won’t get 4k120 with amd cards on linux because hdmi forum is assholes
I have a 6900xt and it has output for 4k 120 and I never had issues with it on multiple distros. Lately Bazzite has been behaving as expected so I don’t know where this information is coming from besides the argument that HDMI is closed source as opposed to DisplayPort.
hdmi 2.0 doesn’t have the bandwidth for 4k120, displayport and hdmi 2.1 do. amd drivers don’t have hdmi 2.1 driver, because the hdmi forum didn’t allow amd to use it in their open source linux driver. you still get 4k120 with dp and even on hdmi if you use limited colorspace
I agree I mentioned the lack of open source support from HDMI 2.1 because that company is exceptionally lazy.
It’s greed. Not laziness.
You can still get it if you use DisplayPort though, no?
yes, but TVs don’t have DP
That is a fair reason and a good remind actually. Thanks!
No
Thanks. That is what I thought but is good to confirm if we are not missing something.
AMD will have superior support and better power management out of the box hands down.
Nvidia may have a minor performance improvement in some areas depending on the card, but not in a way you would care if you aren’t obsessed with the technical specifics of the graphics on AAA games.
I’ve been on Linux as a dev and daily driver for 20 years, and Nvidia drivers are just problematic unless you know exactly how to fix them when there are issues. That’s an Nvidia problem, not a Linux problem. Cuda on AMD is also a thing if you want to go that route.
The choice is yours.
I’m glad you mentioned knowing how to fix them. My server has hosted Nvidia GPUs for 15 odd years now, working great, and has remained stable through updates by some miracle.
Getting it set up was a nightmare back then though, do not recommend for the faint of heart.
I only play older games, opensource games (like Pioneer Space Sim, Luanti), and emulate PS2 mostly (could do PS3/4 you bet) so AMD is fine for my use case and works out of the box. I know Nvidia Linux support has improved which means the latest graphics cards also pretty much work out of the box too. But by principle, I support AMD for the work they put into working on Linux.
it is better to go with AMD because AMD drivers are built into the iso and less headache for gaming
I am probably an anomaly here but I had a really bad experience with linux on an amd card. The card would not output at all whenever there was something linux related going on I could not fix the issue and it did not matter which distro I tried. Windows worked totally fine, the bios worked fine. I switched to my backup nvidia card and all of a sudden linux was working a treat.
Im putting together my new Nvidia PC build tonight. I was planning on putting bazzite on it, should I just use windows then?
I’d go with Linux, no matter what, but this seem exactly why I feel that we should be more clear. People may be building some PCs out there to use Linux for gaming and buying Nvidia because others keep saying that everything is smooth sails with Nvidia. A lot of it is working now but there are some downsides and the recommendation is to go with AMD if you can.
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/
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.
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.
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.
There are always bugs and performance issues that appear and get fixed, that’s the nature of Linux.
This one in particular seem to be taking some time for Nvidia to fix.
This is not the case now, NVIDIA works without major issues.
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.
No, if there are issues, there are issues. The logic only works one way:
If one person doesn’t have issues doesn’t mean some people don’t have issues. But if even one person has issues it necessarily means some people have issues
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CUDA acceleration.
