RIP Windows: Linux GPU Gaming Benchmarks on Bazzite (GamersNexus new Linux Benchmarking is here!)
RIP Windows: Linux GPU Gaming Benchmarks on Bazzite (GamersNexus new Linux Benchmarking is here!)
121 comments
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I've noticed a lot more talk about Bazzite lately and I've been wanting to at least give it a try as a daily driver. I'm not us gaming though I do dev work and what have you. For people on Bazzite that also do that, how is it? easy to set up for that like say using Doom Emacs or what have you?
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I use Bazzite for my HTPC (AMD NUC).
For a "set it and forget it" gaming console experience? It is awesome. It feels like I already have a GabeCube under my TV (that I bought for probably half the price...). And when I have to do more complicated things than "run the update once a month", I just ssh in from either my desktop or laptop.
But... it is an immutable/atomic distro. So if the packages you want to add are flatpaks or appimages? You are probably fine. Otherwise? You get into a mess where you are adding packages to your layers (?) and kinda feel like you are playing with fire. I did that to get iperf3 installed to test some networking upgrades and it was mostly painless but it was also a really bad experience versus
sudo dnf install iperf3. And... even on machines where I spend 90% of my time ssh'ing into servers, I still tend to want to install a good amount of local packages as a developer.So my suggestion would be to stick to Bazzite for gaming first platforms and continue to use whatever distro you like (Fedora for the win!) for "real" computers.
Also, if you aren't as annoyed by atomic distros as I am, I would still be wary of Bazzite. They have a lot of different SKUs and I don't care enough to try to parse what each one does. But the common use case is to basically treat a machine like a Steam Deck... which means you boot into Big Picture with essentially no login screens or a REALLY insecure pin code. And then you switch to desktop mode with a single click.
There are ways to harden that (and very much an argument of whether you need to harden a machine in your home). And Linux, generally, has very good protections by actually requiring auth for
sudo. But I already feel sketchy that I am logged into Steam/GoG on a box with almost no protections. But I also live in an environment where I don't have to worry about someone buying 10k in fortnite bucks on my TV.-
You can use distrobox/distroshelf to set up a container with a regular distro and install packages in that instead of layering; if a package installs a GUI application you can export the application and it will show up in your applications menu.
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Bazzite has a Desktop image explicitly to cover your last issue. The SKU picker has a "Do you want Steam Gaming Mode?" question and explains that it's intended for less secure single user/HTPC setups. If you say no, you'll get the standard Desktop image with a standard user login like any other distro.
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The solution for packages is do it in a container, that way its easy and doesnt involve layering more stuff.
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Dev work in the uBlue family (and yes I use bazzite for dev) leans heavily on distrobox (think development containers). Took a bit to adapt but now I think it's the ducks nuts. Because you decouple the dev environment from the main, immutable OS you get a lot of wins, especially if you work with a lot of different projects as you can setup distroboxes specifically for each. AI code that only works with specific drivers / libraries / python with instructions only for Ubuntu or Arch, no worries, make up a distrobox, when you're finished archive it and spin it up later if needed. If you're only working one project on say LTS or something it's going to be much less of a win, but for the flexible developer it's a godsend.
As to doom emacs or whatever, I have a post install script for distroboxes that sets up my preferred environment for the big 3 (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu), it's not hard. Very much a kill your darlings philosophy.
ETA Because of this workflow it really doesn't matter what the host OS is, so it may as well be something I can game on, and I'm fond of the Fedora relative stability with sharp, but not bleeding edge.
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as i understand it, bazzite is very gaming-oriented.
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bazzite is an excellent all-round linux distro for contemporary spec computer (gpu, >=16GB ram)
i use it for rust and c# dev work using distrobox. all gui ide's and tooling run in the containers with excellent performance
i also layer a handful of packages on the "immutable" or atomic base os for some carefully chosen tools i want. the base os is generally well fitted out
very highly recommend as daily dev driver and also gaming
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See also:
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Bazzite is part of the Universal Blue project, which is basically three distros based on Fedora Silverblue.
Bazzite - gaming focus Aurora - KDE desktop Bluefin - Gnome desktop
Look up the universal blue site and you’ll see more about them.
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TIL helpful
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Bluefin and Auroa are for you, changed how I program and organise, our you can make your own template and just pop everything you're missing in the containerfile similar to how nix pkgs works
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I'm a huge fan of Aurora, the least popular ublue desktop OS. Bazzite is great, too. But I prefer Aurora.
