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Comment by avrionov | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

> 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.

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