Windows is still the best operating system for gaming PCs because of its broad developer support (software and hardware) and the sheer number of games available, but let's give Linux its due credit: Gaming on Linux has improved dramatically over the last few years, with a improved dramatically over the past few years. Some games even run faster on Linux than on Windows PCs, as a recent Red Dead Redemption 2 benchmark battle on YouTube shows.

This is an exception: PC games generally run faster on Windows than on Linux. This can be seen, for example, in various performance comparisons done by Phoronix. The site compares Windows 10 and Ubuntu using three Nvidia graphics cards, including a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Windows wins hands down; another benchmark using Radeon hardware (RX 580 and Vega 64) The comparison is similar.

The results were similar in another comparison from a year ago, where "performance under Linux was only 60-70% of Windows 10's performance."

In a recent validation of a Ryzen laptop with Vega graphics, the situation was a bit more complicated, but still The high quality settings tipped the scales in favor of Windows 10.

However, Linux is not always the loser in these tests. Last year, Jason Evangelho of Forbes compared the gaming performance of Windows 10 and Pop OS (a Linux distro), and the two operating systems were evenly matched. Also interesting are the results of FlightlessMango's Red Dead Redemption 2 test on YouTube (via OC3D), where Linux wins by a wide margin. See: [The test system consists of an Intel Core i7 8700K processor, 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon Vega 56 graphics card, housed in an Asus ROG Strix Z370E Gaming motherboard.

FlightlessMango used Proton to play RDR2 on Linux Proton is a compatibility layer based on a fork of Wine, developed by Valve to allow Windows-only games on Steam to be played on Linux. Proton was developed by Valve to allow Windows-only games on Steam to be played on Linux.

Benchmarkers used three different GPU driver packages on Linux and compared the performance of each run with the performance of running the game on Windows using Vulkan and DirectX 12.

The benchmark results show that RDR2 using the Vulkan API runs faster on Linux than Windows 10 using either the Vulkan or DirectX 12 versions. Where the difference was widest, there was a difference of 10 frames per second, giving Linux an advantage of about 14 percent.

One of the commenters on the video claimed that "the benchmark results mimic what we got with Far Cry 5 using the RX5700," with a slight performance improvement on Linux compared to Windows 10.

This is interesting. Incidentally, Linus Tech Tips also recently discussed gaming on Linux and found that the experience is better than ever, although they did not go into benchmark comparisons.