Hell, even my wife uses it and has no complaints.
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distroboxes are incredible and distrobox expose is legitimately the coolest thing I've seen in ages. I have protonge and proton tricks which every game uses installed in a distrobox, and via distrobox expose my host can use them without any any other setup. it's awesome.
same thing goes for any of my dev tools. i was just shocked about the ability to expose commands and have it be seamless enough for games.
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If IDEs from Flathub and CLI tools from Homebrew serve your needs, no further action is required. If deeper system integration is needed for VSCode (ie. devcontainers), Docker (ie. Podman is not sufficient), etc - then see below specialized images.
There is a whole Bazzite for Devs page that mentions Bazzite-DX for development to handle some things like devcontainers: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite-dx
Their main website also says:
Running a game, a development environment, a container for your Jellyfin server, or a utility only available on the Arch User Repository? You can rest assured it works here. Bazzite is developed on Bazzite.
At the end of the day, its an immutable fedora distro. Which may serve your needs. or may not. And bazzite's primary focus is on gaming. It will most likely work (given a few criteria), but it may not given that is not their primary focus.
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I’m not us gaming though I do dev work and what have you
Bazzite isn't really for you. Bazzite is a gaming 1st distro. You probably want a more normal general use distro.
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Don't agree with this. I do dev work in bazzite without any issues. Just spin a distrobox and that's it. Also it's better that usual dev environments, just like a python env is better than using native os python.
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Not true. I can even develop Linux device drivers on it after figuring out modules signing. Basic stuff if you ask me. Bazzite is as good for developers as any other distro.
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I use Bazzite for devwork too, I do use distrobox though which allows me to get proper dependencies without layering more onto the system image.
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Bazzite has a developer version. Not sure what the differences are though. It's on their site.
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If you don't mind a learning
curvecliff, NixOS is great for development, and I haven't had any issues gaming either.-
Recommending someone who's curious about Bazzite to maybe check out NixOS instead is... Certainly something lol
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its nice as a console. boots right into steam, start game with controller, bam. Since you can get Lutris games added to your steam library, there are so many game and platform options available.
bad: yeah you need to tinker around with a couple of games so they run right. Some only start with the specific proton version, some just take very long to start, some dont like the steam overlay, etc. But once you have them set up, its the best.
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We have Linuxbrew. Homebrew but for Linux. Battletested by countless devs previously using MacOS.
Come join us.
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I initially installed Bazzite when switching to Linux, but the development experience made me switch to Kubuntu after a few days. I've had various problems with development tools which probably related to Bazzite's immutability. For example I couldn't get Godot to connect with a code editor. I'm sure there were solutions to those problems, but I haven't regretted switching. Development works great now and gaming feels just as good to me as it did on Bazzite.
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Look up Bazzite DX. Its a developers oriented version. Other than that, distrobox is amazing for creating containers for your projects, allowing you to have a sane and stable dev environment
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Bazzite comes with no dev tools pre-installed and a lot of gaming-related stuff.
Of course you can add what you need through flatpaks, containers or image layering, but why not choose a distro aimed at dev work in the first place? -
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I really like that now some Content Creators are working on providing useful information for Linux gamers. Especially information like bad Frame pacing or "unreasonable" bad performance for some certain games for certain hardware is a very important information to make a good decision when buying a card.
Me personally I am not very interested in the performance comparison between Linux and Windows. I choose Linux as my daily driver for specific reasons, and game performance was not a high priority. But knowing which Hardware might have strange performance problems compared to other Hardware if I wamt to game is always a very nice thing.
I liked that the Intel B580 was included in the charts. This gave me some usefull information for comparing it to a AMD 9060 XT. Only thing I am missing is if it is the 8GB or 16GB version of the Sapphire Pulse. But I did not check their Blog/Site post yet.
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Me personally I am not very interested in the performance comparison between Linux and Windows.
Very fair, it's not really the reason I made the jump either. I would like to see that tackled at some point though, perhaps with some external recording setup to eliminate the apple/orange comparison issues between benchmarking tools.
I switched about a year ago, and was remarkably impressed to see performance gains or only minor decreases in everything I compared, when running my own benchmarks. I'd love to see that result more widely reported, and also academically to see it validated better than I can, across more hardware and games and with better methodology.
Even if not though, really glad to see Gamer's Nexus taking it seriously and giving us some of the same access to information as we would have comparing hardware for a Windows config. Definitely wishing them the best as they explore automation and even more tooling to make this better.
