New benchmarks show Linux gaming nearly matching Windows on AMD GPUs

[about30ninjas]

Besides matching and sometimes exceeding Windows gaming performance, Linux is open source, free, doesn't include spyware, no built in Ai crap, more stable, can be more secure. Linux is the obvious choice!

 

[about30ninjas]

Found the guy that watched all 6 videos. Lol

I've had almost zero issues gaming on Win 11, and honestly, I don't know anyone else that has to the degree the online Linux community seems to think they do. If it was really that bad, Linux would make up more than the around 3% of gaming that it does. It just isn't a widespread crisis like tech influencers want you to believe it is.

With Windows 10 End of Life - we had millions added to Linux ecosystem. While some of these numbers reflect unsupported hardware, a large portion of users had enough and switched. I am glad you enjoy baked in spyware, closed source products where they continually force feed Ai slop, bloat no one wants or needs, where you are the product.

But I guess if your only concern is to have as little hassle as possible and not put in any effort, Windows 11 may be an option, even though a terrible one, imo. For those of us that care about privacy, not being force fed garbage, and do not trust a company that has a long history of betraying consumer trust, Linux is a great option.

 

[Joeg1484]

Found the guy that watched all 6 videos. Lol

I've had almost zero issues gaming on Win 11, and honestly, I don't know anyone else that has to the degree the online Linux community seems to think they do. If it was really that bad, Linux would make up more than the around 3% of gaming that it does. It just isn't a widespread crisis like tech influencers want you to believe it is.

Its not that Windows cant game, or that Linux is better (Although in some cases Linux is better), its that Windows 11 is a shitshow and everyone is sick of the corporate bullshit that is going on.

Its all the security issues, people get locked out of their Microsoft account and can only call an AI agent and not choke the **** out of a REAL person, its the OneDrive fiasco where people are loosing all their data because of poor documentation, its because patches bork the operating system beyond repair and needs to be rebuilt, its all the ads, AI crap, poor performance.

Its A LOT of things, not just gaming. People are sick and tired on Microslop and their BS! This is why people are looking at Linux - you dont have ANY of those issues AND you get to play 99% of Windows games and near native speed to boot.

 

[BobHome]

Mint is my favorite distro, but it's a huge pain in the *** that it still uses X and doesn't officially support Wayland yet. If you have multiple monitors (especially with different refresh rates) or use modern features like freesync or HDR, Mint is not viable. Anyone moving to Linux for gaming should look for a Wayland-based distro.
This is a big problem the Linux ecosystem needs to address still. It's unacceptable that one of the major, most popular distros is taking this long to switch to a modern display server. Especially when more casual users have no idea what display servers or X/Wayland are, will not understand why their monitors are not working properly if they pick an X-based distro (like Mint), and are likely to just bounce off Linux as a whole because of it.

Linux 22.x has Cinnamon DE which has Wayland.
Plus, Cinnamon looks more Windows-like for users wanting to get their feet wet with Linux.
Though as someone else pointed out, Zorin OS is easier to use overall IMO. I've tried 6-8 Linux and Chromium distros in the last month getting ready to make my move. (got me a mini pc for Christmas!) I might even dual-boot a couple of them if necessary to dump Windows for less intrusion. FydeOS is looking pretty good for Android games and apps and so far is doing better for me than Waydroid on Linux.

 

[poshflamingos]

Linux 22.x has Cinnamon DE which has Wayland.

This is resoundingly false. Cinnamon is specifically built on X11, not Wayland.
Go to Mint's forums or subreddit and you'll see people asking about when Wayland support is finally coming all the time. Mint does not currently support Wayland at all, and some quick googling shows support isn't expected until 2027, maybe 2028.

