18
votes
Linux vs Windows gaming benchmarks: Fedora 40 scores surprising wins
Link information
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- Title
- Linux Scores A Surprising Gaming Victory Against Windows 11
- Authors
- Jason Evangelho
- Word count
- 872 words
Mirror: https://archive.is/8GrVc
There's an x-factor here that I'm surprised was not mentioned- shaders on Proton are pre-compiled (and, if you're using Steam on Linux, cached and uploaded so other users with the same GPU can download your shaders and save time), which can sometimes yield improvements in that range over raw D3D.
There are guides on how to set it up on Windows: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/mlfcsc/a_guide_to_dxvk_on_windows/
I find that there's a minor inconsistency, some games do just do worse with WINE in the middle, but this has generally been my experience with Fedora 39 and 40 over the last six full-time months. Starfield was pretty rough at launch but improved as Bethesda put out tweaks (which didn't target Proton), but in general games do generally feel more performant. It also has a CPU utilization issue that people fix in configs.
I'm getting kind of off topic, but I think the lower required overhead goes far in doing this.
This result also doesn’t surprise me much, and I am not one to follow benchmarks. Way back when Valve was first porting their games to Linux, there was an article posted about how on the exact same hardware the Linux versions of HL2 actually outperformed the Windows by a fairly significant margin.
Of course things have changed quite a bit since then; Windows in particular has become much better than it used to be. But I suspect that at least with AMD or Intel graphics, the fact that they are so much more open means that the OS- and driver-level graphics code gets a lot more scrutiny than it does on Windows.
We don't tend to notice it much these days because even our phones are basically supercomputers now, but Linux has pretty much always been better with resource management and multitasking than Windows was.
Windows is also just less efficient than any Linux desktop and it runs things like Defender and Office-click-to-run in the background, which doesn't help.
I think that's the real takeaway here. The biggest difference between Linux and Windows in general is that in Windows, it's Microsoft setting priorities, and Microsoft is always going to skew towards general purpose use cases, and towards enterprise/home office in particular.
I think Proton is a bigger deal than many people realize, and not just in gaming. The more interoperability there is between Windows machines and Linux, the more Microsoft's death grip on the home market loosens. I know quite a few people who only stick with Windows because their workplaces are fully invested, and it's just not feasible for them to work outside of that environment. If those barriers fall–if, for instance, they're able to use some MS enterprise products through a compatibility layer on a Linux base–then they'd be more than happy to accept some amount of performance loss just to get away from the ballache that Windows and other MS software has become. Hell, I think just forcing the Settings app over Control Panel alone would've lost Microsoft a ton of users had Linux been just the teensiest bit more viable an alternative at the time.