I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it’s about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it’s 982 mods that I can’t be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it’s the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you’re wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.
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It will be more difficult than on windows
I have an HP z4 G4 running Bazzite-dx-gnomr-nvidia with a RTX 2070 (it does not fit in that case at all) and other than the lack of the functional steam big screen mode that the steam deck enjoys, everything else works extremely well!
I have an nVidia RTX 3060, running on a desktop I built back in 2009. I’m running Linux Mint with the KDE Plasma desktop with no problems. All the Steam I bought on Windows, run with no problems under Linux.
Any non-Steam games, like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or Deus Ex (1) run on Wine under the default settings with no problems.
built back in 2009
The RTX 3060 didn’t come out until 2021 (the year that I bought mine). Is 2009 a typo, or are you saying that your motherboard is really that old?
I’ve had 3 different graphics cards since 2009.
It seems to vary. I had few issues with my 2080Ti but my friend had nothing but issues with his 3070. He switched to an AMD card and it worked without issue. Nvidia doesn’t put nearly as much emphasis on their Linux support as AMD does, but that doesn’t mean that Nvidia cards aren’t usable.
I have a Nvidia GPU, and after distro hopping a lot, it only worked right on CachyOS with KDE.
yeah Tetris will be fast
Honestly, I’ve had access to tons of Nvidia cards (1050, 1060, 1080, 3070, etc). All of them worked great for gaming whenever I tried in Debian or Ubuntu, using whatever drivers were latest at the time.
The ONLY place I had issue was specific settings (HDR + 120hz over HDMI) in Bazzite. I wanted a new card back then anyway so I got an AMD. But I’ve heard their Nvidia image is great, now.
Simple answer: Yes!
Not so simple: Yes, but nvidia hates linux and their proprietary drivers can cause issues. Generally (especially on stable distros) everything is stable and fine.
Of course you can. I have a GTX 1660super and it works flawlessly.
OpenMW is still being updated? I thought it got DMCA’d by Bethesda a few years ago
OpenMW is still being updated?
I thought it got DMCA’d by Bethesda a few years ago
not that i ever heard of, for all their faults (and there are many), bethesda has been pretty good about not fucking with people making their old games playable
Good to know, might do a MW play through soon then
not that i ever heard of
I think that I might have got some other project (maybe all the GTA III, VC, SA takedowns) and the openmicrowave android fork stopping development and getting taken down mixed together
Yeah.
I recommend not letting the “wisdom of the crowd” dictate your decisions in the computing space, even with Linux.
Most of these people don’t really know what they’re talking about and are doing whatever they think will make them look good in front of their peers.
Try to see things for yourself and gain your own knowledge. Theory is no substitute for experience, but the average computer user doesn’t understand that.
I have had quite a few nvidia cards in my linux systems and all ran fine, except for a while when Wayland came along. Those issues have now been fixed as well. Your experience may vary ofcourse depending on the hard and software you use. But there is no reason to not use Nvidia on Linux.
That being said, I switched to AMD recently and had some issues with suspend and resume so it is not like AMD is the holy grail for Linux systems. I made the switch because of the opensource drivers and Nvidia being greedy fucks.
Are you using x11 or Wayland? Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers? Everything works well in x11, but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland. When trying to track it down I was led down a rabbit hole suggesting there is some protocol mismatch between what the NVIDIA drivers implement and what Wayland expects.
Yes. Just don’t use GNOME in my experience. KDE Plasma is stable, however. On Fedora at least
The famous bad flicker or ghosting of frames is a famous issue in Wayland caused by the desynchronization of frames. Around 2 years ago they patched the driver to let the system tell it explicitly how to sync the frames, and most Linux systems should have the drivers updated to work as such. Since them I’ve not had any flickering like that. A great example was Dragons Dogma 2, the flickering was insane but fixed by the patch.
I’ve been in Wayland since KDE 6.0 and I’ve a 3080. I think that’s like 2 years now. And I game A LOT.
Is anyone running Wayland with NVIDIA drivers?
Yep! It’s been largely trouble free for a year or so now.
but I’m getting bad flicker in Wayland.
I had some issues the specific combination of NVIDIA card, Wayland running Plasma and VRR. But I disabled VRR, and it went away.
When I tried out fedora on my gaming PC I noticed most games ran noticeably worse on my Nvidia card. They still ran, you could still play, but the experience was nonetheless worse. Elden ring went from rarely dropping below 60 on windows to hovering around 45. FFXIV which would often be at 144fps, usually around 110 during dungeons and only dropping below 100 in really busy cities, went to never even reaching 100.
It’s doable but be prepared for games to run worse. When I looked up issues I found this was normal for Nvidia cards. So just be prepared.
I download Fedora 42 KDE and clicked like 4 things to get my system working well with Steam one was the Nvidia repo, the other was the Steam repo, and update and reboot.