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100% this. I've been on Linux longer than Steam has, and I'm not changing anytime soon. I'm probably also not going to buy Nvidia (I value FOSS drivers), but maybe I will if the performance gap is significant enough.
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If nividia just dropped a driver the quality of their windows one randomly one day. I would expect like 70%+ of the Linux community would suddenly be buying a Nvidia card no questions asked.
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I forget as I wasn't looking for intel, but If it ran stuff, it was likely the 16GB, and if it was excluded often for not running higher resolutions it was probably the 8GB, as they did mention the lower ram cards had weird issues in some games and simply crashed on load.
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I appreciate the work they are putting into this. I think we will see more linux adoption in the future as microsoft keeps doing all the things it has been with windows 11.
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I'm of a few minds on this.
First and foremost: I am a huge Gamers Nexus fan and think Steve et al are a great complement to Wendell when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop. And I love that they actually addressed the elephant in the room where... quite often you actively don't want to use the linux binaries for a game.
But I do think that having Linux as the second class benchmarks are inherently going to cause problems. Assuming they stick to doing a batch every couple months, that... okay, ain't nobody actually buying hardware unless they have to. But still. And this was apparently collected during one of the months where nVidia was a complete shitshow. But Dragon's Dogma 2 completely breaking is the kind of thing where... look, I became WAY too aware of exactly how denuvo registers a machine while I was debugging that. I was able to get DD2 to run beautifully on my PC but... as a HUGE DD1 fan even I think I wasted my life doing that (would do it again though).
But I keep thinking of how many Influencers have done a variant of "tech isn't fun anymore". And... it kind of isn't. But from the editorializing from Steve et al over the past year or so, it is clear they are excited that things are actually changing sometimes week to week and so many of these problems are ACTUALLY solvable by users. Sometimes it is trivial (check protondb for what settings) and sometimes you find yourself going down a rabbit hole of just how bad the Nioh 2 PC port actually was.
I suspect this ends with the vast majority of outlets embracing "XBOX For PC" in a year or two... and Steve looking even more like the crazy old man of PC reviews. But I do think this will go a long way towards helping the fence sitters get away from MS.
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when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop
🤣🤣🤣
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Quarter century, but who’s counting really 😆
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At 3:27: "Linux still isn't for everybody."
Please stop saying this! Linux is for everybody. It's Windoze that isn't because that's where the exceptions lie. E.g., it's only some people that need 3ds Max or some other niche proprietary software that isn't supported on Linux. Conversely, the majority of the population simply uses the browser for email, videos, simple administrative tasks, et cetera, for which Linux is perfect and better than anything M$.
Hypothetically, let's say Linux Mint came preinstalled on every computer instead of Windoze. People would lose their shit if through an update the UX suddenly became like Windoze.
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Linux isn't for everyone, this isn't a false statement, it's 100% true. I consider myself more tech savvy than the general population and I have had to do a LOT of troubleshooting on every Linux install I tried, for things that should have just worked out of the box, and I needed help from friends who are much more tech savvy (people who deal with servers for a living and their hobbies are setting up NAS servers and messing with tech in general) and they all had some trouble with some issues I was having, like for example a Bluetooth USB adapter not working that on windows was just plug and play, and it turned out that the GUI that came with mint just didn't actually change any settings, and I had to go to the terminal and type the commands to directly control the Bluetooth stuff. I can deal with all of these and other issues, but my dad who has to be reminded how to download a picture from whatsapp on his laptop to send through his email could never deal with Linux, something would pop up every single day and he would need someone to help him. Hell, I installed libre office for him to use and he kept having issues with it, his documents wouldn't show up, they would not be saved properly or where he wanted, would lag a lot, updates would be super slow and that's ignoring stuff like the GUI differences that made him constantly have to stop and search for what he wanted. I ended up installing office and cracking it for him to be able to keep messing with his text documents and excel sheets
If Linux is to become the OS for everyone, it needs to become much more foolproof, and currently it is not that
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i switched to linux mint permanently finally after support for 10 ended, and wished i had done so earlier. Even the problems i have had with linux have been more pleasant than what i have had with windows, even though they have been more disruptive. I guess knowing that I could probably fix them if i bother to look into it hard enough, while on windows there is good chance there is nothing i can do about it.
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I switched to Linux a while back for gaming and I am happy with it. There were a couple initial issues getting the sound and screen colors configured correctly and I did lost a few frames, but it seems to be improving.
