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I am looking for help with switching from Windows to Linux

I've been thinking about switching to Linux for a while, but there are some things that make me want to stay on Windows. For example, Gaming and installation of graphics card and software availability.

My G-Card was GT 730 2 GB ddr5.

Can I be able to play the games that Windows supported without losing frames?

48 comments
  • Your GPU is very weak, and because it was a budget card back in the day it doesn't have support for a "new" technology called Vulkan which is an alternative to OpenGL.

    Vulkan is used by Proton (you can think of it as a Windows emulator, even though it's not exactly an emulator) to convert DirectX calls to something native. Without Vulkan Proton needs to convert DirectX to OpenGL which loses a lot more performance, and in the case of newer games (ones that use DirectX 12) it's not possible.

    So it really depends on what games you want to play, realistically I don't think you're playing anything with DirectX12 because those games are all newer than your card, so I don't think your GPU would support them even in Windows.

    I would say give it a go in a separate partition/disk/thumb drive and see how it goes. I don't think the experience of gaming will be good for you, but I can't imagine the rest of the PC has good specs if that's the GPU, so day to day might be a lot more comfortable on Linux without windows hogging down resources.

    • @Harry_h0udini@lemmy.dbzer0.com, in case you don't know, DirectX (just like 'Vulkan') is a graphics rendering software. It draws graphics. I have seen many people being confused by these terms so I thought I should clarify.

      Also here's a video that explains how to dual boot windows and fedora (a pretty good linux distro) or maybe you could use Pop_Os! since they have pretty good nvidia support. I don't know about legacy ones though.

  • Linux Mint offers the option to install it as a secondary operating system so if something doesn't work on Linux, you can just switch

  • You'll likely lose some frames by switching to Linux but not much. It really depends on the games you are playing. Check ProtonDB for some of them

  • I don't see any answer or question, but what games exactly do you have in mind?

    ZorinOS has a build for older machines. I'd check that first.

  • Can I be able to play the games that Windows supported without losing frames?

    It depends on which games in particular, some games actually have higher framerates in linux, but you will likely lose a couple frames, not much though. If you have your games in Steam it's pretty easy to just enable Proton to play everything, you can check protondb.com to see how well each game works and possible performance options. You will likely need to install the nvidia linux graphics driver for good performance on your nvidia card, most linux distros default to the open source nouveau driver, which doesn't perform as well, but there are distros that include the nvidia driver on install like Pop!_OS and Mint

48 comments