PC Gaming Hardware tested gaming performance in Windows 11 and Linux using Proton, using ten different AMD and NVIDIA video cards.
The comparison yielded surprising results: on average, Microsoft's system was faster, but in some configurations, Linux took the leading position.
The study included 10 games and the same number of GPUs – the goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of Windows 11 compared to CachyOS, a build of Arch Linux with optimized features for gaming tasks. Despite Windows' advantage, especially on NVIDIA graphics cards thanks to its more mature drivers, Linux can still show marked success in certain situations.
In Anno 117: Pax Romana, Linux outperformed Windows by 1-5% using the RX 9000 and RX 7800 XT, while NVIDIA solutions suffered a performance loss of nearly 15%. A similar picture is observed in A Plague Tale: Requiem. Outer Worlds 2 also shows higher frame rates in Linux on AMD hardware. On RTX 50 series video cards, due to driver problems it was not possible to launch new RPGs from Obsidian, but on other GPUs, Linux provided an increase of up to 5%.
Of particular interest is Kingdom Come: Deliverance II – here the RTX 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070 video cards run 1-2% faster in Linux, while the RX 9000 models lag behind by about 7%.
In Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and some other projects, the advantage of Windows 11 on Radeon video cards rarely exceeds 5%, while in the case of GeForce (especially RTX 5090) it can be up to 20%. However, Linux still has difficulty using high ray tracing settings in Cyberpunk 2077.
PC Gaming's Hardware journalists also note that average frame rates don't always reflect true stability. In this aspect, AMD solutions for Linux seem more suitable. However, more research is needed to understand how Proton handles different processor and RAM combinations. It was previously noted that SteamOS is not yet superior to Windows on discrete GPUs, but the situation may change after the launch of Steam Machine and further optimization of Linux distributions for memory pool management and discrete graphics.
Thanks to Proton's development, today about 90% of Windows games run successfully on Linux. The new version of Wine 11 has brought a significant increase in performance and according to reports, may finally get support for Adobe Photoshop.
The main barrier to running the most popular multiplayer games on specialized game builds of Linux, such as CachyOS and Bazzite, continues to be secure boot requirements and the implementation of anti-cheat in many online games at the kernel level.
