Linux gaming levels up as CachyOS beats Windows 11 in head-to-head tests

[LordVile95]

Overwatch, CounterStrike, The Finals, Arc Raiders. All of those work. It is the devs fault, not Linux, that their games do not work on Linux.

It’s the games with competent anticheat that don’t work.

 

[Eldrach]

nVidia Linux drivers are just fine. The only people who have trouble with nVidia on Linux are open source elitists. nVidia doesn't play as smoothly on Linux as AMD does. However, most gaming distros have an nVidia version that is already preconfigured to give you the best possible experience. It's really a non issue these days.

Well.
What we know -> Linux has a higher potential for gaming performance due to all the unecessary background bloat going on in Windows. AMD has proven that "it's not them, it the system".
If Nvidia buckled up and allowed all the insanely gifted people editing the AMD drivers in Linux..We'd see a massive increase in users adopting Linux.
We're not there yet, and I have a feeling we won't be as long as Microsoft is paying Nvidia to "play nice"

 

[Hecate91]

It allows cheats to be exploited and there’s not really that much BS in windows. It’s certainly easier to get along with than Linux is

If you think rootkit level anti-cheats are effective then you're very mistaken, effective anticheats are on the developers and publishers to implement. Effective anticheats are server sided that can't easily be bypassed by cheaters, but of course mega corporations don't want to spend the money and would rather punish users with DRM and spyware.
Linux is a significantly easier OS to use "out of the box" than Windows 11 is, the effort to de-bloat it has increasingly become not worth doing as MS has repeatedly forced broken updates.

 

[LordVile95]

If you think rootkit level anti-cheats are effective then you're very mistaken, effective anticheats are on the developers and publishers to implement. Effective anticheats are server sided that can't easily be bypassed by cheaters, but of course mega corporations don't want to spend the money and would rather punish users with DRM and spyware.
Linux is a significantly easier OS to use "out of the box" than Windows 11 is, the effort to de-bloat it has increasingly become not worth doing as MS has repeatedly forced broken updates.

That’s not how anticheat works, server side anticheat is generally very slow and cannot pick up cheats that are running on device. VAC for example is server based, easy to bypass and extremely slow to add cheats to the signature database. It also provides a ton of false positives. Kernel level anticheat is much tighter.

It also only has the same level of access that basically every driver you’ve installed as does every RGB lighting app and peripheral control app, so unless you want to stop installing drivers outside of the windows default ones then maybe hold back on calling it a root kit.

I bet most people couldn’t even install steam or fully set up Linux without help and flatpak

 

[hahahanoobs]

Competition will improve both products.

 

[yRaz]

New benchmarks show Linux gaming nearly matching Windows on AMD GPUs

A recent benchmark from PC Games Hardware suggests that, at least for some games, Proton has nearly eliminated the performance cost of running Windows code on Linux....

www.techspot.com

Nvidia still run slower on Linux than AMD. If Nvidia can improve this a bit that would be great.

That doesn't mean you CANT game on Linux. Using an nVidia GPU just a few years ago meant crashing and black screens, that's not the case anymore. You show some games where the difference is less than 10%. You aren't going to notice that.

You could try Linux gaming anytime you wanted to, people now are just making excuses. Sure, there are some competitive FPS games that won't run because of anti cheat, but the anti cheat has been hacked a long time ago. TPM 2.0 was hacked long before it was a w11 requirement. I don't play competitive FPS games anymore mostly because cheating has gotten so sophisticated

 

[Beerfloat]

That doesn't mean you CANT game on Linux. Using an nVidia GPU just a few years ago meant crashing and black screens, that's not the case anymore.

Silly. Nvidia has been providing competent Linux drivers since about forever.

Sure, they may not always be the first to cheer on the zealots for radical change, like the disaster that is Wayland, but that's to their credit.

 

[poshflamingos]

People who look at tests like these and conclude "Linux is better for gaming than Windows (for AMD cards)" are forgetting a detail.

The vast majority of the time when a game runs better on Linux, it has nothing to do with Linux. It's just the fact that the game is running through DXVK, which translates the game for an inefficient DirectX implementation into an efficient Vulkan one. GTA 4 is a prime example of this, completely botched DX9 game that is fixed and runs incomparably better with DXVK.

Except you can use DXVK on Windows too.

 

[Steezus]

It's hard to get an apples for apples comparison between Windows and Linux because what's rendered and whats being computed may differ: let's say a game has bemchmark tool that reproduces perfectly scenes, then it's not guaranteed that Linux and Windows render exactly the same things (same colors in each pixel of each frame).

Now in this video, the benchmarks are less than ideal as it's not using any ingame benchmarking tool, and the scenes aren't the same, so all the numbers are moot from the get go, especially in few % differences. E.g. in "Where Winds Meet" windows renders a fox then an NPC on a horse, Linux doesn't: I'm ready to bet that's the cause of the FPS diff.

Otherwise, yes gaming on Linux, on Steam, is very much plug and play on CachyOS

It's not plug and play. I installed SteamOS on my handheld last fall and half my library wouldn't run without messing around with versions of Proton. It was honestly a mess and I hated it even though I gave it a few months trial before I uninstalled SteamOS and went back to Windows 11 where everything just works.

