Comment by dekhn
1 day ago
I have a second computer with an RTX 4090 for gaming (running Windows). I also used the new RTX 5090 running Linux to evaluate whether Proton/Wine allow me to run Windows games on linux (yes, it works, but the compatibility and frame rate issues make me stick to native Windows for now).
If you want a GPU that has comparable performance on Linux to Windows- you want AMD. NVIDIA drivers are notoriously bad. Many of my games run better on Linux with the open source AMd drivers. (CachyOS rolling rolling rolling).
Sadly if you want a GPU with good AI performance you gotta go with NVIDIA. It might sound crazy but as a 7900XTX owner.. My 12GB 3060 on my linux server outperformed the 7900XTX by 40%. The 3060 only has half the vram of the AMD card. Proprietary drivers under Arch Linux.
On top of the significantly worse software on AMD's side (literally didn't work on windows in particular - so the "performs as good on both systems" is a nonstarter, some GGUF library dependency just doesn't work/exist under AMD on windows). Had me running the AMD card on windows under WSL (not a problem with nvidia though, that ran just fine on windows-side directly).
Aaaand also the other AMD bugs, such as the pink squares display corruption that has been an active issue for my GPU in particular (7900XTX) for over a year, maybe approaching two at this point, with no fix in sight from the AMD team (barely and ack at all - not on a single patch notes, just a bunch of reddit discussion). Really regret spending so much on an AMD gpu.
I have no interest in moving to AMD for video cards right now- the network effect of NVIDIA is just too high, and their peak performance is insane. I also haven't noticed any major issues with nvidia drivers, unless you mean specifically running Windows games on Linux machines with nvidia cards, where I have zero experience.
Network effect for graphics cards? Literally what? Your friends don’t care what GPU you run my guy and there is not much benefit of having brand loyalty to a company like Nvidia that gives absolutely zero fucks about people that aren’t their enterprise customers buying GPUs by the thousands. If there’s any “network effect” for gaming GPUs on Linux it’s in favor of AMD because of the immense amount of work Valve has been putting in to make it work well for their steam* hardware.
Nvidia’s drivers are trash for gaming on Linux and the majority of your “compatibility and framerate issues” are because you’re using a sub-par product for the job.
3 replies →
https://www.protondb.com/
I wonder what's going wrong there? Personally I found compatibility and performance on Linux to be extremely good. And just keeps getting better. And that's not even just me, that's all kinds of benchmarks out there. Sorry to hear that. : ' (
No idea. I agree that in principle I should have close to the same performance on Linux. I just didn't want to spend a bunch of time customizing configs and updating software so I could reach parity with Windows when I had two computers.
I have the same rig as you minus watercooling, and I assume you have AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D? Anyway, it's my only PC now, I game, dev, run local models, edit photos, edit videos, all in Manjaro. I get ~70FPS in Cyberpunk at 4k, every setting at "Insane" or whatever goofy thing they call it, Ray tracing on path tracing off, with no framegen but with DLSS set to quality. Without DLSS I get around 40fps. Seems equivalent to what I see online with people with a similar build on Windows.
I run hyprland, seems to be the only wayland based keyboard-forward WM that has good nvidia support (and, allegedly, supports HDR, though I haven't got this working). I heard gnome was pretty good otherwise. I was running i3 before and it also worked fine, however once I got into wanting to get streaming working, there wasn't good compatibility between i3/xorg and tools like sunshine. I believe steam streaming worked fine on it though iirc.
The only thing I miss from windows: easy streaming with sunshine/moonlight. Steam streaming works (usually heh) but it took me a couple days of fiddling to get a stream to work at all through sunshine, and it is choppy. But for local gaming, I don't miss windows at all, I'm so glad to finally have all my drives converted from NTFS to ext4.
No, it's an Alienware R51 with Intel Core Ultra 9 285K 3.2GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 32GB GDDR7; 64GB DDR5-6400 RAM; 4TB Solid State Drive; Microsoft Windows 11 Home; 2.5GbE LAN; 2x2 Intel Killer WiFi 7 BE1750+Bluetooth 5.4; Liquid Cooler
I don't see it on the Dell site anymore, only more expensive, lesser configurations (good timing on my part?).
Yeah, I really want to put in the time to try out various games, but realistically, the whole point of getting a second computer and installing Linux was to be able to train and serve models, and switching between serving a model (that people in my house want to use at random times) and gaming didn't seem like a great choice. If I did get good results, I'd seriously consider wiping Windows 11 from my older machine (an older Alienware with a 4090), but to be honest, I'm perfectly comfortable on Windows desktop.