Hey folks. I’m a new dad which means my gaming time is at a premium, but I am going through a big cleanse of the enshittification era of the internet right now, and Windows 11 is kinda giving me bad vibes.
Last time I tried to run Linux it was ok and worked the majority of the time, but ray tracing and a few games caused some issues. I was also using game pass which of course doesn’t work on Linux, so I dropped back to windows.
How is Nvidia life these days? I’ve got a 3080 and an AMD 9800X3D so it should be fine for most games I imagine.
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If you’ve already got an Nvidia card, there’s no sense in going out and buying a new one just for Linux. Just make sure you choose a distro that explicitly supports Nvidia out of the box.
I started with Nvidia as well and then just got AMD at the next upgrade.
I’m on a 2080 on Mint and have been for the past year, haven’t had any major issues so far.
Don’t get a 50 series card. If you must upgrade I’d go for a second hand 40xx. But honestly with a 3080 you’re perfectly fine for now if you’re not married to ultra 4k 144hz.
I’m on a 3070 and it does fine for most games. That said I don’t play a lot of AAA titles but the ones I do play fine at medium or high settings mostly.
Also I used to dual boot, but since about a year I moved to 100% Linux and have only had the occasional issue. Mint with Nvidia send l seems to work pretty well these days.
I mean, if you can get a 50 series card at MSRP then do, the scalping sucks but otherwise it’s still a slight perf/€ win over 40 series.
Don’t buy nvidia. Intel and AMD opensourced their drivers and, more importantly, care for their customer needs. And i am talking about gaming customers.
The only thing nvidia cares about is AI and lots of money.
They lie to their customers (fake frames, paperlaunch) und neglect the gaming needs in favor of AI.
And, after all, AMD does not use 12V high power connectors, just simple, non burning, dual 8 pins
OP already has a Nvidia card and isn’t planning on buying anything. Yes Nvidia is a horrible company, but that doesn’t answer OP’s question. What answers OP’s questions is: Yes, go ahead and try Linux, your Nvidia card is going to work just fine.
Try Linux Mint or CachyOS, most will work out of the box also Nvidia graphics cards.
I heard that CachyOS is pretty good with NVIDIA so maybe that’s the best bet and just see if all my games I’m currently playing work.
MultiplayerGames with anticheat in kernel won’t work in any linux distribution, the rest is fine with proton.Nobara with the nvidia build has been great for me
I’ve been doing almost all of my gaming on Linux for 2 years now, running a 5800X3D and an RTX 3080.
Why the “almost”? I love to fly flight simulators, mostly DCS World, in VR and am still using an HP Reverb G2 (Windows) headset.
Everything else works without issues on Linux for me. I’ve been sitting on Pop!_OS 22.04 but if I were to install today, I’d go for Linux Mint
I’d also recommend considering a more gaming-focused distro, they are increasingly popular, easy to use and tuned for gaming with everything you’re going to need. SteamOS, Bazzite, PikaOS are all strong choices with rapidly ongoing development at this point (and there are others).
Gaming distros may not be as inherently “stable” as more productivity-focused distros like Mint, but for gaming you don’t really want to be. Gaming is pretty cutting-edge, even on Windows you need to get your updates promptly and keep your drivers up-to-date etc if you want many games to work properly. And that situation is doubly true on Linux since it is still a bit less mature for gaming and some parts of the ecosystem are a bit “experimental”. A gaming distro balances the need for stability with the need for the latest and greatest games to run properly and with good performance.
For gaming, pop os has always been good for me on amd
Same here. I’ve never run into any of the edge cases that need the bleeding edge updates, and I’ve been running the same install for a while without any stability issues.
Yeah, I literally tested my whole steam library. Around 100 games. Only like 3 wouldn’t work at all, and those were old somewhat wonky games. I even got most non steams working too. In steam, a minute looking at proton db and making minor adjustments to the config was needed maybe 5-10% of the time.
Important to note that most of my games are 10+ years old
To me, Nvidia isn’t worth the trouble on Linux unless you have specific (non-gaming) needs that can’t be met with AMD hardware.
With this in mind, I kept using my last Nvidia card until it needed replacing, and then switched to AMD. Seems like that might make sense for you, too.
