Linux gaming GPU?

dgingeri

dgingeri

2[H]4U
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Dec 5, 2004
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What's a decent Linux gaming GPU? I've been playing with the idea of building a separate Linux gaming machine, so I can get more overall exposure to Linux and perhaps be more comfortable with it for work, but I don't have any ideas about which vendor and/or model works better with Linux. Any advice?
 
Nvidia is probably still the safest bet. Choose any model that you'd choose for Windows gaming but preferably a notch faster.
 
Good to know Nvidia is the safer bet for support. I'm not going to be doing major gaming on it, at least at first, but I thought I might try some Windows games to see how good/bad their behavior in Wine is.
 
Nvidia is still fastest. AMD is catching up the issue is drivers.

Nvidia requires closed source drivers. Which means adding it to your kernel. Most distros make that pretty easy these days... you shouldn't have to follow the nvidia instructions outside of the odd distro. Ubuntu Arch and solus distros tend to make it easy to install them with a click.

AMD as a company supports the open source projects, and they have been getting driver code for their GPUs into kernels before they release cards. The performance isn't quite as good... but 100% open has the potential to be the best option for performance in the future. (AMDs full 100% support of the open drivers isn't that far in, and it gets better weekly)

Up to you really NV is going to be the fastest option today at least.

Wine runs really well these days, you will give up a bit of performance but on most modern CPUs its nothing most people would notice. If your playing games like Witcher 3, Overwatch or other DX 11 titles setup DXVK (direct x over Vulcan)... the project isn't that old but its already got a lot of big name windows titles running at very nice frame rates.
 
dgingeri said:
Good to know Nvidia is the safer bet for support. I'm not going to be doing major gaming on it, at least at first, but I thought I might try some Windows games to see how good/bad their behavior in Wine is.
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Expect about 50% framerate drop on Wine. You need a beefy system to play non-native games on linux.
 
dgingeri said:
Think a 750Ti would be decent?
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I have an old machine around with a 750ti... depends on what type of games you want to play really. If your talking DX 9 level games... or the type of games you tend to play. In general the performance isn't that different from windows. I have used the 750 to play games like dota maxed out (or close to) with no issues at all. (DOTA is one game that I actually get better FPS in Linux) There are not a ton of games that perform better in Linux but dota is one.

I even got some less intense dx 11 games running on the 750 with DXVK. For instance Star Trek Online... I get around 55-60FPS in windows and around 44-50 in Linux wine with DXVK on the 750ti.
 
The Windows games I was going to try are Rift and Star Trek Online. I've read Rift behaves pretty well, but takes a bit of a performance hit, but with medium settings should do fine with that 750Ti, or even a 1030. I have not been able to find anything on Star Trek Online, though. The rest of the games I'll probably play on it would be the native Linux games, depending on what I find. I found Scorched 3D on one gaming geared distro, and I always loved the 2D version of it. I doubt any of the native Linux games I have seen so far would have any problem with a 750Ti.
 
While Nvidia is the "fastest", support can be problematic if you want to stay more "up to date". Also, I play games on Linux and most things do NOT require a lot of horsepower. A well supported Radeon will be cheaper, fast enough and open source (so no problems). In many cases, even a lowly integrated HD graphics of an Intel chip is enough for many things (it can be sluggish at 1080p though).

With all that said my Linux gaming platform uses an Nvidia GT240 and IMHO, it's plenty powerful. YMMV of course.
 
I prefer Nvidia with Nvidia drivers. Running a 980Ti here and it doesn't struggle with anything except a really poorly optimized port.
 
GTX970 had little problem running up to 4k with settings floored on even newer stuff. Hard to complain really!
 
dgingeri said:
The Windows games I was going to try are Rift and Star Trek Online. I've read Rift behaves pretty well, but takes a bit of a performance hit, but with medium settings should do fine with that 750Ti, or even a 1030. I have not been able to find anything on Star Trek Online, though. The rest of the games I'll probably play on it would be the native Linux games, depending on what I find. I found Scorched 3D on one gaming geared distro, and I always loved the 2D version of it. I doubt any of the native Linux games I have seen so far would have any problem with a 750Ti.
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To install star trek online you can install windows version of steam.... to be honest I never bothered. I have had a windows drive around forever. I honestly just picked up the STO install directory in windows and copied it to my ext4 drive. Star Trek Online.exe runs under wine staging no issues. No need for silly game launchers or anything. I just use the default wine prefix as I honestly don't use wine all that much. Installing DXVK will depend on your distro... I'm running Antergos an Arch based distro, and a kind maintainer has been keeping a AUR install entry for DXVK. So I install it from the AUR.... and run from a terminal setup_dxvk32 and setup_dxvk64 if you don't specify a prefix it just copies the required .dll to your default prefix and sets the library link in wines config. Really no big deal. (DXVK shouldn't be hard to install on pretty much any distro at this point... some of the guides for installing it on the net are old and out of date and refer to older versions of wine. The lastest versions shouldn't require to install the Vulkan SDK or compile special Vulcan aware wine ect those steps are all old)

