10 Reasons Linux Gamers Might Want To Pass On The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series

[DMJC]

The number 1 reason for not buying a 2080 GTX: the 3080GTX will feature a smaller die process size and as a result a dramatic increase in performance over the 1080/2080 GTX cards which use the same die process size.

2. By the time the 3080GTX is out Raytracing will actually have been adopted by the games industry and more likely the 3d content industry making it useful for rendering and gaming work. Currently it's a really expensive overclock of a 1080 GTX TI.

[Leopard]

But you can. Or at least I can. It works just fine for me on multiple computers. Mixed set of AMD and Intel hardware.

Can you do gaming with Wayland?

[Tomin]

Can you do gaming with Wayland?

Yes, I can. At least if you mean running games on Xwayland on Gnome Wayland session. I doubt I have that many games that use Wayland directly.

[bemerk]

AV1 in hardware will come in the next generation at the earliest.

[RealNC]

Well, actually you might want to pass on RTX even if you're gaming on Windows, because the "NVidia RTX" option in games will most probably turn out to be a mislabeled "30FPS Lock and Half Resolution" switch.

You love your 1440p or 4K monitor? You love 60FPS and higher? Well too bad.

[L_A_G]

I don't think the title should be quite that negative... A better title would be something along the lines of "10 Reasons Linux Gamers Might Not Want To Wait And See With The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series" or "10 Reasons Why Linux Gamers Shouldn't Pre-order The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series" as we still don't have real performance numbers on the cards or a timeline for the ray tracing stuff and new anti-aliasing under OSs other than Windows.

Out of the 10 reasons listed, 4 of them also apply to Pascal and previous generation hardware is pretty much always sold off at a discount when new models come out. Just look at how pretty much the whole first gen Threadripper line, apart from the 1950X, can be had for about half price* now that the second gen is out.

However don't get me wrong, I'm not really brushing off the fundamental point here. Nvidia does tend to ship Linux drivers with support for new cards pretty quickly after they unveil them, which in conjunction with them not having released one by now does worry me slightly. However I'm probably worrying for nothing as there's still two weeks until the launch day for the real hardware and their driver team is obviously busy with all of the new extensions for the deep learning, ray-tracing and anti-aliasing the new on-silicon hardware is to be used for.

Come to think of it, when was the last time Nvidia shipped a graphics card with this much brand new on-silicon hardware?

*While supplies last

[Weasel]

About Wayland ; c'mon. You can't even use Wayland on AMD/Intel too. Wayland has ways to go for being an alternative to good, old X.

Wayland is simply unusable for any power user doing more than just mobile browsing bullshit with his PC. I mean, nothing to do with Nvidia, the protocol is too crippled in functionality. I'd rather live with X's lack of security than crippled functionality.

[Weasel]

It's not just KDE, there are other devs refusing to support 2 paths, for example the Sway devs.

And Sway is a project that shouldn't even exist because such basic features should be in the Wayland protocol itself.

[johanb]

Yes, I can. At least if you mean running games on Xwayland on Gnome Wayland session. I doubt I have that many games that use Wayland directly.

Games based on SDL2 2.0.1 or above (which are more than you might think) does have Wayland support.
Dota2 works with a few caveats:
- the steam runtime is shipping a old SDL version, so you have to run it without the steam runtime or overload libSDL2
- Start the game with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland to force enable wayland

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/999

[andre30correia]

Yes, I can. At least if you mean running games on Xwayland on Gnome Wayland session. I doubt I have that many games that use Wayland directly.

with a lot of dropping frames, wayland is worst than X right know and mutter is a nightmare, after years of develop... wayland is only a ilusion