I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it’s about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it’s 982 mods that I can’t be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it’s the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you’re wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.
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I have an HP z4 G4 running Bazzite-dx-gnomr-nvidia with a RTX 2070 (it does not fit in that case at all) and other than the lack of the functional steam big screen mode that the steam deck enjoys, everything else works extremely well!
I have an nVidia RTX 3060, running on a desktop I built back in 2009. I’m running Linux Mint with the KDE Plasma desktop with no problems. All the Steam I bought on Windows, run with no problems under Linux.
Any non-Steam games, like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or Deus Ex (1) run on Wine under the default settings with no problems.
I had problems on Ubuntu but no problems with PopOS
It seems to vary. I had few issues with my 2080Ti but my friend had nothing but issues with his 3070. He switched to an AMD card and it worked without issue. Nvidia doesn’t put nearly as much emphasis on their Linux support as AMD does, but that doesn’t mean that Nvidia cards aren’t usable.
yeah Tetris will be fast
Simple answer: Yes!
Not so simple: Yes, but nvidia hates linux and their proprietary drivers can cause issues. Generally (especially on stable distros) everything is stable and fine.
Honestly, I’ve had access to tons of Nvidia cards (1050, 1060, 1080, 3070, etc). All of them worked great for gaming whenever I tried in Debian or Ubuntu, using whatever drivers were latest at the time.
The ONLY place I had issue was specific settings (HDR + 120hz over HDMI) in Bazzite. I wanted a new card back then anyway so I got an AMD. But I’ve heard their Nvidia image is great, now.
Yeah.
I recommend not letting the “wisdom of the crowd” dictate your decisions in the computing space, even with Linux.
Most of these people don’t really know what they’re talking about and are doing whatever they think will make them look good in front of their peers.
Try to see things for yourself and gain your own knowledge. Theory is no substitute for experience, but the average computer user doesn’t understand that.
My 5000 series has worked out of the box on Bazzite. The only GPU bug I’ve run into is that Moonlight is incompatible with the driver. All of the games I’ve tried have worked with proton GE, and with some config tinkering I even have VR with full body tracking working for VRChat…
HOWEVER
I can’t say its a premium experience for competitive games or VR. Both have latency issues that impact the experience. Maybe an older shooter like openMW would be just fine, but modern games like Rematch have had some weirdness, even though they “run fine”.
I have a Nvidia GPU, and after distro hopping a lot, it only worked right on CachyOS with KDE.
Of course you can. I have a GTX 1660super and it works flawlessly.
Nvidia is FINE on Linux. There’s just a couple extra steps.
All of these Nvidia GPUs being bought for all this AI bullshit? Running Linux. Every stupid AI company runs Nvidia right now, and it’s on Linux, so don’t worry.
Pick a mainstream distro, lookup the steps for installing the drivers and blacklisting the Nouveau drivers which sometimes take first dibs, and you’re golden. Few commands at best.
AMD is just simpler because you don’t have to manage the drivers, but it’s really not a big deal. It’s very easily handled.
Nvidia for compute* has always been fine on Linux. It’s Nvidia for an actual display that’s been the biggest problem.
No, it has not „always been fine” - I’ve worked with people who disabled auto updates on their dev machines just to keep a specific kernel & driver version working together. Circa 2016 :)
I was indeed setting up nvidia and cuda for ML around 2018 and it was not as straight forward or easy as it is today. It was quite annoying and error prone, at least for me who was setting it up on my own for the first time.
I had to fiddle with it for a while when I moved my main machine over to Linux a few months ago, but that’s mostly on me because I chose Arch & Hyprland.
If I had gone with a mainstream distro with a “nvidia” variant, it would have likely just worked out of the gate.
Hell, if you had gone from an arch derived distro like EndeavourOS and just clicked the nvidia option. It would have been solved.
Not with Hyprland, I had to set a nice chunk of variables to make it work properly.
AMD is just simpler because you don’t have to manage the drivers, but it’s really not a big deal. It’s very easily handled.
Honestly this isn’t as true as I was led to believe it was before I switched to AMD. Just like Nvidia has issues between the proprietary driver and nouveau; AMD has its own mix of issues with Vulkan between RADV (mesa), AMDVLK, and AMD’s proprietary driver on a per-game basis at times.
AMD has its own mix of issues with Vulkan between RADV (mesa), AMDVLK, and AMD’s proprietary driver on a per-game basis at times.
Good news, they’re going away. AMD is focusing entirely on Mesa now.
Then I’m pretty sure you’re a sucker who bought some hype from a post that told you to run some immutable distro.
