You know what? I'm done. Between forced updates, bloatware, AND AI FEATURES THAT
NOBODY asked for. I mean, what in heaven's name are you doing, son?
He's not dead. He just needs the right
medicine. But I have an NVIDIA GPU. Isn't that a sin? According to Reddit,
maybe it is true that the mere mention
of NVIDIA in a Linux forum can start an argument. But when Lennis Torvoltz, the
man himself, was here, he mentioned that Linux and NVIDIA have somewhat mended
the relationship now that NVIDIA is balls deep in the AI bubble and [music]
needs Linux developers on their side. Which raises the question, is AMD still
the best GPU choice for Linux? And where
does Intel [music] land? To find out, we spent weeks testing. And I don't just
mean FPS numbers. I'm talking setup process and day-to-day usability, too.
Now, as you might expect, AMD does remain a very strong choice. But you
MIGHT BE SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I SAY, when you see how far the others, especially
certain ones, have come. What never shocks anyone anymore, though, is my
segways to our sponsor, Play Tracker. They keep all your gaming achievements
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[music]
Before we get into the results, let's talk about the setup process. We chose
these five GPUs to represent both recent and slightly older gaming cards from the
main brands and also Intel was there. As
for our DRO, our original plan when this was an article on ltlabs.com was good
old Ubuntu 2404LTS or long-term support. Why that one?
Well, while there are numerous more gaming focused dros like Bazite or Steam
OS, we decided to approach this experiment with the idea that we wanted
a stable, userfriendly, wellsupported desktop experience that can also game.
Maybe we should do a video going through Linux gaming dros, though. Comment which
ones that you guys would want to see. Right out of the gate, we ran into a
problem that will likely be familiar to any Linux early adopter. Driver [music]
support. Out of our five GPUs, four of them failed to work out of the box. Some
were easy fixes. For the 460Ti, Ubuntu has a driver on their additional drivers
page, and after a short reboot, it worked flawlessly. But the 5060 Ti, that
was a bit of a different story. See, back when we originally did this
testing, Ubuntu didn't have a driver for it at all. Meaning, we had to settle for
the official driver from NVIDIA, which if you ask any Linux head, they're going
to tell you is a big no no. As for our
Radeon 970, it too was lacking bakedin
drivers, and AMD hadn't yet rolled out their official installer. Finally, the
Arc B580 appeared to be working until the moment we fired up a game, and it
showed its true colors. Turns out that the easiest fix was to use Kubuntu,
which uses the KDE desktop environment rather than Gnome. Of course, all of
these issues have since been resolved. Yay, open source. So, what's the point
of bringing them up? Well, we said we'd talk about the experience, and it turns
out that for us, the bottom line is that it comes down less to which brand of GPU
you choose and more down to the age and the exact timing. The easiest fix across
the board for all of them was simply to move off of LTS and use Ubuntu 25, which
just uses a newer version of the Linux kernel that had bakedin support for all
of our cards. With everything up and running, how's the day-to-day life?
Well, this is where things get totally
fine. Actually, most people these days, except for you, Dave, and by the way,
you are so good at using computers, do a huge percent of their work in a browser.
Google Docs, Teams, support tickets, even some design work can now be done
fully within a browser. And even for the work that isn't, some combination of
Linux alternative software, virtual machines, or remote desktop applications
could probably allow most people to make the switch. Of course, the day-to-day
usability of Linux is not the point of this video. The point of this video is
the difference in that experience between our various cards. And I kind of
hate to say it, but it's kind of a draw. Again, I know that's not very
satisfying, and I'm sure that you would much rather that I praise the corporate
brand that you love and bash the one that you really hate. But Lin Torvalds
himself is doing his day-to-day work right now on an Intel arc. Not because
of how special it is compared to the other options, but because for his work,
it just plain didn't matter that much. He actually cared more about how quiet
the cooler was. With that said, there will be some huge exceptions to this
depending on the software you use. There could be major differences in
performance, compatibility, and stability. But which card works best for
training LLMs or whatever, that's beyond the scope of this video. Which brings us
to the big question. What about the
games? Now, before we show you the numbers, it's important to understand
that our usual testing software doesn't work quite the same across Windows and
Linux. That's why we stuck to simple in-game benchmarking tools. Also, for
that reason, we can't draw a definitive conclusion about exactly how the Linux
and Windows performance compares to each other. What we can do is get a broad
impression, and we can say that across all of our three brands, if you were
hoping for a big win for Linux, unfortunately, that still isn't the
case. Across the board, we saw lower performance on Linux at 1080p, both with
and without rate tracing, and at 1440p.