 

[BrightlightJohn]

I really want to people to stop talking about how SteamOS doesn't match custom PC builds performance to Windows. SteamOS is made specifically for valve hardware and only approved for use on those systems even though valve lets you do wantever you want with it. This is why people are Choosing to benchmark on Bazzite. I'm big on Mint but I'm seriously considering ZorinOS whenever I have to do my next reinstall. I know somepeople like configuring ever aspect of their Linux install, but I like having every mostly configured and with all the applications I use already there. While Mint was really the only option for a long time, ZorinOS has been making a big slash this last year

I got ZORIN Linux Pro and its stable. Plays LINUX games but have not bench marked any. I read about Mint but didn't make a change. Why change when the operating system works.

 

[Roboyt0]

Found the guy that watched all 6 videos. Lol

I've had almost zero issues gaming on Win 11, and honestly, I don't know anyone else that has to the degree the online Linux community seems to think they do. If it was really that bad, Linux would make up more than the around 3% of gaming that it does. It just isn't a widespread crisis like tech influencers want you to believe it is.

It's great that you are having a decent experience with W11, but that doesn't mean that plenty of people are currently, and have been for some time, experiencing all sorts of very frustrating issues.

M$ has nowhere near the quality control it once had, which should be very apparent by how many updates they put out that have critical flaws leading to all kinds of issues; including permanent data loss.

M$ agenda is more AI and more telemetry treating each user as a node to mine precious data from so they can make more money. Why do you think they have so frequently sold W11 at a MASSIVE discount? The user is the product, not the OS.

I finally jumped ship on Windows for 2 reasons. Number 1 is that M$ is hell bent on overwriting drivers, specifically for GPU's, no matter what one does to prevent it from happening. Number 2 is a longstanding/recurring issue with sleep/wake. Either the PC won't stay asleep, wakes and goes back to sleep, or loses video output upon upon waking. From my experience this has been a problem since W10 wasn't even publicly released and continues with W11. It has happened with both AMD and Nvidia GPU's and AMD and Intel mainboards. It also occurs with WoL disabled in the BIOS and while wired mice/keyboards are disconnected.

I moved 1 system over to Linux Bazzite 3 weeks ago, which has been an eye opening and pleasant experience; and I've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities. I've got my entire games collection functioning, including running Ubisoft Connect and Battle.net through Steam's wonderful Proton layer. My 2 other systems will soon be switched. 2026 is looking to be the first year, of many, for me as a Linux user.

 

[yannus]

But you still have all of the annoyances of running Linux, especially if you do more than game. It's not worth the hassle to cheap out on a Windows key - which was like $15 or $20 for my last build spread over 5+ years.

If your time has any value and tinkering with your OS is not your hobby or your perceived cause, it's a solution in search of a problem.

Paying for the hassle of running windows, no thanks.

 

[MiqWalsh]

Linux is not for beginners, but those who are Windows power users will probably be able to adapt if they are willing to learn the terminal and various Linux quirks

TBH, Windows "power users" are the very group that have the most trouble making the switch! The term means that you know Windows inside out.....but when transferring to t'other side of the fence, we're all noobs again.

I've used only Linux for well over a decade. I knew Windows well enough to keep on top of stuff & maintain it in a usable condition, but when I moved over I was lost. Took me a while to get used to things, but I was SO glad I had.

I wiped Windoze out of my life AND dived head-first into the Linux ecosystem, all in the course of a single night. You know what? It didn't take nowhere near as long to get the hang of as folks said it would....and this was more than 10 years ago, when there were still plenty of rough edges. The user experience is way smoother today.

I'd had nearly 30 years of Windows, right from the get-go.....and I was absolutely fed up with it. So I did summat about it...

(*shrug...*)


Miq.

 

[Sonojo]

I want Linux gaming for all platforms, so I'll kick Windows out of my pc.

I already kicked it from my life. I only play offline games and Cachyos is perfect on my RX 9070 XT

 

[BobHome]

This is resoundingly false. Cinnamon is specifically built on X11, not Wayland.
Go to Mint's forums or subreddit and you'll see people asking about when Wayland support is finally coming all the time. Mint does not currently support Wayland at all, and some quick googling shows support isn't expected until 2027, maybe 2028.