 

[Nobina]

Linux distro developers should learn from Apple about how to make their products wanted. CachyOS doesn't sound very serious. People will not want to install something that gives them the impression that it's made by 3 people in a basement.

 

[Steezus]

Overwatch, CounterStrike, The Finals, Arc Raiders. All of those work. It is the devs fault, not Linux, that their games do not work on Linux.

Linux makes up less than 3% of market share. It cost money and resources to make a Linux version of a game. No one cares about the 3%. Look at Paradox, they used to release Linux versions then they publicly said it was not worth the cost to do that due to them seeing that almost none of their players actually used their Linux version.

 

[illu07]

Until you hit a game that just won’t run on Linux

Why the fear mongering? All of my 218 games on steam run on Linux.

 

[illu07]

Linux makes up less than 3% of market share. It cost money and resources to make a Linux version of a game. No one cares about the 3%. Look at Paradox, they used to release Linux versions then they publicly said it was not worth the cost to do that due to them seeing that almost none of their players actually used their Linux version.

That was december 2025. Now Linux usage is on 5.3% which is 4 million people and considering how fast Windows degenerates I reckon that it still is going to increase that fast. I recently switched and I love it.

 

[illu07]

Linux gaming has come a long way...However..and this is a big one, Nvidia has a 95% market share. So for handhelds using AMD hardware, this is great

But unless Nvidia starts actively supporting Linux in a big way, we won't see "the big shift".

You mean 55% market share?

 

[d3Xt3r]

Until you hit a game that just won’t run on Linux

... which would most likely be a game with dumb/invasive anticheat - something you wouldn't want to install on Windows either. So no big loss either way.

 

[d3Xt3r]

Linux makes up less than 3% of market share. It cost money and resources to make a Linux version of a game. No one cares about the 3%. Look at Paradox, they used to release Linux versions then they publicly said it was not worth the cost to do that due to them seeing that almost none of their players actually used their Linux version.

They don't need to make a Linux version of the game, they just need to ensure that their anticheat (

Basically any competitive FPS. If you’re dual booting why use Linux at all?

There are several competitive FPSes that do work on Linux, such as CS, TF2, The Finals, Overwatch, Halo Infinite, Splitgate, Quake Champions etc.

 

[d3Xt3r]

Linux distro developers should learn from Apple about how to make their products wanted. CachyOS doesn't sound very serious. People will not want to install something that gives them the impression that it's made by 3 people in a basement.

You're making a (pardon the pun) apples to oranges comparison. Apple is a commercial product, whereas CachyOS is a niche, free, enthusiast distro. No one's expecting them to be all serious and professional. And if someone is, they're looking at the wrong product.

 

[d3Xt3r]

This is the dumbest reply I have ever seen. You are an absolute mouth breather. When I installed SteamOS last fall, half of my Steam library was missing. I couldn't even get an option to install it. So I would have to mess around with versions of Proton and whatever else it took just to install half of my games. I don't buy random *** stupid games.

Not OP, but the reason your other games were missing was because you didn't enable the option to enable Steam Play for all titles. But you don't even need to do that now, Steam Play should be enabled by default for all titles on the Linux client.

 

[d3Xt3r]

Linux makes up less than 3% of market share. It cost money and resources to make a Linux version of a game. No one cares about the 3%. Look at Paradox, they used to release Linux versions then they publicly said it was not worth the cost to do that due to them seeing that almost none of their players actually used their Linux version.

Not OP, but I don't see them asking devs to make a Linux version of the game? Because they don't need to, when Valve and the a Linux community have already done all the hard work for them. All the devs need to do is enable their anticheat to work with Proton - EAC, BattlEye, nProtect Gameguard, VAC and a few others already work, but for some of the anticheat systems, the devs just need to tick a box to enable support. And for BattlEye, the devs don't even need to do any coding or tick a box, they just need to email BattlEye to enable support, that's it. And if the devs can't even bother to do that, well, that's a studio that I won't be supporting.

 

[WaphleStomp]

No fair; Windows has to do extra work constantly reporting everything about the user and the machine, in real time, to 3-letter agencies.
;o)

 

[LordVile95]

Why the fear mongering? All of my 218 games on steam run on Linux.

Yet LoL doesn’t

 

[LordVile95]

... which would most likely be a game with dumb/invasive anticheat - something you wouldn't want to install on Windows either. So no big loss either way.

I mean if you think your keyboard driver is dumb/invasive I guess?

 

[LordVile95]

They don't need to make a Linux version of the game, they just need to ensure that their anticheat (

There are several competitive FPSes that do work on Linux, such as CS, TF2, The Finals, Overwatch, Halo Infinite, Splitgate, Quake Champions etc.

You’re really trying to make that list bigger than it is aren’t you.

 

[OortCloud]

Competition will improve both products.

Absolutely. This has been a real eye-opener for MS who have started issuing very different messaging about the OS in the last couple of months as they try to claw back some of the damage to their reputation that their obsession with AI has caused over the last couple of years especially.

 

[havok585]

Those games more often than not aren't worth playing, but if you really have to just dual boot or put Microslop W11 on another drive.

that applies to MS as well. MOST of the time.