WEBVTT

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You know what? I'm done. Between forced updates, bloatware, AND AI FEATURES THAT

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NOBODY asked for. I mean, what in heaven's name are you doing, son?

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He's not dead. He just needs the right

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medicine. But I have an NVIDIA GPU. Isn't that a sin? According to Reddit,

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maybe it is true that the mere mention

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of NVIDIA in a Linux forum can start an argument. But when Lennis Torvoltz, the

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man himself, was here, he mentioned that Linux and NVIDIA have somewhat mended

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the relationship now that NVIDIA is balls deep in the AI bubble and [music]

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needs Linux developers on their side. Which raises the question, is AMD still

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the best GPU choice for Linux? And where

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does Intel [music] land? To find out, we spent weeks testing. And I don't just

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mean FPS numbers. I'm talking setup process and day-to-day usability, too.

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Now, as you might expect, AMD does remain a very strong choice. But you

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MIGHT BE SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I SAY, when you see how far the others, especially

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certain ones, have come. What never shocks anyone anymore, though, is my

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[music]

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Before we get into the results, let's talk about the setup process. We chose

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these five GPUs to represent both recent and slightly older gaming cards from the

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main brands and also Intel was there. As

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for our DRO, our original plan when this was an article on ltlabs.com was good

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old Ubuntu 2404LTS or long-term support. Why that one?

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Well, while there are numerous more gaming focused dros like Bazite or Steam

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OS, we decided to approach this experiment with the idea that we wanted

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a stable, userfriendly, wellsupported desktop experience that can also game.

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Maybe we should do a video going through Linux gaming dros, though. Comment which

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ones that you guys would want to see. Right out of the gate, we ran into a

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problem that will likely be familiar to any Linux early adopter. Driver [music]

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support. Out of our five GPUs, four of them failed to work out of the box. Some

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were easy fixes. For the 460Ti, Ubuntu has a driver on their additional drivers

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page, and after a short reboot, it worked flawlessly. But the 5060 Ti, that

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was a bit of a different story. See, back when we originally did this

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testing, Ubuntu didn't have a driver for it at all. Meaning, we had to settle for

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the official driver from NVIDIA, which if you ask any Linux head, they're going

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to tell you is a big no no. As for our

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Radeon 970, it too was lacking bakedin

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drivers, and AMD hadn't yet rolled out their official installer. Finally, the

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Arc B580 appeared to be working until the moment we fired up a game, and it

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showed its true colors. Turns out that the easiest fix was to use Kubuntu,

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which uses the KDE desktop environment rather than Gnome. Of course, all of

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these issues have since been resolved. Yay, open source. So, what's the point

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of bringing them up? Well, we said we'd talk about the experience, and it turns

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out that for us, the bottom line is that it comes down less to which brand of GPU

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you choose and more down to the age and the exact timing. The easiest fix across

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the board for all of them was simply to move off of LTS and use Ubuntu 25, which

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just uses a newer version of the Linux kernel that had bakedin support for all

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of our cards. With everything up and running, how's the day-to-day life?

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Well, this is where things get totally

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fine. Actually, most people these days, except for you, Dave, and by the way,

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you are so good at using computers, do a huge percent of their work in a browser.

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Google Docs, Teams, support tickets, even some design work can now be done

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fully within a browser. And even for the work that isn't, some combination of

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Linux alternative software, virtual machines, or remote desktop applications

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could probably allow most people to make the switch. Of course, the day-to-day

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usability of Linux is not the point of this video. The point of this video is

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the difference in that experience between our various cards. And I kind of

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hate to say it, but it's kind of a draw. Again, I know that's not very

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satisfying, and I'm sure that you would much rather that I praise the corporate

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brand that you love and bash the one that you really hate. But Lin Torvalds

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himself is doing his day-to-day work right now on an Intel arc. Not because

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of how special it is compared to the other options, but because for his work,

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it just plain didn't matter that much. He actually cared more about how quiet

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the cooler was. With that said, there will be some huge exceptions to this

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depending on the software you use. There could be major differences in

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performance, compatibility, and stability. But which card works best for

