There's still room for improvement, but Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time.
I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
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Serious question: how do nvidia drivers perform on Linux? I've heard they're not very good and missing features. Anything I should know about? I have an RTX 3060ti that I use for both games and stuff like blender, substance designer/painter, etc.
Its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I do think its distro specific. PopOS was rock solid with nvidia drivers. I had a 3070ti that worked really well with it. I ended up getting a 6700xt because I wanted to go full-tilt into linux land and everyone raves about the open source amd drivers. I figured if I was going to be all-in on linux, why not get a radeon card.
I traded some minor issues for some fairly significant limitations. Nvidia had stutters every once in a while on the desktop. Like maximizing a window would occasionally (1 time in 50) 'hang' for a half second then complete. For Apex Legends, there was a semi-manual step to pre-cache shaders to prevent stuttering in the game. That was actually fixed over a year ago with a proton and steam update. That was about it. It also ran everything else flawlessly.
When I switched to Radeon, I thought it would be smooth sailing. Its really just different issues. You obviously dont have the nvenc encoder. The radeon encoders all suck, but AMF, their new hottness, is supposed to be really good. Well, you can't use that with the open source mesa drivers that everyone raves about--the big draw for using radeon on linux to begin with. You have to use the proprietary ones if you want to use AMF. Cool, but if you do that your game performance can suffer because the amd proprietary drivers aren't as good as the mesa ones. Oh, and you can get occasional stutters on your desktop...
You can't mix and match so if you want to stream your games on twitch or record your gameplay, tough shit. Get used to throwing CPU cores at VAAPI.
Also, AMD absolutely sucks when it comes to AI/ML. Cuda is king and ROCM is trash. If you are doing anything with AI/ML stick with nvidia. I literally bought a used 1080ti and threw it in my server (ubuntu) to do some AI jobs, because I got tried of fighting with radeon, trying to get rocm to work.
All that said, my next build will very likely include an nvidia card --even though I plan on running linux exclusively.
For Blender, Nvidia is currently the only way to go on Linux. Cycles is horribly slow on my 6750XT, and Eevee shaders take way too long to compile on Mesa (although version 23.3 should include a patch to fix that).
In my experience, not great. I have a 1080ti and run 2k ultrawide. A bit dated but still a pretty powerful card. Some games weren't too noticably different but on cyberpunk for instance I took a huge performance hit and had to adjust my game to look basically terrible to get it playable compared to windows. I think I did this by setting superfx to performance.
I have to say though, I am running a pretty old processor (barely meets win11 spec) so that could be contributing to my issues.
Thanks! I've been looking harder at Linux, but the thing that's holding me back is that I'm not sure how well the modeling and texturing tools I use will run on Linux and dual booting is a headache.
Have you ever tried running windows in a vm, and if so, how well does it run? Only reason why I'm considering this is because I've heard some vm tools can do hardware passthrough to significantly increase vm performance. If the stuff I need to run works on Windows in a vm, then I might do that.
Edit: you might check cyberpunk again, I've heard the new update currently has it performing significantly better on Linux than in Windows.
Sorry for the late reply, I have tried running windows in a VM and it kinda worked. Big pain was forwarding peripherals, I ended up having to use a ghetto KVM switch setup to get it working at the time. Hardware passthru can work well, but was a huge pain to get working right. Once its working though you get pretty damn close to bare-metal performance. Haven't tried that in years tho cuz all my friends made fun of me for being so masochistic lol
I'll have to try again soon. Honestly thinking of downsizing and seeing if I could possibility use my steam deck with a dock to play some desktop games that aren't too crazy.
Ey! No problem. Thanks for the info, I might check it out this week or something. One of my biggest concerns is mainly with weird drm schemes or niche games not playing nice with compatibility layers. That said, I've heard some drm can tell when it's in a VM, but I'd hope that hardware passthrough would be able to fool it. Not sure I'd be running anything that could tell the difference though.
I think most anti-cheat won't care a lot, especially with a lot of them actually supporting proton now. Off the top of my head tho I could guarantee that Valorant anti-cheat probably would not work or you would eventually get banned. Their shit runs like a rootkit basically