So I’ve been a little wary of installing Linux on my desktop since I have a 1660 ti as a graphics card and read that there are some problems with drivers and such. Are my fears unfounded/outdated? Anyone experienced any problems and what Linux distro should I look to use for gaming?
I use Fedora 37 workstation with the Nvidia proprietary drivers from RPM Fusion. Relatively painless install, with the option to sign the kernel module if you want to keep secure boot on. Only downside is the Nvidia drivers still don’t work great with Wayland, so I normally login with Gnome on X for gaming.
Same here. Fedora 37 on 3070Ti. Sadly, not all nvidia options are available in games’ settings (like dlss). Also performance is sadly a bit lower than on windows. But according to Nick from TLE it should get better soon. No such issue on AMD.
DLSS doesn’t seem to work in any of the games I play, so I’ve been using FSR in games that support it. It’s not as good as DLSS but it does the job for now.
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I’ve just switched from a GTX 1080 to a Radeon RX 6650 because of problems I was having with the Nvidia binary drivers.
Games performed just fine, but my desktop performance would slow down dramatically if I had a lot of things running at the same time, especially YouTube videos. This issue seems completely resolved now that I’m using an AMD card.
However, based on what I’m reading online it seems that a lot of people are using the Nvidia binary drivers without any major issues. So maybe my experience isn’t very representative either.
I am looking for switching to Linux as well and run a 1080 as well. How would you compare the general performance (desktop usage and gaming) of the RX 6650 versus the 1080? I am looking for getting a RX6650 or RX7600 as well, that is why I ask
I haven’t played many intensive games on the 6650XT yet, but from what I found online the 6650XT is roughly equivalent to a 1080, slightly faster even.
That is great to know, thanks! I plan to use it primarily for programming, but I would like to have the option to play some games every so often.
nvidia’s usually a pain in the ass when it comes to linux. that being said, it isn’t too bad. just don’t expect good wayland support. stick to x org and you’re probably fine once you get the nvidia drivers installed and signed.
as far as distro goes, i recommend fedora. overall really solid choice, had 0 issues with it, gaming included.
I’d highly recommend checking out Nobara, it’s based on Fedora but optimized for gaming. In addition to supporting nVidia out of the box, it has a ton of tweaks and gaming related apps pre-installed, such as Steam and Lutris, which is a huge time saver. Should be the most out-of-the-box gamer friendly distro, outside of SteamOS I reckon.
I’ll check it out, thanks :)
if you use the proprietary drivers you’ll be fine, probably not even noticable
if you go with a Radeon card or try using open source drivers then go with god
I’ve been using Linux Mint with an Nvidia GPU for a few months now. I have run into a few issues where it hasn’t wanted to behave itself, buf nothing major or unsolvable.
I had laptop with descrete Nvidia graphics card and had no trouble with most of the distros i tried. Theh either offer inbuilt driver app, which let’s you choose which driver to use or you google it and follow an uncomplicated guide.
That being said, i always recommend dual booting at first, something might go wrong with your first installation or you just forgot that you had something important on windows. If it’s a desktop, i recommend getting and extra ssd. Which you will use for linux (for now). Later it’s always convenient to have extra storage. They are not too expensive anymore. You can have your linux playground, where you can test distros and see how they actually work on your machine and you can revert to windows in the meantime.
I’ve been gaming on Linux with nvidia gpus for over a decade, it is fine… There is a lot of negativity about nvidia because the drivers are not open. But they work, and I have not personally had any issues.
You’ll want to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers if you want any sort of performance. It can be a pain to get started sometimes, but when you get them working, they work and performance is good.
Personally I’m annoyed because any time I change my kernel version, I have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers. It’s quite possible that this is not an issue if you don’t use an extremely weirdly configured install of Gentoo like I currently do.
Ok, thanks for the reply!
Basically it just works except if you use a bleeding edge distro like Arch where the newest Linux kernels are sometimes still incompatible with the binary only Nvidia driver. Overall the experience is a bit better with an AMD GPU and the open-source drivers though.
Completely agree on the AMD point. I’ve gone out of my way to only buy AMD for quite a few years now due to their support of the open source driver. Everything just works with no fiddling about with drivers.
Idk. Proprietary Nvidia driver on Debian or vanilla Fedora aren’t easy for non-tech folks either. Last time I tried with Debian was 2018 though.
On Fedora it got super easy as well. Debian is just by design not very friendly to closed-source drivers.
Good to know. Thanks
The biggest unexpected issue I have experienced was caused by kernel and driver mismatch on Manjaro. Nothing like restarting after an update and realizing it won’t boot…
Great recommendations here already, just chiming in to say that it works great with no issues at all.
It’s not great I can’t even use nvenc and have to use software encoding for OBS…
I mean everything else works, so I guess this is a high bar? ?
Just try it out. I have a laptop with a 2060. My first Linux distro was Pop!_OS, but I’ve used nobara, fedora, and eventually settled on LinuxMint cinnamon.
My primary issue with all of the distros I’ve tried, is the older display server, X.ORG is the only display server that really plays well with Nvidia, the newer and more streamlined server, Wayland, does not. This has lead to a lot of wonky experiences with multi monitor support. Certain resolutions and refresh rates haven’t played well together in various power usage profiles. At most, it has lead to a couple hours of headache, googling fixes and trying shit out, until I find something that works. When I find the right fix, I make note of it in case I ever need to reinstall. I’ve been gaming on mint for about a year now and I’m very pleased.
Is this related to running different refresh rates on multi-monitor setups or something different?
My current solution has just been disabling my secondary monitors when playing FPS/competitive games so I’m not limited to 60hz.
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I’ve been gaming on Nvidia cards since I switched over 3 years ago and only had a few issues.
On initial install, the opensource nvidia drivers wouldn’t work - I had to go into the terminal and select the proprietary ones. That’s pretty much it, really. Other than that, I’ve had about the same amount of issues with AMD(integrated graphics) and Nvidia.
On the plus side, Nvidia has a nice little control panel. It’s basic, doesn’t have all that GeForce Experience stuff, plus there are command line utilities like nvidia-smi(basic info) and nvtop(temp, clock, usage, memory stats). AMD doesn’t have a control panel, that I’m aware of.
As far as distro, I’d say just chose the one you’re most comfortable with. I don’t think there are any huge differences between them concerning gaming performance.
