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 likely going to change as software support for gaming on Linux improves.
If you consider real high performance computing, with well optimized libraries that can properly use the hardware (including GPUs), 50 % difference between windows and Linux is not really surprising. This is the reason 100% of real high performance computing is done on Linux. It is a better OS for raw performances than windows. For some tasks we are easily talking over twice the performances. It is not always the case, but not surprising at all.
The differences clearly depend on the actual low level implementation of the code. But in general the current situation in gaming, with windows that competes with Linux on raw performances, is only due to lack of software support for gaming on Linux. As this is changing over time, we’ll see games performances greatly improve in Linux. Hopefully until the physiological surpass of windows performances.
Currently most of gaming support on Linux is done via some kind of translation layer, that has itself an overhead. It means that the real linux performance would be even better than in all these benchmarks, if it was really possible to compare 1:1 Windows and Linux with native, well optimized code.
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.
Yeah.
I’m personally lucky that my fav titles are CPU hogs, like ARMA 3 and X4: Foundations. Both run better under Linux.
Cyberpunk runs great too, I’m sure once we eventually get the updated drivers for NVIDIA we’ll get Ray Recon too.
X4: Foundations
Can relate 🤓
Only thing I’m missing is “real” head tracking. There is simply none in the Linux version and while I can map a virtual joystick driven by OpenTrack to each camera corner it’s just not the same. Sadly this is not exposed via LUA or I’d have wired up a UDP connection by now. So this feature sadly works only via Proton. Still sticking with the native Linux version though. It’s faster.
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…
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
Nobara and Pop!_OS do well in this regard.
Yeah but it still upsets me that “Fedora” exists lol. The name, that is.
Lol
linux users still coping
nobody likes linux yall are chatting in an echo chamber. lemmy feels like a comp sci major college party lol
And yet, Steam hardware survey shows Linux growing almost every month. By little, yes, but still growing almost every month, with Valve and Steam themselves betting more on Linux than on Windows and the Steam Deck being a thing.
If Lemmy feels like a computer science party, tell ya what: feel free to join us, everyone’s welcome. Just don’t claim “cope and seethe” when there’s actual growth here
Plenty of people like Linux, the real echo chamber would be some place you don’t have to hear how much better alternatives there are to garbage-ass windows.
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Wait, DLSS doesn’t work on Linux at all? That’s a pretty big thing to gloss over whenever someone is talking about linux gaming and how comparable it is to windows nowadays. I doubt I’d be able to get anything remotely close to a stable framerate on cyberpunk2077 without it, and same goes for other newer games like dying light 2 or starfield!
DLSS works. It took a while longer than Windows, but Nvidia themselves actually provide Wine-compatible DLL files. Also, there’s a native way to implement DLSS for Linux which, I kid you not, zero games so far are using. The Windows version works fine though.
But DLSS Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction do not work, and there are zero workarounds.
Oh, so he’s just talking about DLSS3 features, gotchya. I thought DLSS 1 performance improvements are also frame generation but I see now thats different
DLSS is upscaler. Game is rendered at lower resolution and then image is upscaled in a bit smarter way than simple “stretching”.
More precisely, DLSS is a set of models that use AI to interpolate an image. This interpolation can take many different forms:
Interpolation can be used to take a lower resolution image and upscale it, which is the main feature of DLSS.
You can also use DLSS to take a high resolution image and scale it down, with less artifacts, as a type of antialiasing. This is DLDSR.
You can also use it to take information from an image, combined with motion data, and interpolate how blocks of pixels might change into a new frame. This allows you to generate intermediary frames. This is Frame Generation.
You can also take a very noisy image, composed of discrete dots, and interpolate how neighboring pixels should look. This is Ray Reconstruction.
Aren’t frame generation and ray reconstruction new? I’m sure they’ll work one day, although I’m not a big Linux head I only use steamos on the deck I just see a lot of Linux posts on Lemmy so here I am lol.
They’re new, yes. Though the folks at Proton already confirmed they’ll provide no workaround to support it, Nvidia needs to build the Linux drivers with official support. We don’t know if they’ll do that and when.
Plain DLSS definitely works, I’m guessing they mean that specific reconstruction feature. I’m sure it’ll be implemented eventually if it’s possible at all though.
Side note, a kind of related feature that is missing for sure from the Linux drivers is DLDSR, and plain DSR for that matter. As a heavy user of both, it’s a bit of a personal deal breaker.DLSS works fine on Linux, but I don’t know about frame generation and ray reconstruction specifically. It could be those two don’t work yet.