Of course, that's not the question that's most on our minds right now.
Rather, we want to know which GPU maker loses the least performance switching
over to Linux. Starting with [music] Intel, the B580 was about 30% worse on
average. That means that most of your games are going to run a full class of
card worse. And you might even find outliers like what we saw with Dota 2
that are frankly unacceptable. I mean, look at this. This game has a native
Linux build. That means no Proton compatibility layer and yet it's getting
barely over half of the performance compared to Windows. As for NVIDIA,
well, things got a little spicy here to say the least. Do you remember I
mentioned that our original article tested on Ubuntu 24? Well, in that test,
the older 4060 Ti was still within striking distance of our Windows tests
in a fair number of our games. Some were further off, but was pretty close. As
for our 5060Ti, I mean, it is a faster,
better card, but the difference between Windows and Linux was about 30% just
like we saw with Intel. Yikes. Though not as yikes as the internet might have
you believe. What is as yikes is the fact that upgrading to Ubuntu 25 for the
retesting that we did for this video saw an overall regression in Linux
optimization across both of our NVIDIA cards. or I don't know, maybe they tuned
the Windows drivers to be even better. All I can say for sure is that NVIDIA
could use just a few of their trillions of dollars to do a little bit better
here. Bringing us finally to AMD end. Well, it won't be a huge surprise to
many of you, but it turns out that if you let open- source folks do open
source things with your drivers, you might get better open-source performance
with some games like Cyberpunk 2077 seeing almost no performance loss and
even some outliers like Strange Brigade on our RX970 that actually performed
better on Linux. For gaming, then AMD emerges once again as a clear winner.
So, if we factor that in, let's see here. We've got AMD wins gaming.
Everything else is a draw. AMD wins.
Or do they? Our final test was to throw a couple of different dros into the mix
because, let's face it, our entire comments section would be complaining if
we didn't. Since AMD came out on top, we
wanted to see how our RX7700 XT would handle Basite, Mangaro, Ubuntu 25, and
Ubuntu 24 across three games. And what we found was that there was functionally
no difference between the three, which I got to say is honestly a really good
thing. I think the last thing that the Linux community wants is a war over
which DRO performs the best for gaming. There's already enough of a war over the
ease of use of gaming across various distros or the unique value propositions
that they offer from pre-installed applications and features or slick UIs
for organizing your favorite retro titles. So, in conclusion, then AMD
wins, but it's also totally valid to go
Linux on any GPU hardware. In fact, I
think it's fair to say that for most people out there, it really doesn't
matter that much. Certainly, it doesn't matter enough that you should wait until
you can afford a new GPU before you take the Linux plunge. If you're interested
in jumping ship from Windows, you're not alone right now. And I think that your
bigger roadblocks are going to be around settling on a DRO that suits you and
getting all of your devices and workflows running. But the good news is
that there's an ever growing number of resources out there for new users. And
we're going to link some of those below for you guys to take a look at. One way
or another, the year of the Linux desktop is getting ever closer. And
arguably, I would say is even today for
people that mostly work inside a browser or would rather give up a little bit of
performance than put up with Windows's Just like you're going to put
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backlog. Try Play Tracker for free today by using our link down below. If you
guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the collab that we did with the
Linus Torvtz, creator of the Linux kernel. He actually ended up going with
an Intel ARC for his new computer and even talked a bit about how NVIDIA and
Linux are getting along quite a bit better these