this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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The YouTube channel "Maximum Fury" conducted a technical test of the new Cyberpunk add-on called "Phantom Liberty" on an older AMD hardware system, testing it separately on Linux and Windows 11. The Linux system, specifically the Fedora distribution called Nobara, performed significantly better, delivering 31% more frames compared to Windows 11.

The hardware used for testing included an Asrock B550 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU from the first RDNA generation, along with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The CPU, RAM, and GPU were overclocked, and the system utilized undervolting to save energy costs.

When testing the game at 1080p resolution with high textures, the Linux system achieved an average of 63.72 frames per second (fps), while Windows 11 managed only 48.55 fps. This suggests that the game should run noticeably smoother on the Linux system.

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[–] [email protected] 165 points 1 year ago (14 children)

A 30% increase in performance just might get gamers to switch over to the new operating system.

Hell that is the difference between a better graphics card for some people. It's like getting a free overclock, just for going outside your comfort zone.

[–] [email protected] 120 points 1 year ago (8 children)

This is a rare and extreme case, which is probably caused by some sort of fluke in the testing method or due to a bug in the game that Linux is handling better. Usually gaming on Linux is like ~5-10% slower for GPU-bound games.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is likely going to change as software support for gaming on Linux improves.

If you consider real high performance computing, with well optimized libraries that can properly use the hardware (including GPUs), 50 % difference between windows and Linux is not really surprising. This is the reason 100% of real high performance computing is done on Linux. It is a better OS for raw performances than windows. For some tasks we are easily talking over twice the performances. It is not always the case, but not surprising at all.

The differences clearly depend on the actual low level implementation of the code. But in general the current situation in gaming, with windows that competes with Linux on raw performances, is only due to lack of software support for gaming on Linux. As this is changing over time, we'll see games performances greatly improve in Linux. Hopefully until the physiological surpass of windows performances.

Currently most of gaming support on Linux is done via some kind of translation layer, that has itself an overhead. It means that the real linux performance would be even better than in all these benchmarks, if it was really possible to compare 1:1 Windows and Linux with native, well optimized code.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is probably more common than you'd think, at least in my anecdotal experience. Converting directx commands to vulkan commands, especially for AMD GPUs, can result in better and more consistent performance on Linux.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Do you have any numbers or examples of games? I know that it's generally the case that DX9 games often have greater performance through DXVK, but DX11 and DX12 should usually be a little bit slower. Also, CPU-bound games are often faster on Linux in my experience, but it's rare for games to be CPU-bound (MMOs etc).

Additionally, OpenGL and Vulkan should be faster on Linux (Native or WINE+OpenGL/Vulkan), but I don't have as much experience with them.

Edit: I found this video which has a few standout games where Linux pulls ahead even on DX11/DX12. Hopefully that's a sign of future trends.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Usually gaming on Linux is like ~5-10% slower for GPU-bound games.

Or faster. Depends heavily on the game. Some things wine + dxvk does better.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah.

I'm personally lucky that my fav titles are CPU hogs, like ARMA 3 and X4: Foundations. Both run better under Linux.

Cyberpunk runs great too, I'm sure once we eventually get the updated drivers for NVIDIA we'll get Ray Recon too.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Sometimes there are also unimplemented/broken features on Linux which people don't notice and save frames. Legit performance improvements over Windows do happen (especially on memory and cpu-limited systems) but I'd be skeptical of any particularly huge ones.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is just one game with one particular graphics card, this might not be the same for example with nvidia cards.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ha that hit hard. This is basically the system I just upgraded to. Well at least it'll run the game well.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

It's the exact same system I upgraded to a couple months ago except I got 5700 x3d. This system slaps bro I love it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There isn't a single piece of software that I use that makes me think I should upgrade my 5600. Not a single game fully utilizes it (on 1440p res)

Older hardware is fine.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me with my i7 2600 playing with oblivion level graphics: yeah, older hw is just fine

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What are the chances that it's just not rendering something due to the DX12 to Vulkan translation?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Possible, but looking through the footage it seems everything is being rendered as expected.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It won't just not render something. DXVK is already a finished thing in that regard. Complete enough that Intel uses it for legacy DirectX support in their ARC GPUs even.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It’s entirely possible that the translation layer will alter timing to expose a race condition such that something doesn’t render.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks Stadia. No wonder it performed so well.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

That may be true, but that’s only because Linux is better than Windows.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Windows 11 is trash. Microsoft kept boasting it was "faster" than 10, but it is (unsurprisingly?) heavy in some weird areas, including a less snappy start menu, more telemetry, invasive integration with their software, you name it. Tried one machine in my collection to try it via an upgrade (a Microsoft Surface Pro 6), and the performance was so bad I ended up going back to Windows 10. Multi-second lag just to get to the program shortcuts is a really bad sign.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

It is just unfortunate that it does not run on Nvidia hardware. The benchmark runs if you disable all RTX features, but it crashes on a new game before you even have full control of the character.

Looking at protondb it looks like all people with Nvidia have issues since the 2.0 update. I hope there will be some fix soon. I don't want to replace the GPU yet it would be a waste (2080 Super).

For now I am playing it on my Steam Deck instead.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

I don't know what you're talking about, It run very well on my Nvidia GPU on Linux before and after the patch and DLC.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Casual vulkan W?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Now can you make it stop defaulting to controller keybindings on Linux?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

echo '2C45C6: EB' | xxd -r - Cyberpunk2077.exe

In the x64 bin folder

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Source, and what is this command supposed to do? We shouldn't blindly copypaste shell commands from online.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Shut up and look at the more frames. - article author mumbling - God damn ingrates always complaining just because things don't work right... 30% more frames is practically 10% less controller!
໒꒰ྀི -᷅ ⤙ -᷄ ꒱ྀི১

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Haha, what a crazy coincidence! I had the original cyberpunk last year on windows 10. It was glitchy as hell but ran semi decent on my hardware.

Deleted it, and last night just installed phantom liberty.

Ngl, the gameplay and feel is so far 10x better than it was before the update. It's actually complete now and if you hated it before I'd honestly recommend another try as so far I'm actually sort of enjoying the gameplay whereas I hated it before and only played for the story.

Anyway, my issue is that with all of the updates it's not running anywhere near as nice as it was before. I'm having to run it on the lowest resolution with every graphic option disabled which stinks because with the gameplay being fixed somewhat I'd really like to enjoy it graphically as well.

I've installed Ubuntu dual boot on my ssd before and can do that again but any tips? I wouldn't know about where to even get phantom liberty on fedora or how to install it?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hey that's a similar setup to mine, except I have 6700XT, on ultra settings, worst case scenario I get ~60FPS, on average it's 80

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

It's a well known fact that every second major release of Windows is crap.

  • Windows 95 was not the best.
  • Windows 95OSR2 was the one you wanted.
  • Windows 98 sucked.
  • Windows 98 2nd ed. worked as the former should have.
  • Windows 2000 was great but had no support for running games.
  • XP solved that and made people leave Windows 98 (I deliberately left out the clusterf... Windows ME.).
  • Windows Vista sucked balls.
  • Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.
  • Windows 8? Metro on phones, yes! On desktop? No no no.
  • Windows 10 got Microsoft back on track again.

I thought the new upgrade scheme (2 editions per year) Microsoft introduced with Windows 10 would be like "every second release will suck" but it started to look like Microsoft were able to break the curse....

...and then Windows 11 happened.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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