Well, when I ran FastFetch, it showed Wayland.
Mint 22.3 Cinnamon... I'm not sure what else to say.
(except that I dumped it temporarily for Zorin 18 r2 Core--which is also Wayland out of the box. Still testing the Linux waters.)

 

[yannus]

TBH, Windows "power users" are the very group that have the most trouble making the switch! The term means that you know Windows inside out.....but when transferring to t'other side of the fence, we're all noobs again.

I've used only Linux for well over a decade. I knew Windows well enough to keep on top of stuff & maintain it in a usable condition, but when I moved over I was lost. Took me a while to get used to things, but I was SO glad I had.

I wiped Windoze out of my life AND dived head-first into the Linux ecosystem, all in the course of a single night. You know what? It didn't take nowhere near as long to get the hang of as folks said it would....and this was more than 10 years ago, when there were still plenty of rough edges. The user experience is way smoother today.

I'd had nearly 30 years of Windows, right from the get-go.....and I was absolutely fed up with it. So I did summat about it...

(*shrug...*)


Miq.

The transition is very easy nowadays, my best friend finally followed me last month and already says he was a fool not to have switched to Linux earlier. He's a power user on windows but MXLinux or Mint are so clear and not so far from windows, it's almost a flawless transition. He switched something like 4 PCs right away.

 

[MiqWalsh]

The transition is very easy nowadays, my best friend finally followed me last month and already says he was a fool not to have switched to Linux earlier. He's a power user on windows but MXLinux or Mint are so clear and not so far from windows, it's almost a flawless transition. He switched something like 4 PCs right away.

Mm-hm. There has been a massive, concerted effort across the entire Linux community over the last decade to make it welcoming for noobs, and not only easy-to-understand but easy-to-use. Where once the terminal dominated Linux thinking, GUIs now abound.

I repackage a lot of applications into a 'portable' ecosystem we've developed for the Puppy community. I also create the odd utility here & there....and I always make GUIs the user 'focus'. It's what Windows users are used to.....and despite having had enough of Redmond's product, I DO still like GUIs for personal use.

Mind you, although there's no real need for new users to go anywhere near it, the terminal will always be there. It's the quickest - and still the most versatile - way of communicating DIRECTLY with the system when anything important needs taking care of.

Miq.

 

[Revolution 11]

Mint is my favorite distro, but it's a huge pain in the *** that it still uses X and doesn't officially support Wayland yet. If you have multiple monitors (especially with different refresh rates) or use modern features like freesync or HDR, Mint is not viable. Anyone moving to Linux for gaming should look for a Wayland-based distro.
This is a big problem the Linux ecosystem needs to address still. It's unacceptable that one of the major, most popular distros is taking this long to switch to a modern display server. Especially when more casual users have no idea what display servers or X/Wayland are, will not understand why their monitors are not working properly if they pick an X-based distro (like Mint), and are likely to just bounce off Linux as a whole because of it.

You are absolutely right on your actual points but I just want to mention that most casual users don't have multi-monitor setups. X11 works just fine on a single monitor. Mint doesn't use Gnome which has been working fine on Wayland for a while; it has its own desktop environment in Cinnamon, so there is a lot of code that needs to be ported to Wayland.

 

[Revolution 11]

There seem to be a lot of these "boutique" linux distros these days. Their marketing pages are flashy, but I prefer to stick with distros that have large groups of contributors that can be easily verified. This Zorin OS seems to be built by a couple of guys in Ireland. No thanks.

I have computers running windows, macos, and linux. Steam on Linux just works. It works way better than on macos. It's wonderful. Valve deserves yet another medal for supporting, building and advancing gaming on linux. Making tons of money while following a righteous moral compass. Who knew?

The Windows OS makes a profit for microsoft, but it's not huge by big tech standards. However considering the massive user base, there is potential there for Microsoft to make a lot MORE money by selling additional things to its windows users. Herein lies the problem, microsoft wants to treat users like a product. With Windows 11 they are pursuing additional user revenue more aggressively - injecting ads, AI integration, defaulting search to shopping etc. Windows is becoming a sales platform with an operating system attached.