The first time you fire up STO it takes awhile, don't panic it hasn't likely crashed. After the first boot it doesn't take any longer to fire up then it does under windows. Runs pretty well under wine+dxvk. (STO is DX 11 only now... so you will want DXVK wines Directx->opengl stack still sucks hard). A few other tips... turn down what you need to in STO to get it running well of course.. but the new 2.0 Lighting engine make sure you enable it, game actually runs faster with it on. Seeing as you may not be running Steam or other overlay stuff in linux.... in STO the commands for the FPS counter are;
/showfps 1 (0 turns it off)
/hidedevui 0 (1 hides it again)
Cryptic messed something up over the years and showfps doesn't work but if you un hide their dev ui it pops up.

I haven't played rift at all under Linux... haven't played that game in years may have to go back and see whats new. ;) I believe rift still has DX 9 and DX 11 options... so you can either run it in DX 9 mode with just wine... or DXVK and enable DX 11. Its very possible that DXVK will be faster then the DX9 path.
 
Grrrr.....

Now I've run into a ton of other problems. I'm having a hell of a time getting my hardware to work. I've tried multiple motherboards and multiple Linux builds. Ubuntu 18.04 or 16.04 won't recognize any NIC, either built into the boards (Intel i210 and i217) or an addon card (Broadcom 520, which may be bad). I try Fedora, and it gives all sorts of boot errors just starting up. I don't know if that is from the processors (a 4930k and a 4790k) or the chipsets or the bios, but both Fedora and Ubuntu refuse to work. I'm going to try CentOS, but it isn't really geared for gaming.
 
dgingeri said:
Grrrr.....

Now I've run into a ton of other problems. I'm having a hell of a time getting my hardware to work. I've tried multiple motherboards and multiple Linux builds. Ubuntu 18.04 or 16.04 won't recognize any NIC, either built into the boards (Intel i210 and i217) or an addon card (Broadcom 520, which may be bad). I try Fedora, and it gives all sorts of boot errors just starting up. I don't know if that is from the processors (a 4930k and a 4790k) or the chipsets or the bios, but both Fedora and Ubuntu refuse to work. I'm going to try CentOS, but it isn't really geared for gaming.
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Have you considered trying Solus?

EDIT: Before installing any distro test it out by running it "Live" from the media you burned the image to.
 
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I think the mesa AMD drivers are in pretty good shape BUT I certainly would recommend running nvidia..I haven't checked in a while but many of Feral Interactives linux ports were not "supporting" AMD cards but only said "it might work...it might not." Maybe they are better at it now donno. As a side note, running Mad Max on my GTX980M with Vulkan is a shitshow.
 
Chuklr said:
Have you considered trying Solus?

EDIT: Before installing any distro test it out by running it "Live" from the media you burned the image to.
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I have no problem with reinstalling, in that I can't lose anything but a little time. I'll see what this distro can do for me.

I just get a "connection refused" error from that link, no matter how I get to it.
 
Same- and Google gives URLs that also don't connect. Assume that the site is currently down and will be up later?
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Same- and Google gives URLs that also don't connect. Assume that the site is currently down and will be up later?
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Just tried it from two different Windows machines and Android phones, she's down. Always a great sign for dealing with something as complicated as PC gaming.
 
heatlesssun said:
Instead of worrying about BS nonsense why don't you guys offer an alternative to download Solus?
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The Solus site is the proper place. If there site is down for some reason the best course is to wait.

If MS site was down would you have a 100% safe offering for people to download alternate windows ISOs ?

Exactly. :)

Not sure why his NIC isn't working... its strange. Intel is well supported they are one of the best kernel supporting companies around. Intels owb 1001b driver normally loads and works fine for most of their gigabit on board cards ine. Hopefully someone that has direct experience with his hardware has a better fix then simply playing rolling distro. I would have expected any of the arch based distros to work fine as they are rolling and tend to have very recent kernels.

Mint or Manjaro would be my suggestions for any new user... perhaps Solus it seems to be getting alot of the new user recommendations as well lately. All should have kernels that include the Intel kernel drivers.
 
ChadD said:
The Solus site is the proper place. If there site is down for some reason the best course is to wait.

If MS site was down would you have a 100% safe offering for people to download alternate windows ISOs ?

Exactly. :)
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Fair enough. There are a lot of ways to download clean Windows images if you know what you are doing.

