2y ago

Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmarks

www.tomshardware.com

Nobara OS, Arch Linux and Pop!_OS beat Windows 11 by a slim margin in fps (delta 8) in Windows native games - Cyberpunk 2077, Forspoken, Starfield and The Talos Principle II. Windows 11 wins in Rachet & Clank.

ComputerBase's testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Update: Windows 11 wins in one game.

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2y ago

Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmark

www.tomshardware.com /software/linux/three-gaming-focused-linux-operating-systems-beat-windows-11-in-gaming-benchmarks

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2y ago

Arch and other Linux operating systems Beat Windows 11 in Gaming Benchmarks

www.tomshardware.com /software/linux/three-gaming-focused-linux-operating-systems-beat-windows-11-in-gaming-benchmarks

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2y ago

Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmarks

www.tomshardware.com /software/linux/three-gaming-focused-linux-operating-systems-beat-windows-11-in-gaming-benchmarks

149 comments

Soooo when did Arch become a gaming focused OS?
- Since Valve decided that.
  
  Pretty much this.
  
  I upvoted but it sounds hostile. Since valve started using and contributing to arch appears to be more reasonable.
  No arch btw.
  
  Manjaro is/used to be a good choice for gaming purpose
Is arch really gaming focused though?
- Arch is focused on being cutting-edge and lightweight which happens to be perfect for gaming performance in most cases but that's all.
- Arch is focused on however you put it together
  
  Arch is focused like the same way a beach is a camera lens.
- SteamOS is based on Arch, likely why they picked it.
  
  That's like saying PlayStation 5 and Switch are based on FreeBSD, so you should game on FreeBSD (well, not quite, but hopefully the point is clear). FreeBSD isn't good for gaming, it's just liberally licensed and easy to build on top of, hence why it's used.
  Valve has reasons to use an Arch base, and none of them have anything to do with any specific benefit regarding gaming. It's easy to fork and maintain customized build files for since it makes so few assumptions (packages are as vanilla as possible in Arch, so it's easier to maintain a patch set).
  Valve likely has patches in SteamOS that haven't made it to upstream Arch, and there's likely a number of packages that are quite outdated vs upstream Arch, so installing upstream Arch will give you quite a different experience vs SteamOS.
- shrug, I've been using arch and Manjaro for years and gaming in them. They are what you make them, and AUR is massive and solves a lot of problems I have in other distros so that's why I use it.
I recently switched to ubuntu in a gaming laptop, right now I've been using it just for jellyfin and some other coding tasks, but it definitely runs smoother, more stable, quicker, and cooler than windows did for the same workload.
I was surprised at the difference of even just having the machine idle, on windows it was noticeable warm, now on ubuntu it's almost as if it has been turned off.
- Honestly, at this point -- If Valve made a more generalized Linux OS... or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.
  Now now, I'm not saying YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP!! - but Valve would be a great mother for fostering an ecosystem that would potentially make Microsoft compete by not making their OS shittier year-by-year.
  
  If Valve made a Linux OS... or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.
  Sorry, does SteamOS 3 not count? Is Valve's massive investment in Mesa, Wine, Wayland (HDR, Gamescope, etc) not exactly what you're talking about? I feel like we're living in parallel dimensions or something lol
  
  Steam deck was definitely a move in this direction. From what I hear people like it. If they like it, I see more traction to it as people understand that it's not windows. Ya never know. 2035: year of the Linux desktop!
Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don't run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.
Its like people miss the good old days of "This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don't work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don't". Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn't still work to be done serves no benefit.
- Yup. Just use the same benchmarks major sites use and note any interesting differences. They usually pick games for specific technical reasons, so most of the work figuring out where Linux is weak is done for you.
  I personally play on Linux because I use Linux, but because I think it has better performance than Windows or whatever. That should be the selling point, not slight differences in performance. Show that Linux is largely on par with Windows, and then go through all of the other benefits to using Linux, like privacy, package management, and user choice.
  