Linux Mint, a 3090 and zero problems
Linux Mint and 3060 - no problems here either.
linux mint and 3060ti rolling smoothly
I just did a new build with AMD 9800X3D and RTX 5080. I’ve been dual booting Win 11 and Nobara. I haven’t done direct head to head benchmarks but Deep Rock Galactic, Deep Rock Survivor, Satisfactory, Skyrim, Atomic Heart all have run fine on Nobara.
The big difference I’ve noticed is Cyberpunk 2077. For whatever reason the AI frame generation tool doesn’t seem to work on Nobara so max FPS is around 65-70 with max raytracing/graphics settings. On Windows I got around 75+ and with the AI frame generation it goes up to 180 (I realize this is not a feature that some people like, please just realize I’m reporting my testing results).
Now all of that said, there is this weird jitteriness along the edges of objects with rapid camera movement in Cyberpunk on Windows, even at 180 fps, that isn’t there on Nobara. So even though the objective frame rate is much lower on Nobara, it actually feels much smoother and nicer.
¯\(ツ)/¯
AMD is ideal but Nvidia is fine. Basically any game that would work on AMD will work on Nvidia (only exception I know of is the VR mode of Phasmophobia). Gamepass still won’t work though - blame Microsoft for that one.
That said, Nvidia has more of a performance hit when switching. Ancient Gameplays recently did a video comparing Nobara vs Windows 11, with both the RX 7900XTX and the RTX 4080 Super. These were his average results across 20 games:
RX 7900XTX: 1080p +2%, 1440p +0%, 4k -2.2%
RTX 4080S: 1080p -13.8%, 1440p -13%, 4k -10.2%
So your games will work. They just might run 10%-15% slower until you can snag an AMD card. If you’re interested in fully committing, looks like most used 3080s are going for ~$500 on ebay, so you could probably get an AMD card and get most of your money back.
AMD is ideal but Nvidia is fine
Not in all cases. I need GPU passthrough to play VR games in a VM. Only Nvidia cards work for that.
I have an Nvidia RTX 3070 and it works fine in kubuntu.
One of the latest games I played where I used HDR and ray tracing was Ghostrunner. It worked fine but with some intermittent slow downs.
I also have an AMD processor and that works great. You get a lot more bang for your buck.
You’ll be fine. Although if you ever change, go with an ATI Radeon card for graphics because it’s better supported by Linux and will have less potential problems.
A couple years ago I swore off Nvidia on principle. For periods things would seem fine but updates would randomly break games and other things. Sold that card and got an amd haven’t seen that issue since.
I have a 7900 XTX. It just works™.
This. I moved to the 7900 XTX after trying to get my 4080 to work properly for a solid month. Works perfectly now.
I got a 3080 and I have not encountered any issues on the latest drivers, released a few days ago.
Before that, I had a minor issue (artifacts) on some websites when on a high refresh rate. Fixed with latest drivers.
My next card is going to be nvidia, too.
Alrighty, I’m going to give it a real go when I finish moving house and see how it goes.
I daily drive Linux, gaming quite a bit and I have a 3080.
There are occasional annoyances, for example when I wake from suspend one of my monitors doesn’t activate until I change display settings (which I do now with a script bound to a hotkey, though a fix is in the pipe). Most of the time it doesn’t cause me any issues.
I’ve kept a Windows install on a partition as a backup in case I have real compatibility issues but I haven’t booted it in weeks (even then, it was to play an anti cheat game, nothing NVIDIA related).
I use Hyprland (on Arch, btw) so I’m technically using unsupported software but I have had no major issues.
On the plus side, I can run local AI easily and DLSS/DLAA, to me, produce higher quality results and with less overhead. Ray tracing is technically in the plus column but most of the time I’d rather just have higher FPS than the visual quality.
I don’t have HDR gaming just yet (my biggest complaint) because gamescope likes to crash, assuming it launches in the first place. However, a Wayland update is going to fix this imminently (next major release) so you can get HDR without gamescope.
Basically, there were trying times in the past but currently (assuming you’re using current versions of things and not some LTS release from a year ago) it’s largely a smooth experience.