ChadD said:
Not sure why his NIC isn't working... its strange. Intel is well supported they are one of the best kernel supporting companies around. Intels owb 1001b driver normally loads and works fine for most of their gigabit on board cards ine. Hopefully someone that has direct experience with his hardware has a better fix then simply playing rolling distro. I would have expected any of the arch based distros to work fine as they are rolling and tend to have very recent kernels.

Mint or Manjaro would be my suggestions for any new user... perhaps Solus it seems to be getting alot of the new user recommendations as well lately. All should have kernels that include the Intel kernel drivers.
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Yeah, it shouldn't be a problem installing a major Linux distro on common hardware, Intel and Broadcom NICs are ubiquitous. Even uncommon "proprietary" hardware like Surface devices tend to get all of the basics working out of the box automatically.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Same- and Google gives URLs that also don't connect. Assume that the site is currently down and will be up later?
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It sounds like they're juggling some SSL certificates at the moment and opted to take their site & repos down as opposed to serving scary cert messages. Looks bad, but I know how that can happen. Perils of small teams hosting their own infrastructure.

source
 
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heatlesssun said:
Instead of worrying about BS nonsense why don't you guys offer an alternative to download Solus?
Click to expand...

For once Heatless wasn't wrong. ;)

Solus was updating SSl certs and they ran into problems for whatever reason. It is what it is but they're up and running again

That said Solus is cirrencur my distro of choice and I love it.
 
AMD drivers are open source and it just works on most OS's. Nvidia isn't a ton more work but I have had more than a few driver issues with Linux Nvidia drivers. Blinking screens/Odd Performance/etc Over all they work but that have been quirky. Need to mess around with the RX560 I bought but it was pretty much plug as play.
 
DeChache said:
AMD drivers are open source and it just works on most OS's. Nvidia isn't a ton more work but I have had more than a few driver issues with Linux Nvidia drivers. Blinking screens/Odd Performance/etc Over all they work but that have been quirky. Need to mess around with the RX560 I bought but it was pretty much plug as play.
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As of last night, I have it up and running now with Ubuntu 18.04. It took manual loading of Intel drivers, which is not fun. The Nvidia drivers were a cakewalk compared to that. I'm using an old Geforce GT430 for now. It'll run basic stuff, but nothing too demanding. I haven't had much time to get any games loaded, though. Perhaps I'll try tonight after work. Maybe I'll just take the night off of computer problems. I'm kind of torn at the moment.
 
dgingeri said:
As of last night, I have it up and running now with Ubuntu 18.04. It took manual loading of Intel drivers, which is not fun. The Nvidia drivers were a cakewalk compared to that. I'm using an old Geforce GT430 for now. It'll run basic stuff, but nothing too demanding. I haven't had much time to get any games loaded, though. Perhaps I'll try tonight after work. Maybe I'll just take the night off of computer problems. I'm kind of torn at the moment.
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Add the PPA and install drivers using the PPA method. This way it's very easy to install drivers and they keep themselves automatically updated. There used to also be a tool released by Intel that updated drivers, however I don't know if that's supported under 18.04.

The same goes for Nvidia drivers, I've been adding drivers via PPA for years now and I've never had a single issue.
 
dgingeri said:
As of last night, I have it up and running now with Ubuntu 18.04. It took manual loading of Intel drivers, which is not fun. The Nvidia drivers were a cakewalk compared to that. I'm using an old Geforce GT430 for now. It'll run basic stuff, but nothing too demanding. I haven't had much time to get any games loaded, though. Perhaps I'll try tonight after work. Maybe I'll just take the night off of computer problems. I'm kind of torn at the moment.
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It was no where near that bad on Fedora. There RPMFusion repos for both. I think the Intel Open Source drivers are in EPEL repos as well...
 
Mazzspeed said:
Add the PPA and install drivers using the PPA method. This way it's very easy to install drivers and they keep themselves automatically updated. There used to also be a tool released by Intel that updated drivers, however I don't know if that's supported under 18.04.

The same goes for Nvidia drivers, I've been adding drivers via PPA for years now and I've never had a single issue.
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Yeah, using that for the Nvidia drivers is fine, and that's how I did it. It's kind of hard to do with network drivers.
 
dgingeri said:
Yeah, using that for the Nvidia drivers is fine, and that's how I did it. It's kind of hard to do with network drivers.
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Network drivers are supplied in the kernel and are generally very well supported in the case of Intel hardware? Hence the reason why I assumed you were talking about GPU drivers.

My bad, I should have read higher in the thread. How odd that the adapters didn't work out the box?

In cases such as that, install UKUU and try updating the kernel to the latest version supported by the Nvidia drivers (4.15).
 
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