  Yeah. More or less the same. Pretty much the entirety of my work day is in a terminal and I have increasingly liked "linux" as a desktop since Mint (and now Plasma) are "more windows than windows" in terms of UI/UX. WSL gets Windows a lot of the way toward the OS I want (a good nix-ish terminal with a strong GUI for day to day), but MS also add more and more spyware and stupidity with every update so...
  But holy crap do the evangelists go out of their way to undermine widespread linux adoption. Whether it is pretending that opencad is at all a replacement for fusion 360 or that gimp is comparable to photoshop or it is inflating performance or compatibility numbers.
  Like, I've tried to switch over a few times over the years. And it has always been a shitshow. ProtonDB goes a long way, but it is also prone to outdated information (since the one person still playing Tribes 2 has no need to try newer versions of wine/proton and so forth). And if you check message boards you get the same skewed bullshit. Which mostly boils down to "Okay, well. I figured out that game X won't work. And I now assume that these fifty other games I care about won't either"
  These days? it is a lot easier because Valve have put in the work to the point that I can more or less just check games in steam. There is still the risk of a new patch breaking something, but it is a lot closer to the good parts of protondb where the steps to recover to a good build are pretty easy (Armored Core 6 was basically a case of just rolling back a major revision of proton) rather than the shitshow. Which then makes it "Well, game X won't work. But I am reasonably confident that every other game I care about will run performantly so..."
- Of the two main games I play, one doesn't work on Linux due to the anti-cheat they use, and the other has horrific stuttering while loading game assets.
  But Linux works better for the curated selection for this article.
Computerbase is very solid and well known in Germany and have been covering Linux quite a bit for a while now.
Performance of course can fluctuate heavily between games but the amount of progress that Linux made over the past decade is nothing but astonishing.
- that's kind of my take on it too. Linux has come so far from what it used to be like. it's not quite ready to see mass-adoption, but it's making some amazing strides. so many different parties have been contributing to a massive effort to iron out some of the issues with Linux. once performance improves significantly over Windows, and compatibility gets a little more wide-spread, you'll start to see people willing to put up with the teething problems, in the name of superior performance.
  THAT is when Linux will see more mainstream success.
  some year, i don't know when, really will be the year of Linux.... maybe.
  
  I don't think we'll see like some definitive year of Linux, instead we will just have slowly rising user numbers. The only exception would be if Microsoft fucks up so badly that it will completely drive people away from Windows.
Description is false. Windows won in R&C. This was not an across the board win for Linux. Good news doesn't need to be sensationalized.
- Updated the summary about Windows winning.
Ok, but what about Nvidia GPUs? Those are what the the vast majority of gamers use.
- Nvidia has been kind of a mess for me on Wayland, especially the lastest 545 drivers. I just switched to AMD and literally all my issues disappeared, including one I thought was a KDE plasma bug
  
  Looks like KDE Plasma 6 is going to default to Wayland, so I'll probably give it another shot when it comes out (in Feb I think?). I'm currently on GNOME because of weird KDE Wayland issues on my AMD card (maybe it's no longer a thing, IDK). I don't have a strong preference between them, but my kids use my computer and I think KDE is probably easier for them.
- 93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
- It's anecdotal but I saw a significant improvement in multiple games on an Nvidia 1050 running Nobara. Had no issues installing drivers and getting things set up.
  
  Nvidia 1070 here. Haven't run into problems using Mint or Endevour. Had to choose propriety drivers on Mint, but that was it.
  Might buy an AMD card next, but that's more to see if there are any features I'm missing out on. I'm also excited to see whether AMD has grown better hardware, as it was a constant hassle when I last used one 10+ years ago.
- That's just how it is, no matter if you like it
- I use NVIDIA gpus and they have worked fine for me.
- Does it really matter? The majority buy Nvidia due to mindshare, the same probably goes for why they use Windows.
  
  Nvidia has been so far ahead of AMD cards for so long, and running AI stuff on them is a much better experience as well.
  I love AMD and wished it weren't so, but buying an AMD video card can only be justified by price or Linux compatibility.
  