DLSS ray reconstruction works in Linux. You just need to launch with
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command%.I was (happily!) wrong. See reply below.
No, it’s definitely working. Here’s proof (open the images in a new tab and zoom in on the reflections to see the difference in clarity):
With reconstruction:
Without reconstruction:
With reconstruction:
Without reconstruction:
With
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799and ray reconstruction enabled, reflections are much clearer and also resolve way faster during motion.deleted by creator
Could you tell me how to use these arguments?
Sure thing! Right click on any game in Steam and click Properties. Then in the General tab, you’ll see a Launch Options box where you can paste these arguments in.
What most people get wrong when first trying to use it is not knowing how to correctly specify environment variables vs launch options that get passed to the game executable. If you just want to pass arguments to the game, just paste them into the box. So for example with Cyberpunk, you can just paste in
--launcher-skipand Steam will launch the game as if you were running
Cyberpunk2077.exe --launcher-skipHowever, if you want to specify environment variables as well, you’ll need the
command%placeholder. So, in order to enable raytracing and bypass the driver check for ray reconstruction in Cyberpunk, I paste these launch arguments into the settings:DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command% --launcher-skipwhich is like running
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 Cyberpunk2077.exe --launcher-skipcommand%is just a placeholder for the game’s executable path.Hope that clears things up with regards to the launch options.
As far as knowing which environment variables to use, that’s on a game-by-game basis, but the two most common ones that I use for Nvidia GPUs are
PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1which enables DLSS in games that are not on Proton’s NVAPI whitelist, andVKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11which enables raytracing. I almost never bother with any other environment variables unless there’s special game issues I need to workaround (like Cyberpunk’s driver version check), in which case I check ProtonDB or the game’s issue tracker on the Proton GitHub page.deleted by creator
DLSS is a matter of Nvidia’s sub-par driver support. FSR2 (and soon FSR3, which does frame gen.) works, ironically even on Nvidia GPUs :P
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I only took FSR3 for reference because it’ll support one of the things you outlined xP
Also no HDR, either (not supported by the OS). You’re not getting the full Cyberpunk experience without HDR and Ray Reconstruction. But I suppose that people with an older PC and monitor would benefit by switching to Linux.
Gamescope allows the usage of HDR
I recently tried but can’t get the tone mapping right in gamescope, any tips?
HDR on Linux is definitely a thing, KDE supports it
I already got the full cyberpunk experience 3 years ago, and it was terrible. Making the game prettier doesn’t make it any less of a joke.
I used to say things like this too, but then I played 2.0.
Surprisingly it’s a proper game now. They turned the game into GTA in the future, and that’s a good thing. Also the perk system was completely overhauled, and weapons rebalanced so that you actually have to do more than just grab whatever has the highest DPS.
The story’s the same, but everything else is completely different. Give it another chance.
I’ve tried it. It absolutely is not “GTA in the future”. It’s just as shallow as it was at launch.
5600
“Older”
Ha that hit hard. This is basically the system I just upgraded to. Well at least it’ll run the game well.
It’s the exact same system I upgraded to a couple months ago except I got 5700 x3d. This system slaps bro I love it.
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
I was thinking “Let it be Vega. I might give that shitty game a second chance.”
Don’t mind me and my ThinkPad X220.
Modern computers cost too damn much
Thanks Stadia. No wonder it performed so well.
I miss it :'(
Me too…
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.
Damn, you know what? I actually sort of liked windows 11 when I had it on an empty SSD but now that I’ve added all my software I’ve noticed it’s much less snappy than win10 was.
Now I’m thinking of down(upgrading) back to windows 10 but Feel like it’s going to be a hassle. I’m not as tech savvy as I used to be and can’t even recall how to go back to win10 without just installing it fresh
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Were you using the same distro?
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Btw!
I had very similar results with pop os and windows 10 on an Nvidia card
Bls answer sailormoss
What are the chances that it’s just not rendering something due to the DX12 to Vulkan translation?
Possible, but looking through the footage it seems everything is being rendered as expected.
It won’t just not render something. DXVK is already a finished thing in that regard. Complete enough that Intel uses it for legacy DirectX support in their ARC GPUs even.
It’s entirely possible that the translation layer will alter timing to expose a race condition such that something doesn’t render.
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.
Just tried this on my Nvidia 3090 with no issues. Corpo start, went all the way to T-Bug’s Mili-tech training program just fine. DLSS and Psycho RT enabled.