I personally don't want that.

What distros do you consider acceptable besides the big quadrant of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch? I am guessing Nobara is out because of the single developer. What about Mint or CachyOS?

 

[penn919]

There seem to be a lot of these "boutique" linux distros these days. Their marketing pages are flashy, but I prefer to stick with distros that have large groups of contributors that can be easily verified. This Zorin OS seems to be built by a couple of guys in Ireland. No thanks.

I have computers running windows, macos, and linux. Steam on Linux just works. It works way better than on macos. It's wonderful. Valve deserves yet another medal for supporting, building and advancing gaming on linux. Making tons of money while following a righteous moral compass. Who knew?

The Windows OS makes a profit for microsoft, but it's not huge by big tech standards. However considering the massive user base, there is potential there for Microsoft to make a lot MORE money by selling additional things to its windows users. Herein lies the problem, microsoft wants to treat users like a product. With Windows 11 they are pursuing additional user revenue more aggressively - injecting ads, AI integration, defaulting search to shopping etc. Windows is becoming a sales platform with an operating system attached.

I personally don't want that.

It's not really about the size of the developer team. It's really about reputation and a proven track record. Zorin OS has been around since 2009 and has steadily increased in popularity since. Zorin OS is currently on version 18. The size of the team only needs to be big enough to get the job done.

 

[BobHome]

The transition is very easy nowadays, my best friend finally followed me last month and already says he was a fool not to have switched to Linux earlier. He's a power user on windows but MXLinux or Mint are so clear and not so far from windows, it's almost a flawless transition. He switched something like 4 PCs right away.

One of my challenges is Android on Linux. I have a few pretty old games I like to play casually so was using Bluestacks. One-click install and it was ready to go. Sideloading NLA Play Store games is simple. It all just works.

For Linux I guess the go-to is Waydroid. I've messed with it on 3 or 4 distros, did all the sudo this & that commands, used 'helper scripts' to add yet other libs and such, but a couple of games have audio and no video. So still trying to make it work. Just reloaded Zorin yesterday to give it another try. (FydeOS worked well for Android for me and it is pretty well locked down security-wise... a little too much so for a couple of old-school apps I was not able to directly install. (Indirectly=yes).

 

[hwertz]

I'm actually surprised, I've read on AMD it was typical to have a like 10-15% FPS improvement on a typical Linux setup. This could of course have been fanbois cherry picking games with the largest uplift. I will say I have a GTX1650 (so one of the GPUs that presumably is 15% slower -- I think this is for DX12 specifically, DX11 doesn't have the 15% penalty. I don't have Windows on my system though, so I can't verify this. That said I find it runs quite nicely, and the couple games I've come across that are like "What is optimization?", a 15% FPS boost would not make them have acceptable frame rates. (Of course, the same argument would cut the other way, if I hypothetically was happily using Windows to game, the games I've come across that don't run well enough wouldn't run well enough with a 15% FPS boost either.)

What's shocking to me is the high quality of the Intel GPU drivers these days. As a Linux user since 1993 it's hard to stress just how rough the Intel 3D support was up until Mesa Gallium 3D came out within the last 5 or 6 years. Now? I even got Deep Rock Galactic to run on a freakin' Ivy Bridge (by setting PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1, needeed on GPUs too old to run Vulkan). Not that it ran WELL (like 10-12 FPS) but... really (this icomputer is just for media playback, I don't go around playing DRG at 10FPS. I just was curious if it'd even run.). I've got a notebook with a 11th gen CPU and a Surface with a 7th gen, and there's no comment about compatibility; the surface is limited from running larger games by the 8GB shared memory; the 11th gen has 20GB installed and has run everyting I've thrown at it. And, in stark contrast to the current status quo in Windows where Intel is cutting back on driver updates on 1 year old GPUs, both the Iris drive (for GPUs going back to around 2015) and Crocus drive (going back almost 20 years) are fully supported, receiving imporvements both in the specific drivers and Mesa Gallium 3D itself continuing to receive improvements.