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?
I have 3080 and I’ve seen significant performance issues too (e.g. in Cyberpunk 2077, KCD2). I think it depends a lot on the games you play. Apparently DX12 (via vkd3d) doesn’t perform well on Nvidia cards.
My next GPU will probably not be an Nvidia card.
I have a 5060ti 16gb version and don’t experience any issues with frame pacing and stuff like that on nixos, while when I tried bazzite I was experiencing some issues with the gpu.
It’s most likely a bazzite specific issue, especially if you use something like the steamos interface.
For example my monitor is a 160hz monitor that support’s gsync, but if I enable global gsync in any wayland compositor the bottom part of my screen is cut off and experience weird vissual bugs, but if I make them only enable gsync on my steam games when they are fullscreen I don’t experience that issue. The steamos session inside of bazzite doesn’t have that feature, so when it enables gsync I experience that same issue of cut off part of the screen with weird visual issues.
I think the biggest issue they had was with consistency of frame rate. Maybe the graphic drivers have matured more for the RTX 30 than the later versions. Are you using the proprietary drivers, or the open source ones?
I have always used what PopOS bundles. It used to be the proprietary driver, but ever since a certain driver version, they have switched to the Nvidia-made FOSS driver. Because nvidia stopped developing any sort of proprietary components in the driver and just made the FOSS driver instead, which became the “official” Nvidia driver in May 2025 i think.
Edit: Correction, only the kernel modules are all FOSS, while the userspace modules such as CUDA for example are still proprietary.
The only thing I know for sure in regards to why nvidia kinda blows on linux is that system RAM sharing doesn’t really work the way it does on windows or with AMD cards on linux. This means that particularly VRAM intense workloads will suffer. Unreal 5 games in particular suffer because of this.
I just bought Avowed. Splitegate 2 has been running great on my 3060 but splitegate 2 is also very plain looking. I hope Avowed runs well too
This might explain why Manjaro waits so long in between updates for Nvidia. A really old driver didn’t have as many problems until 580.82.90.
The problem for me is that its so damn back and forth. One driver will be perfectly fine, and then the next will introduce some random new issue. Rn 580 has caused elite dangerous to crash with some out of memory error, and VR is completely broken. Im really considering switching from Nobara because I want a distro that has a built in tool to easily downgrade nvidia drivers.
No idea, I’ve been playing “normal” games and VR games with my NVIDIA card for years now on Debian and… it just works. It just keeps on working. Maybe people are hardcore tinkerers that mess with specific options but me, I just play and I’m happy with it.
I feel that “works” is a very broad term. It can work but doesn’t mean that it will perform even or better in a good amount of games compared to Nvidia on Windows or AMD in Linux or Windows. Issues depends on specific games that one plays, one may be playing games that aren’t prone for those issues reported.
Sure, but FWIW I play from AAA to indies and it “works” as in no bug, no noticeable visual glitch.
I don’t benchmark from my driver version to the previous one on Windows or Linux or a price point equivalent with AMD hardware, I just play. I don’t think anybody gain much from checking performance benchmarks before playing a game, at least I can say for sure to me that’s not part of the fun.
I would notice if something was blatantly wrong e.g 50% performance hit, but I wouldn’t if it’s 5% hit. I don’t really care for it as it doesn’t affect my gameplay. Like I said, it’s from a casual player, not a pro player nor a game tinkerer.
Working “better” on Windows means nothing to me. Either I can play and I’m happy or I can’t (which never happened) then I’d be disappointed and potentially check why.
PS: I’m also a developer of XR content so I’m relatively confident I’d spot any significant problem.
In the past (2021-2022) I remember that Nvidia drivers were really pain in the ass and installing them always ended for me with black screen. For right now everything is working for me in debian-based distributions and arch-linux. Yesterday I was looking for new linux distros, I wanted to try Fedora and OpenSuse but drivers didn’t work there at all. In Fedora this Nouveau driver was okay but in OpenSuse even open-source driver wasn’t working.
I could barely launch games on Wayland 2 years ago. I have been gaming on Wayland now, no problems. So if anything, it has massively improved.
I haven’t noticed.