As I keep saying: BEGINNERS NEED TO STAY AWAY FROM IMMUTABLE DISTROS
I’m not using an immutable distro and the issues with the Vulkan drivers have nothing to do with them.
Explain in detail then…
I’m not who you were replying to, and I’m by no means a beginner… but I just got the Framework Desktop with the AMD Strix Halo APU and I initially installed Fedora and could not get games to run through Steam. I eventually installed Nobara, and overall I don’t like it, but it played every game I tried without any fuss.
It ranges from significant performance differences between the drivers with specific games to games having rendering issues with specific drivers. A lot of games don’t work at all with the proprietary driver.
My most recent issue was with the Indiana Jones game having horrible traversal stuttering making some areas basically unplayable on RADV, but AMDVLK had no stuttering and better framerate overall.
I think the experience you were lead on to was the open source driver built into the kernel.
With that the moving parts are the kernel, and the amd-gpu-firmware. The open source setup is much more reliable, and if a bug ever arises, it tends to get fixed quickly. You update, and it’s gone.
Using the proprietary driver is difficult with regardless of vendor.
That’s interesting, I don’t remember which implementation I’m actually using, possibly RADV, but don’t remember having any issues, unfortunately I don’t have Indiana Jones to try to independently confirm that the driver is indeed causing a problem there. Have you seen issues in other games?
RADV has the least issues but I still tend to test AMDVLK (vulkan-headers makes switching drivers per-game easy) for any big performance differences, and it’s typically the first thing I try for crashes now. If you want to use ray tracing at all you should definitely use AMDVLK, it performs way better.
Are you using x11 or Wayland? Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers? Everything works well in x11, but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland. When trying to track it down I was led down a rabbit hole suggesting there is some protocol mismatch between what the NVIDIA drivers implement and what Wayland expects.
Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers?
Yep! It’s been largely trouble free for a year or so now.
but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland.
I had some issues the specific combination of NVIDIA card, Wayland running Plasma and VRR. But I disabled VRR, and it went away.
I have had quite a few nvidia cards in my linux systems and all ran fine, except for a while when Wayland came along. Those issues have now been fixed as well. Your experience may vary ofcourse depending on the hard and software you use. But there is no reason to not use Nvidia on Linux.
That being said, I switched to AMD recently and had some issues with suspend and resume so it is not like AMD is the holy grail for Linux systems. I made the switch because of the opensource drivers and Nvidia being greedy fucks.
Yup
Nvidia has come a long way the past 10-15 years for Linux, just don’t tell AMD fanboys that.
No it hasn’t, Nvidia usability in Linux now is the same as it was 10-15 years ago, and that’s sort of the problem. What do you think has improved since then? I remember ~18 years ago getting Nvidia to work with the proprietary drivers on my Mint was just a couple of clicks away and I could play oblivion and many other games that ran on Wine (and the very few natives we had) just fine. The majority of the Nvidia issues are self-inflicted, always have been, the problem is that because you have to use the proprietary drivers it’s very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and inexperienced people tend to do it very often, so my guess is that 10-15 years ago is when you started using Linux, and broke stuff with the Nvidia driver, nowadays you don’t break that stuff and you think the driver has changed, when what has changed is you.
In the last 18 monts, they’re enabled explicit sync, which was pretty much the turning point in making NVIDIA drivers/GPUs usable. On top of that, they’ve open sourced the kernel modules.
It’s very very different to what it was even 2 years ago.
As a 1060 owner I’m gonna tell you this is probably the case only for newer gpus!
I had no issues on my 1050ti nor my 4070.
I did have issues on my amd phantom 2 many moons ago
I gamed on Linux with a 1080 for a few years there and it was alright, I have gone AMD though just so I don’t have to bother.
I have been using linux with a 1060 for 4 years almost 5, and it isn’t that bad now, tho you need to make a lot of compromise!
At the beginning I experiencing a lot of graphical glitches! Like screen flipping when using an app that used a lot of gpu power or app going black after doing soo!
To this day on that pc I still experience black bars on the sides of apps and as even stated by doitsujin (dxvk creator):
Low D3D12 performance on Nvidia Pascal (and older) GPUs is expected and likely won’t improve much. The hardware has a bunch of limitations that make it very hard to extract good performance. Turing fares better, but only AMD actually runs reasonably well right now.
Source: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/465#issuecomment-744092867
And all of this on xorg to be clear! On the other hand I have an amd laptop with an igpu where I can safely say my experience was almost flawless!
I cannot report anything of the sort out of a GTX-1080. Using Linux Mint, X11 and the proprietary drivers handled by Mint’s driver manager, I got reliable service in video editing, CAD and gaming. I will note, my main computer is now a Radeon system running Wayland.
