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Comment by tlackemann | Hacker News Reader

Also built a linux gaming machine this year, AMD CPU but Nvidia GPU (3080)

For work, it's a beast. For gaming, it's a beast. I love it.

I'm really happy to hear Steam's push to get all games working on Linux. I still dual-boot for those games that require Easy Anti Cheat, but for everything else linux has been incredible for both indie and AAA gaming.

My biggest gripes aren't all that major but there are a lot of Windows-specific tools for changing the colors inside the case for the various fans. I'm not a fan of the RGB-puke and like a solid color, but after a few tweaks and hacks it mostly works as I intend it to.

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Are you using Wayland? If so, where the compatibility issues resolved? (that's one reason why I moved to AMD GPUs over Nvidia).

I don't believe I am, I'm using Fedora + i3 but I don't have any transparency or special fx on the windows. I do remember setting that up on my last machine but it never looked great so I left it out this time.

are you using i3 with compton? Without it my 2070s had screen tearing, with it, weird visual glitches here and there. never figured it out

Compton sounds familiar, I think that's what I was confusing for wayland before. It adds a bunch of transparency effects and other "nice to haves" but I believe I had similar issues.

Drivers on Linux have always been ... non-ideal. I use the Fedora kmod drivers these days. It's held up nicely so far without any boot halts.

I went from a 1060 -> 3060ti and didn't have any problems. All I did was an apt update after booting. I'm on KDE+X.

Not GP but I have an Nvidia card and no, Wayland on Fedora 34 does not work. And unfortunately Nouveau is highly unstable and crashes multiple times per week, usually when I'm in a meeting or something important.

I just build a new rig and I didn't even consider Nvidia. AMD for me all the way. My only regret is that there's no `nvtop` equivalent for AMD.

there's radeontop, but i don't know if that's comparable

Cool ty, I'm going to check out radeontop.

RE: the article, I also built a 100% amd desktop (in 2020) for Linux. Wayland, sway, vaapi, pipewire, etc... all working without drama. I've considered posting about it somewhere, but just haven't had time.

Radeontop is awesome and I'm grateful for it, but it's nowhere near equivalent.

From reading this it sounds like support should land soon in Fedora 35

https://lwn.net/Articles/869561/

I just recently setup wayland+sway on my linux dev machine running a 970gtx. I made sure to use `mesa` the open source drivers for nvidia and everything worked pretty well.

I will definitely be purchasing AMD GPUs if I intend on running linux in the future. I know nvidia is working on supporting GBM (which is the sticking point for wayland support) but who knows when that will land.

Have you seen OpenRGB? https://openrgb.org/

Yes! One of the tools I ended up trying.

Some newer boards allow you to control your RGB LEDs from the BIOS (ASUS ones in my experience, at least), if you don't need much control over it that can be a viable alternative as well.

Good point! The motherboard I have apparently allows for this but it never saves? I tried playing with it for a week before giving up. Ultimately, I ended up dual-booting windows and using the official brand tool to do something to the motherboard to save the correct colors. Been working since, even when booting to linux.

Speaking of Easy Anti Cheat, it's coming to Linux! https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-la...

If you haven't doscovered it yet, theres is OpenRGB on Gitlab. It works with an increasing number of devices, and it also exposes an API for which there are a couple of SDKs, and it works well (tired python).

have you bothered with VR? On PopOS i get audio issues with the mic and i have to manually switch the speakers to output to my index and it still gives me feedback. i dual boot as well but i would love to ditch my windows partition.. just need VR working 100%

VR is still the one reason to keep using Windows if you want a better experience. It kind of works on Linux but it lacks a lot of polish as per the example you mentioned.

> I'm really happy to hear Steam's push to get all games working on Linux.

Word on the street is that the TPM 2.0 requirements for Windows 11 are, in part, to provide a common DRM platform for all Windows applications including games. Meaning that instead of custom DRM software like Denuvo, antipiracy measures will be implemented as common Windows APIs that take advantage of the TPM to provide secure attestation of genuine, nonpirated binaries. Remember Palladium? Yeah, it's that again, quietly implemented piecemeal beginning with Secure Boot.

Linux will have to implement this DRM down to the kernel level, or it will be simply locked out of many Windows games.

Forget it. Linux gaming is over. Proton for me has been busted enough to have spotty support from release to release anyway.

> Linux gaming is over.

Minecraft: Let me introduce myself.

It's almost ironic that one of the most popular games ever made just so happens to perform its best on Linux.

Hold your horses young one - I haven't finished my run on dwarf fortress yet!

Have you tried the same games on Windows and Linux? I wonder if there is a significant performance difference.

I've tried some, Sea of Thieves primarily.

SoT performs better on Linux for me but the online experience has a lot to be desired. Microphone doesn't work, anything Microsoft live is absent ... though playable.

I'd say that 9/10 games I try on Linux run at Windows performance if not better. YMMV

Windows performance is overall much better, don't listen to people with 3080 or equivalent.

This is simply not true anymore, at least not across the board. In fact, many games run better on Linux than on Windows—it depends highly on the title.

This is pretty much a lie. For example DLSS does not work on Linux so how can it have better performance that Windows.

Drivers are better on windows, games are developped for windows and optimized for it so the vaste majority run better on Windows.

> For example DLSS does not work on Linux so how can it have better performance that Windows.

What does DLSS have to do with anything?

> Drivers are better on windows

[citation needed]

Anecdotally, I've had way more driver-related stability problems on Windows than I've had on Linux, at least within the last ~3 years.

> games are developped for windows and optimized for it so the vaste majority run better on Windows.

How games are developed is irrelevant; Mesa has different performance characteristics than the respective Windows drivers, and so performs better in a lot of cases due to lower overhead. Projects like DXVK can further improve performance by translating DirectX calls to Vulkan.

In any case, there are plenty of benchmarks online showing some games achieving higher FPS on Linux than on Windows. For a fairly extreme example, see this 3-year-old benchmark[0] showing Dota 2 on Linux wiping the floor with its Windows counterpart in 1080p. I have also personally tested this and noticed an improvement on Linux with certain games. (Granted, not very many, but this was also a few years ago, before some of the recent performance optimizations in Mesa, Wine, and related projects.)

Disclaimer: I'm not a subject expert, so can't go into detail about the how/why, but I also believe the benchmarks speak for themselves.

[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=june-201...

Dota 2 is and most Valve games are native on Linux so it's irrelevant.

DLSS is in the Linux NVIDIA driver since 470 (June 22nd).

That is if you use it directly with Linux APIs (Vulkan). I think Direct3D implementations on Linux (like Proton/DXVK/VKD3D) are still catching up to wrap the D3D API for it, but, that's out of NVIDIA's court.

Followup: Proton has implemented a mapping for D3D12 DLSS to this new NVIDIA 470 Vulkan DLSS implementation.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Proton-6...

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