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Have Nvidia drivers on Linux gotten worse over later generations? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I just saw the GamersNexus benchmarks and I wondered to myself, why do they have so many problems with Nvidia on Bazite? I've used PopOS with my RTX 30 graphics card and I've essentially had performance parity with Windows.

Do you guys think they misconfigured something in the background or do you think that the driver has just gotten worse? What are your experiences?

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[+] -8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

All this is ironic, bazzite is often chosen for gaming, but as all these niche distros they have problems in stability which in this case reflects on exactly their core feature: gaming performance.

Stands yet again in demonstrating that gamers don't actually care about performance, just in claiming that they have a top spec pc, if that thing does not perform like it should but just gives a workable experience it is actually fine

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I just went to repurpose some old hardware for my nephew (4790k + 32gb ddr3 + rtx 3050) which I thought would make a very passable bazzite box. I put 2 drives in the test rig, one with bazzite Nvidia + kde and one with win11 running with the rufus tpm bypass hacks.

    CS2 ran at ~40fps in bazzite with no sound once you got in game, win11 ran at ~100

    Helldivers2 ran at ~50fps in bazzite with constant frame drops even after letting it precompile shaders. On windows it was a very playable 70fps.

    I mainline Linux myself and I wanted bazzite to be the set-and-forget answer but it really wasn't. I can't in good faith hand that build over to an 12 year old with bazzite and that was super disappointing.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Problem is not Bazzite or Linux, problem is Nvidia. If we need to be honest, we should avoid Nvidia.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    None of the problems that they're describing are caused by using an Nvidia card.

    The default proton is bad, using GE-Proton will often improve things.

    CS2 getting 40fps and no sound. A quick trip over to https://www.protondb.com/app/730 will show that this is a problem with CS2 as it happens on every graphics card. Setting SDL_AUDIO_DRIVER=pipewire resolves the issue for a lot of people.

    Helldivers 2 low FPS: Protondb has people with both graphics cards reporting the low fps issues. Setting a framerate cap will reduce FPS variance, using GE-Proton10 fixes HDR issues. In my experience disabling vsync improved performance significantly, this is true of a lot of games if you're using adaptive sync.

    I see this all the time in the Linux communities. If someone is having an issue with a game and they use an Nvidia card then community responses are often to do the blame Nvidia meme rather than troubleshoot the issue.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Appreciate the recommended fixes. I did find similar and was able to work through some of the issues with CS2 but I did that on instinct, and it wasn't until I was halfway through troubleshooting game 2 of 2 attempted that I realized it wasn't where I needed it to be for a remote support hand-me-down.

    I did briefly entertain the idea of setting up rustdesk on it but the atomic nature + Wayland made unattended (read: "help I broke it and I can't log in") not really viable. By the time I got to "hrm, I could probably set up a reverse ssh tunnel into my homelab for persistent support?" I decided windows was probably the play here.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Like the other guy said I think this is a bazzite-induced problem. I have other Linux systems at home. My daily driver and my wife's daily driver are both highly custom Ubuntu server derivatives, we both have Nvidia GPUs (3050, 5070), and neither of us have similar issues.

    The reason I wanted to try bazzite was that I didn't want to remotely support something super custom.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Do you think you would have those issues that you are reporting if you were using AMD or Intel GPUs?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    I suspect the difference in experiences is more due to x11/pulse(my custom systems) vs Wayland/pipewire(bazzite) than it is any particular GPU vendor or driver branch. Which I guess is a roundabout way of saying

    Maybe? Probably?

    Judging by the protondb entry on CS2 I strongly suspect I would have at least the audio issue regardless of gpu.

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