Still some games I can not get to work on Linux, such as Sacred 2 and some other older ones. Probably just a lack of knowledge on my part. Still no US tax prep software that I trust for Linux, though.-
Try free tax USA next time. It's what we use!
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What tax prep software do you use? I thought they had all gone to just webapps at this point ..
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Maybe they mean for a business?
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H&R Block. They still used a downloaded app last year.
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such as Sacred 2
Where are you installing it?
Maybe this helps? https://www.protondb.com/app/225640#lTflZjszpq
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I was trying to run it from steam. I tried a while back, looks like support has gotten much better.
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I just threw it on the family laptop to give it another life. So far it’s great, and I would honestly suggest it as a regular user desktop system. My kids will be fine with it, so would my mom, and any of my non-tech-savvy friends.
Personally I probably won’t switch from my beloved LMDE, but I’m also a greybeard nerd who’s set in my ways.
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that's how I started 15 years ago… put it on a netbook just to try it and loved it… showed the wife and she said "it's coooler than windows" (loved her more from that day)… windows never entered my house since
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solving anti-cheat would basically seal the Dingus
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It's solved, they just refuse to enable it
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Enabling anticheat means the user must sacrifice many of their core freedoms just to play a video game. And in principle anticheat will never fully prevent cheating short of pointing a camera at the user and watch them the whole time they are playing.
I hope Linux community can push back. This whole thing is idiotic and harms the consumers.
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Enabling anticheat means the user must sacrifice many of their core freedoms just to play a video game.
Lots of games support anti-cheat in Linux. It's critical to note that anti-cheat in general is not the issue.
Kernel-level anti-cheat however is. It's a massive security issue and something that everyone, including Windows users, should roundly reject.
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What I don't get is "easy anti cheat" seemed to work fine for elden ring (provided you created an empty file when SotE dropped and you didn't have it). I have seen next to zero cheating in my experiences. Although I do realize souls type multiplayer is very different than competitive FPSs.
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cheating absolutely ruins a lot of my favorite fps games. many of them are unplayable unless you have some well moderated private server to play on
souls type multiplayer is very different than competitive FPSs
extremely so. yes good talk thank you
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Gaming will be the drive to get more people to use Linux and I’m enjoying the trajectory it’s on.
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Damn Wendell actually got me thinking of CachyOS with his shameless plugs 😁.
I would mostly do gaming but there are those occasional times where I just need some random functionality which I perhaps may miss with Bazzite.-
I’ve been on Cachy forever, across two PCs.
It's fast. Its maintainers are great. It has everything, preconfigured sanely. It Just Works.
…I don’t see myself switching distros ever again. I can’t think of a reason to, nor anything I’d want from others.
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I enjoyed cachy os when I tested it out. I'd like to see how it compares to Bazzite tho. I thought I tried an immutable is years back and it annoyed the hell out of me but I can't remember.
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What kind of functionality do you use on bazzite specifically?
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How is Bazzite with Waydroid?
I am looking to change my Sons laptop from Mint; he is using Minecraft education for some things at school. It is an older dell laptop; but has plenty of power for a 10yo kid.
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Not very difficult to find, it is supported https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Waydroid_Setup_Guide/
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AMD is more stable in games where Proton/Native Linux builds have weird issues, sometimes leading to a 9070xt leading a 5080 (even beating a 5090 in like starfield but like, lol.) Raytracing still heavily prefers Nvidia.
Does not directly compare to windows benchmarks. Low V-ram causes failures. Some native versions for linux are actively worse than running windows through Proton Loading Shaders before launching game can take long (longer on Nvidia cards), and can be required very often.
Suggest watching the last 10m where they talk about these issues if you don't have time for the whole video.
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A short summary would have been nice. As far as I know YT even gives a AI generated one for free.
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From the video description:
We're finally benchmarking GPU performance in Linux, first using the Bazzite OS following thousands of community requests specifically for this operating system. A lot of this is exploratory and research for establishing methodology, so we're still learning how to control the platforms and software for this benchmarking. In the very least, this allows us to start generating some exit velocity from Windows for some people. Linux still isn't for everyone. Some users, like our own production machines, are bound to Windows by compatibility requirements with certain software. But gaming has dramatically improved on Linux over the years and is developing fast (despite still having issues), and so it may slowly start to become more viable for gaming users in particular.
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In short: They made a test suite that runs on Linux. No clear advantage was measured? Hence people are empowered to switch to Linux?