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training LLMs or whatever, that's beyond the scope of this video. Which brings us

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to the big question. What about the

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games? Now, before we show you the numbers, it's important to understand

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that our usual testing software doesn't work quite the same across Windows and

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Linux. That's why we stuck to simple in-game benchmarking tools. Also, for

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that reason, we can't draw a definitive conclusion about exactly how the Linux

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and Windows performance compares to each other. What we can do is get a broad

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impression, and we can say that across all of our three brands, if you were

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hoping for a big win for Linux, unfortunately, that still isn't the

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case. Across the board, we saw lower performance on Linux at 1080p, both with

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and without rate tracing, and at 1440p.

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Of course, that's not the question that's most on our minds right now.

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Rather, we want to know which GPU maker loses the least performance switching

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over to Linux. Starting with [music] Intel, the B580 was about 30% worse on

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average. That means that most of your games are going to run a full class of

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card worse. And you might even find outliers like what we saw with Dota 2

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that are frankly unacceptable. I mean, look at this. This game has a native

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Linux build. That means no Proton compatibility layer and yet it's getting

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barely over half of the performance compared to Windows. As for NVIDIA,

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well, things got a little spicy here to say the least. Do you remember I

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mentioned that our original article tested on Ubuntu 24? Well, in that test,

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the older 4060 Ti was still within striking distance of our Windows tests

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in a fair number of our games. Some were further off, but was pretty close. As

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for our 5060Ti, I mean, it is a faster,

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better card, but the difference between Windows and Linux was about 30% just

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like we saw with Intel. Yikes. Though not as yikes as the internet might have

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you believe. What is as yikes is the fact that upgrading to Ubuntu 25 for the

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retesting that we did for this video saw an overall regression in Linux

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optimization across both of our NVIDIA cards. or I don't know, maybe they tuned

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the Windows drivers to be even better. All I can say for sure is that NVIDIA

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could use just a few of their trillions of dollars to do a little bit better

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here. Bringing us finally to AMD end. Well, it won't be a huge surprise to

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many of you, but it turns out that if you let open- source folks do open

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source things with your drivers, you might get better open-source performance

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with some games like Cyberpunk 2077 seeing almost no performance loss and

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even some outliers like Strange Brigade on our RX970 that actually performed

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better on Linux. For gaming, then AMD emerges once again as a clear winner.

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So, if we factor that in, let's see here. We've got AMD wins gaming.

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Everything else is a draw. AMD wins.

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Or do they? Our final test was to throw a couple of different dros into the mix

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because, let's face it, our entire comments section would be complaining if

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we didn't. Since AMD came out on top, we

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wanted to see how our RX7700 XT would handle Basite, Mangaro, Ubuntu 25, and

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Ubuntu 24 across three games. And what we found was that there was functionally

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no difference between the three, which I got to say is honestly a really good

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thing. I think the last thing that the Linux community wants is a war over

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which DRO performs the best for gaming. There's already enough of a war over the

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ease of use of gaming across various distros or the unique value propositions

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that they offer from pre-installed applications and features or slick UIs

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for organizing your favorite retro titles. So, in conclusion, then AMD

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wins, but it's also totally valid to go

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Linux on any GPU hardware. In fact, I

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think it's fair to say that for most people out there, it really doesn't

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matter that much. Certainly, it doesn't matter enough that you should wait until

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you can afford a new GPU before you take the Linux plunge. If you're interested

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in jumping ship from Windows, you're not alone right now. And I think that your

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bigger roadblocks are going to be around settling on a DRO that suits you and

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getting all of your devices and workflows running. But the good news is

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that there's an ever growing number of resources out there for new users. And

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we're going to link some of those below for you guys to take a look at. One way

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or another, the year of the Linux desktop is getting ever closer. And

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arguably, I would say is even today for

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people that mostly work inside a browser or would rather give up a little bit of

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performance than put up with Windows's Just like you're going to put

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guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the collab that we did with the

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Linus Torvtz, creator of the Linux kernel. He actually ended up going with

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an Intel ARC for his new computer and even talked a bit about how NVIDIA and

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Linux are getting along quite a bit better these