  The majority buys NVIDIA, because NVIDIA cards are just better.
These tech YouTubers should do Linux comparisons. These are not small differences when comparing, let's say, Nvidia 4060 and the RX 7600. It could make the AMD GPU edge out the more expensive Nvidia offering
- Every comment should be "But what about in Linux?"
- I'd like this. At first I stuck with Nvidia because they had drivers for Linux. But I've been on that train so long. Only reason I'm still on it is cuda cores for video editing with davinci resolve.
- And with the popularity of the Steam Deck, it's actually a pretty reasonable thing to do now. I want three sets of numbers: Windows and Linux on the same hardware, and Steam Deck. Maybe do a fourth for Windows handheld PCs like ROG Ally.
I've been using arch and manjaro for the past 3 years with awesomewm and gnome (can't get awesomewm to behave with second monitor while gaming so I switch to gnome when using the second monitor, using laptop) and this has pretty much been my experience. Windows is bloated and it never"just works".
- Windows almost always just works.
  This seems crazy to say when talking about Linux. Especially when saying you have to switch to use dual monitors.
  
  I have to agree. I love Linux but Windows really does just work. Especially when it comes to gaming. I applaud anyone that enjoys Linux gaming but don't act like it's anywhere near as simple as on windows.
  
  Yeah. In all the time I’ve been using windows I never had a problem that people constantly report; even BSOD happened quite rarely. I never got my pc to randomly shut down and update either…
  Like, I switched to Linux cause i saw it as cool, wanted to try it out and liked how customisable it was and mostly to spite the megacorp
  
  Nearly always something random breaks for me on windows, and it's a huge pain to fix it. I hate dealing with windows, Linux is easier, because it isn't a black box.
  
  Linux allows you to change anything. Like using a WM that's specifically made for enthusiasts, and developed by random people in their spare time.
  Windows doesn't allow you to move the taskbar.
  Who'd guess some Linux setups are not going to be plug and play...
  
  I'm creating my own desktop environment and deal with bugs here and there that I fix on my own since it's my own product. It's designed with my needs in mind created by someone who doesn't know what he's doing half the time.
  There are absolutely awesome products like gnome and kde that just work. You can use them to get a stable environment that are designed to work in multitude of situations for general public. Windows never just works, you just learn to ignore its shortcomings. Like updating in the background even when you need the bandwidth, lack of central update station for your apps, dealing with lengthy custom install processes trying to impose bloatware you didn't ask for, uninstall processes begging you not to uninstall the sweet sweet spyware.
  You just learn not to let these problems bother you. And that's not anything personal against you, it's just how a bad product with good marketing works. Linux is objectively better.
  You may want a few products that are built for Windows and are not available on Linux and you wouldn't want to try an alternative that may even work better objectively and that is absolutely your choice and is respectable. You may not want to learn a new environment and stay in your safe zone and that's respectable. But you can't use your safe zone to decide what's better. A free product that provides better hardware support, faster communication bus, easier user experience with much faster bug fix and release cycle, tons and tons of choice is objectively better. You are free not to try it.
- Windows never works so much that you have to switch between distros to do different stuff, ahahaha! Oh my, the delusion...
  
  Gnome and awesomewm are apps
I'm not familiar with the games mentioned in the article, but Linux is great for gaming. I run Manjaro on my T540p laptop and have never had problems with Angband or Nethack. I can even run DF with tilesets if I'm feeling spunky. Mind you, I do have 8 gbs of RAM and a pretty sweet Intel integrated graphics setup, so that may be why it's so smooth.
- woah sounds like quite the rig! enjoy
Anyone tried crysis?
- That's when we know it's:
  The year of the Linux desktop
  When we all can finally run crysis.
  
  You already can run Crysis.
  https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Crysis
Hasn’t this been happening for years?
Intel’s clear Linux had similar articles published about it years ago.
slim margin isn't significant enough.
I want bigger margins.
- Still very impressive considering this is all run by translating the same Windows API calls into Linux ones, and then running them. There's definitely some overhead in doing this, and yet they still beat Windows native.
- And still ... it would not matter.
  
