Your initial baseline was arbitrary. If the game had been 10% slower on Windows, would you have never enjoyed it? If not, how could switching with a 10% penalty be a deal-breaking downside?

Just do it. Swap and let go of objectivity. Let your subjective experience guide you.

For me, the subjective joy of not having to fuck around with Microsoft's bullshit was worth multiples of having to mess around with technical crap to get a game working (spoiler: I nearly never have to do that because I play single player games, Dota and CS). I couldn't give less of a damn if my FPS in some random title is 10% slower than it would be in Windows. So long as it's playable, I benefit in spades from the trade-off.

If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this.

If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that important to you? I switched 10 years ago when things were a lot rougher than this, and in the end everything still worked well enough that I never cared to swap back.

I think the actual answer you are looking for is this paragraph:

> These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.

That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.

1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...

2: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/confi...

3: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/maste...

If memory serves, Linux typically outperforms Windows with AMD and Intel graphics. Some of the gotchas are things like running games through Proton or anti-cheat/DRM stuff not getting the same attention that Windows does, but the raw performance is there. I wouldn't recommend using Nvidia on Linux though.

Windows and Linux trade punches in terms of overall experience. What I've seen around is that if Linux has worse FPS, it tends to have more consistent pacing (it generally has better pacing - but not always, I had to abandon Once Human).

Gamer's Nexus has a pretty extensive benchmark video: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Cx5Q1a-lMMm14H4i . They refuse to compare to Windows, and it kinda makes sense: if it's satisfactory on Linux for your demands then who cares what Windows can do?

Here's a less professional, but direct comparison https://youtu.be/Giois6VtLPM?si=XFaVUMbea3u0AmP. An extremely important thing to note: AMD GPU. I personally have no idea what NVIDIA is like, but it sounds like their drivers are still all over the place.

And kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't work, though some (e.g. EAC) run in user mode if the developer allows it. Make sure to check ProtonDB for the games you care about. I have personally never had a good experience with Linux builds of games, so I just always use Proton now - but maybe I'm cursed because others have passionately disagreed with my experience. Either way, if a Linux game is broken/bad, try forcing it into Proton.

I don't want to say, "switch now" because it still has rough edges in terms of gaming. Better for you to have a great experience and stick around, than hate it and leave for good. Only you can figure out if it needs more time to cook based on some very light (ProtonDB) research.

I last used a Windows machine about a year ago, and I can say with confidence that the average desktop experience is significantly superior to the barrage of bullshit that Windows puts you through.

Depending on storage constraints, you could always dualboot. That would give you the exact same hardware to compare, and it's not a full commitment.

Anecdotally, I find that getting Linux on somewhat older or underpowered hardware is always a massive positive. Better performance as well as battery life. I'm not as familiar with modern hardware's relationship to either OS ("OS vs. some flavor of OS based on a similar or same kernel" - I know) with modern hardware. Worth a shot though!

Every supercomputer seems to do quite well with Linux kernels. Probably good enough for Crysis :)

As others have said, try it yourself, it's very low effort nowadays. For me the lowest bandwidth option was to dual boot then load existing library with https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-di...

Got it running in less than an hour.

Then swap! Partition and dual-boot into Bazzite. Or get an extra SSD and flash Bazzite there.

It's an easy weekend side project, and any numbers people give you will be ballparks anyway - the performance of Linux drivers for YOUR specific GPU running YOUR specific Steam games are all that actually matter.

Just take the two hours to do it. You won't regret it.

Here are some numbers: I bought a windows box with misconfigured dram timings (bios bug).

I never would’ve been able to root cause it under windows (certainly not with builtin tools), but dmidecode on linux made the problem obvious.

Fixing the timings fixed crashes in amdgpu that windows users widely reported (with no diagnosis), and increased frame rates by 30-50%.

Anyway, if you really want to move, do yourself a favor and just go with straight AMD.

Software support is better than intel and nvidia, HW blows intel out of the water. The only exception is if you need cuda for AI dev work.

I've running the game Black Myth: Wukong on my dual boot PC systems. The OS are openSUSE Tumbleweed and Windows 10, hardware is AMD RX7800XT and intel i7. Turned out Linux is 10% faster than Windows, and more stable fps.

Faster (than previously) not Faster (than windows).

The title after the jump is "Linux gaming is getting faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

Getting faster. Not at parity yet.

Unless you're playing CS competitively and really need 720fps for your 360Hz monitor, is 5-30% fewer frames (all else equal) really a deal breaker? Is this hardware thats barly good enough or something else?

I ask because I feel like I can frequently play games at, say, 150fps, and losing 30% would mean almost nothing to me to switch to Linux. I worry more about general capatibility and anticheat.

I have not seen the numbers, but even a game running 10% faster does not replace the fact that many games wont even start in Linux (League of Legends for example).

they installed Linux on a PS5 and somehow the Windows games running through proton get same or sometimes a little bit more fps then the native ps5 game, its crazy

I've been gaming on Linux since 2020 on an Nvidia GPU with no problems, including some AAA titles like Overwatch and Halo.

A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows!

If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.

> Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.

No.

> I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so.

If you won't put the work in, why should we help you? Just stay on Windows, and we'll enjoy our Linux gaming rigs.

It isn't saying it's faster than Windows. Just faster.

Just produce your own numbers. Install whatever flavour of Linux you like (all distrohopping leads to Debian) on a separate partition and benchmark it yourself. It isn't complicated.

In the case of my machine, I haven't observed any difference. And by observe I mean with my eyes, I haven't bothered with actual benchmarks because it seems to work about the same, which is good enough for me. I haven't booted my Windows partition in months, and I'm probably just going to blow it away next time I need storage space.

Its never going to happen. Because console players by far dominate the gaming scene. Microsoft is going to push Xbox first, which will drive all development of the games, which is going to be windows focused. As such, all major release studios are going to target that.

Until we get something like CoD titles being Steam Console first, linux is allways going to lag behind.

That being said, I think we are on a precipice of AI being able to simply just rewrite games from concepts. Start with generic source code for an FPS or 3PS, then people can contribute changes in english language to tailor the game. So it won't be even copying source code, it would be copying concepts and then making a new game with it. There have been a lot of games that have very rudimentary graphics that people played in large numbers because the complexity and gameplay was quite good.

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