I want to make the move to Mint at the end of Win10 in a week or so, but I’ve heard some horror stories about how tough it can be to get Nvidia GPUs working with them. As it is I have a 4060TI and no money for an AMD GPU. If I can’t get my GPU working with Linux I’m probably gonna end up having to stick with Windows untim I can afford an AMD GPU, the thought of which doesn’t exactly excite me.
This is the biggest hurdle nowadays with Nvidia:
NVIDIA GPUs generally experience a performance penalty when running DirectX 12 games on Linux, with reports indicating a drop of 15-30% compared to Windows. This is largely attributed to driver optimizations and the overhead from using translation layers like Proton and Wine.
To be clear, these are game problems, not NVDIA GPU problems. Some games only work on Windows and need to use a translation wrapper, which has overhead.
To be clear, AMD has much less performance loss if any. In some cases surpassing the performance in Windows on those same games.
So is it the game’s fault? Mostly no. The performance gap is not due to poorly written games, it’s about:
Games that are poorly optimized on Windows will also mostly likely perform badly on Linux.