  Kinda like this comment?
- Feel free to contribute. Most the stack from driver to software is FOSS
- Install Gentoo
Doesn't matter. Easy of use + compatibility trumps all.
- Some people already using Linux as daily driver and booting to windows is not ease for them.
  People doesn't need every games to be compatible. They only need the games they want to play compatible.
  For me, I no longer need to boot into windows to play game.
  
  Yes. That is the status quo.
- I agree to an extent, but most games just work in Linux with no slowdowns or glitches. And I've had to mess with many games in Windows over the years to get them to run.
- That's true, but also a W for Linux.
- It's more: whatever comes preinstalled trumps all.
- I don't agree whole heartedly, but I understand where you are coming from.
  I recently installed Win11 for work related reasons. Not entirely happy with that, but keep learning or die. If I'm gonna have to support Win11, I should probably run it for a while, lol.
  I will say it was nice to just install steam, vortex, download game and mods, and just play without any further tinkering required.
  I'd love to see Linux have that sort of native support, not just from the gaming industry, but the community as well.
- More like, "doesn't matter -- not being tracked > all." :^)
  Even so, Linux is easier to use than Windows (yes, I went there.) because of a single and only fact:
  Configuration files.
  Does the average Windows user can configure EVERYTHING through a SINGLE configuration/text file, that explicitly says "what does what"? Video, sound, window size, hotkeys....?
  No? So there you have it.
  
  Linux is easier if you're already comfortable with a computer. A lot of users wouldn't understand how to edit a config file / would be uncomfortable doing so, especially those who grew up with modern phones and apps. Even if a 30 second edit took 30 minutes in a GUI, lots of people will prefer the GUI.
  Unfortunately most people find Windows / MacOS "just works". If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher. I love my Arch setup but the average user would probably find it unusable LOL
  
  Windows has a configuration file, it's called a registry. Always has been.
I switched to Mint this month and have only run into issues with anti-cheat. I've tried about 8 different games. Halo Infinite had some odd textures the first time I ran it, but not since.
All in all I'm very happy with my OS switch.
When first switching to Linux I tried Pop!_os and it was awful was a headache to get anything to work .. switched to Ubuntu and all my problems went away , I don't recommend using pop .
- For me it was the reverse. Pop was the clear winner for several reasons. Plus I like System76 overall. I vigorously recommend Pop as a beginner/gaming choice.
  But honestly, Ubuntu vs PopOS should not have been that different for you - they are extremely similar. Pop is cleaner with less bloat, and not beholden to Canonical.
  To each their own of course, and having options is what makes switching great.
  
  My wife's laptop crapped out so I threw pop os (previously had arch on it) and made profiles for both of us. Lets her play the few games that she likes, and Firefox is the same. It's made for an easy transition from windows to Linux for her. Ubuntu would probably be just as easy overall, but she likes the tiling too since it's very helpful on a small screen (arch + bspwm is my main driver so I wasn't going to give up tiling)
- This may be a YMMV situation. I'm not a huge gamer, but Pop has worked great for me for nearly all games I've tried. The one glaring exception has been the Civilization series (specifically 3 and 6)... Anyone know if that's a Linux problem, a Pop problem, or a just me problem?
  (Also, sorry you're getting downvoted for sharing your honest opinion/personal experience)
  
  I had a bunch of issues and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got to the point that steam wouldn't even work anymore and couldn't get any games to launch. I'm not worried about upvotes so it's all good lol .
  
  I've played civIV on fedora and had no problems (I was using a jc141 release, though).
- For me it was the other way around. I did notice performance issues then I tried fedora and they went away so I've been sticking with fedora
  
  I haven't tried fedora myself and at this point I don't want to mess with what is working great for me . I did have some issues with it freezing when idle but that was fixed with a kernel update.
What does "gaming focused" even mean? In what way is it focused on gaming?
Been using Nobara for the last 2 years. Haven't noticed much of a dip in performance coming from Windows, if anything.
Linux, is not for gaming. Period.
- And here I am enjoying my steamdeck
  
  With non Linux games with reduced performance :D
- Then you must be lost.
  
  I’m lost playing all possible and available video games on Windows with all theirs mods and addons :D

149 comments