Thank you for testing. Seemingly it is just the 20XX cards affected then. I just checked the other reports again and they are also using turing cards. Bummer!
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!
The 1650 is Turing though. Both 16XX (low end) and 20XX (mid/high end) cards are on Turing architecture
I am starting to believe it just affects the 2000 series of cards then although some of the driver bugs causing crashes should affect all modern Nvidia cards equally.
I am confused why that’s the case though.
I looked through protondb again and it looks like all people using 20XX cards cannot play the game. While it looks fine for 30XX with some minor tweaks. For older cards it is a mixed bag, but there are just very few reports overall.
I just did this a couple days ago(new game with corpo start) on my brand new system that I just built. No crashes, no issues at all. Using 7950X3D and a 4090.
Edit: I misread. I’m using windows on this system.
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.
Yup, you just gotta set the right environment variables. Can’t remember them off the top of my head though, “NVAPI” is part of one of them I think. Don’t have an nvidia gpu anymore, though, switched to AMD about two months back.
Just came back to say it freaken worked. Cyberpunk on linux looks and runs just as well as it does on windows. I don’t think I need to dual boot anymore…
export PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=0 export PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 export VKD3D_CONFIG="dxr,dxr11" export PROTON_ENABLE_NGX_UPDATER=1In case anyone else is wondering…
Haha glad it worked out :)
Casual vulkan W?
Now can you make it stop defaulting to controller keybindings on Linux?
echo ‘2C45C6: EB’ | xxd -r - Cyberpunk2077.exe
In the x64 bin folder
Source, and what is this command supposed to do? We shouldn’t blindly copypaste shell commands from online.
The Steam community thread about this issue and I can vouch it does fix it.
“trust me bro” is not an answer
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Thank you!
This bug was fixed in a patch when phantom liberty launched? I haven’t seen it since that patch anyway.
Shut up and look at the more frames. - article author mumbling - God damn ingrates always complaining just because things don’t work right… 30% more frames is practically 10% less controller!
໒꒰ྀི -᷅ ⤙ -᷄ ꒱ྀི১
That may be true, but that’s only because Linux is better than Windows.
It’s a well known fact that every second major release of Windows is crap.
- Windows 95 was not the best.
- Windows 95OSR2 was the one you wanted.
- Windows 98 sucked.
- Windows 98 2nd ed. worked as the former should have.
- Windows 2000 was great but had no support for running games.
- XP solved that and made people leave Windows 98 (I deliberately left out the clusterf… Windows ME.).
- Windows Vista sucked balls.
- Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.
- Windows 8? Metro on phones, yes! On desktop? No no no.
- Windows 10 got Microsoft back on track again.
I thought the new upgrade scheme (2 editions per year) Microsoft introduced with Windows 10 would be like “every second release will suck” but it started to look like Microsoft were able to break the curse…
…and then Windows 11 happened.
casusally skipping millenium edition because most people opted to buy windows 2000, the enterprise server os instead.
Windows 2000 couldn’t run games because it was based on Windows NT and the NT Kernel. ME was still based on DOS. XP frankensteined the NT Kernel and DOS to somehow make the most stable, longest running and best windows ever.
And 20 years later they’re bleeding marketshare.
Windows 2000 could run games (I should know: I kept being a gamer whilst using it for years) but in the early days with so many games designed for DOS that required direct low level access it was a problem. If I remember it correct one had to boot in DOS mode for those.
Eventually with DirectX that stopped being a problem (plus, again if I remember it correctly, OpenGL also became compatible with it).
I ran 2000 back in the day and didn’t really have any problems with it. IMO it breaks the pattern somewhat. XP was better, of course, but 2000 was a good OS.
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
I haven’t tried the new update but this gives me high hopes for what my 6800 can chew through.
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Why does the Nobara benchmark report as Windows 10 pro?
Wine always reports itself as some version of Windows. Mostly, it doesn’t really matter.
probably from the wine trick it uses or something, no?
I wouldn’t know personally. I don’t use linux for games except on my steam deck, so I don’t have any knowledge on the subject. That does make some sense though if WINE relies on tricking software into thinking it’s Windows.
Wine simulates a Windows environment to some degree, Steam is the only platform that fixed the reporting issue and that wasn’t always the case ether because the system tells the game it’s Windows.
Because translating a game in real-time doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a windows game. As such, wine will report as being Windows 10 by default.
@JigglySackles @cron wine self reports itself as windows 10 for compatibility
Thanks!