(Not gonna watch the long video, but am a least curious to the state of gaming on Linux and this is not a GN community i.e. I expect others to also not want to watch such a long video but be kept in the loop)
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I'm not sure what advantage a summary of benchmarks across multiple games would bring, or how that amount of data could be summarized.
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Is there really zero windows benchmarks for comparison in this entire video?
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Yes. They were very concerned about head to head comparisons because the tools for measuring FPS and stuff works differently.
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I'll also add on that there are a LOT of blog posts and youtube shorts about "Game X is 20% faster on Linux than Windows!!!!" that everyone loves to regurgitate. And the reality is that it was a single outlier or it all boils down to Steam distributing "good enough" shaders to Linux but not Windows (and let's not get into the weeds of why).
Whereas GN, especially since "All New Data" a few years back, have very heavily focused on reproducible and "good" data. That is why Steve basically apologized for not having error bars or having what looks like messy data for a few of those runs. And they've done entire videos on their testing methodology that often includes MANY runs to normalize out the noise.
So without being able to explain exactly why? I doubt they will EVER put Windows and Linux data on even the same page of their website. But... someone who cares will be able to see trends.
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GamersNexus' normal GPU benchmark videos are to help gamers compare GPU performance on various games to determine what they should purchase for their needs. With this new video, they are now providing the same service for Linux Gamers going forward.
The goal of this video was not to compare Windows performance to Linux performance. There are videos that exist which do that, if that is what you're were hoping for.
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If we want to convince the windows crowd that linux is a viable alternative, we really need the comparison to show the difference isn't so bad.
I've seen the ancient gameplays video you linked, but there is very little out there for linux vs windows benchmarks that are of high quality. Most videos tend to be incredibly amateur. I really hoped they would throw in a couple of composite charts with windows vs linux results since GN has all this data already and for a simple summary it shouldn't have been much work at all. Instead I need to look at multiple videos.
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big bars are from the video. small bars are from https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/amd-needs-just-shut-amd-radeon-rx-9060-xt-16gb-gpu-review in july
I do want linux to gain market share, but this stuff is important. Eagle 5060 can't even run Dragons Dogma 2 really on linux at 1440p max settings, but can handle it on windows at 1440p max settings. Doesn't apply to me... but this is why we need to see the parity.
9070xt seems fairly close, compared to nvidia
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8&t=2746
I'm not sure I quite understand the issue Steve has with things updating when adding new cards.
Sure, updates during a single benchmark series is a problem but what is the issue with the system being updated for the next benchmarks?
Proton/amdgpu/Mesa receiving updates is no different than installing newer "Game Ready" drivers when a new GPU comes out.
I assume they don't go out of their way to install older (potentially incompatible) drivers on Windows just so they can compare two separate benchmarks.
Besides that, after disabling Flatpak and rpm-ostree updates in Bazzite, the only remaining variable is Proton. Which should be easily fixed by manually copying a fixed Proton version to their compatibility tools and using that.
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Without re-testing their entire suite of cards for every new card review (which is cost prohibitive), performance changing from updates would make the comparisons between cards less useful, as it cannot be determined if the newer card being tested is better or worse purely on the merits of the hardware itself, since newer software may be artificially making it look better or worse than the tested cards that came before, and thus the actual integrity and usefulness of the testing comes into question.
They are trying to assemble a like-for-like dataset that doesn't require their entire catalog of cards to be regularly retested to ensure that it remains like-for-like. Keeping all the software the same across tests ensures that they can add new data piecemeal and still retain an apples-to-apples comparison.
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I switched to Linux when I bought a 9070xt. They had only been available for a couple of months.
I had to tinker with mesa stuff to be able to play ; otherwise my system didn't understand I had a GPU and games just wouldn't start.
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121 comments
I'm so happy to see some big channels doing these Linux tests. I know it's probably way more difficult since there are thousands of distros to try!
You don't need to test every distro.
Honestly you could capture 90 percent of the market with just arch and Debian/Ubuntu.
You could add 2 or 3 of the gaming focused distros for comparison however since they tend to be built on top of the two above things are more likely going to vary based on configuration more than which distro or de you are using.
They don't test all the windows varieties either. 10, 11, 23h2, 25h2, home, pro, N, ...
Lets be real, Ubuntu/Arch is the way to go. Debian is just not present on gaming set ups, Arch is close to what Valve is doing and Ubuntu has like 69 downstream distros.