Linux Gaming Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 288 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for linux gaming. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

With a few weeks having passed since the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release along with some point releases for addressing initial fall-out, I've been meaning to run some Plasma 6.0 Linux gaming performance benchmarks. I'll have up some interesting metrics soon using Fedora 40 while for this initial article is a look at the KDE Plasma 6.0 gaming performance between the Wayland and X11 sessions atop KDE Neon. Then similarly are the results for GNOME Shell with its X11 and Wayland sessions.

In recent days there have been leaks about an MSI "CLAW" gaming handheld device set to be announced this coming week at CES in Las Vegas. Making this gaming handheld device interesting is that unlike the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally or Legion Go, it's expected to be the first handheld featuring an Intel Meteor Lake SoC. In particular, the recently launched Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. For those curious about what the performance is likely to roughly be in comparison to the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these competing SoCs.

The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here's a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.

A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck. Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.

After resorting to buying a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card to be able to share Linux performance metrics for that more affordable Ada GPU, last month I posted the Radeon RX 7600 vs. GeForce RTX 4060 benchmarks as well as looking at the GeForce GTX 1060 through RTX 4060 GPU compute and renderer performance across several generations of NVIDIA GPUs. For those considering the RTX 4060 for a Linux gaming system or an upgrade to other recently released AMD or NVIDIA GPUs, here is a fresh round of Linux gaming performance metrics on the newest drivers.

Many readers have been curious about the performance of Linux gaming on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that out-of-the-box runs Microsoft Windows 11 Home... Well, the wait is over with the first benchmarks today of Windows 11 against Ubuntu 23.04 Linux on the ROG Ally. Beyond looking at the out-of-the-box performance, the results under Windows 11 with ASUS' "Turbo Mode" is also included plus some modifications to allow Linux to be more competitive to Windows 11 for games.

Similar to prior Wayland vs. X.Org desktop comparison impact on Linux gaming, here is a fresh round of tests looking at the (X)Wayland vs. X.Org GNOME session performance with Ubuntu 23.04 and the latest NVIDIA proprietary and AMD open-source graphics drivers on Linux.

Due to the constantly evolving state of the open-source Linux graphics drivers in particular, here is a fresh look at an assortment of AMD Radeon GPUs making use of the Mesa 23.2 development code for the newest RadeonSI and RADV drivers paired with the recently released Linux 6.3 kernel. These open-source Radeon Linux gaming benchmark results are going up against various NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series graphics cards using the NVIDIA 530.41.09 release as its latest Linux driver.

Last week I shared my findings over the great state of Intel's open-source compute stack for Arc Graphics now that the DG2/Alchemist support was promoted to stable in Linux 6.2 and the Compute-Runtime user-space stack for OpenCL and Level Zero is back to seeing regular updates with that code having matured particularly well. Here is a brief look at the current state of the Linux gaming performance for Arc Graphics on Linux 6.2 and making use of the latest Mesa 23.1-devel OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

With the Linux 6.1 kernel due to be released in the next week, Mesa 23.0-devel continuing to see a lot of improvements land for RADV and RadeonSI, and the NVIDIA R525 Linux driver series being available, here is a fresh look at the AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming performance with various graphics cards and an assortment of Linux games -- both native and via Valve's Steam Play.

Today the review embargo expires on the AMD Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors ahead of their retail availability this week. Over the past two weeks I have been testing the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X processors as the initial review samples (I should be receiving the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X CPUs this week, AMD is staggering their review seeding of the different models). In this article to get things started are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks with the Ryzen 9 7900X/7950X compared to an assortment of other AMD and Intel systems.

With last week seeing AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 released as an update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver and it noting performance improvements, it was time for some fresh benchmarks of that driver up against Mesa's alternative "RADV" Vulkan driver. Here are some fresh benchmarks with an AMD RDNA2 GPU for seeing how RADV continues competing -- and usually outperforming -- AMD's own official open-source driver.

Last week Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER III for Linux as a native port of this game that debuted earlier this year on Windows. This latest Total War game port to Linux by Feral relies on the Vulkan API for graphics and comes with a modest system requirements. For those curious about the performance of this latest high profile game port, here are benchmarks across 24 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

Since the release at the end of February of Valve's Steam Deck there has been numerous Phoronix readers wondering about the CPU performance of the Steam Deck's AMD APU in non-gaming workloads and just how viable the Steam Deck could be for a converged device for desktop uses. Here is some commentary on that front and benchmark results.

After being an Epic Games exclusive for its first year, HITMAN III launched on Steam last week. While there isn't a native Linux port for HITMAN 3, it does run wonderful under Steam Play with Proton for enjoying this Windows game on Linux complete with Vulkan API rendering. Here are some initial benchmarks of HITMAN 3 on Linux with NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards.

As we hit the end of 2021 for those wondering about the X.Org vs. (X)Wayland gaming performance difference for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, here are some fresh benchmarks using the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver stack and desktops on Ubuntu 21.10.

Valve yesterday introduced experimental Vulkan support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an alternative to the long-standing OpenGL path for running CS:GO on Linux. Curious about the performance implications of CS:GO with Vulkan, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

With last week's release of Ubuntu 21.10, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux gaming performance on this new release while testing both the GNOME Shell 40 default desktop to that of its KDE Plasma 5.22 based option. Both the X.Org and Wayland sessions for KDE and GNOME were benchmarked for seeing how the Linux gaming performance compares with the Radeon open-source GPU driver stack.

Recently with my Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G Zen 3 APUs with Radeon Vega graphics I touched on the GPU graphics/compute performance in some of the basic benchmarks while in this article are a number of Steam Play and native Linux gaming benchmarks for looking at the potential for these latest-generation desktop APUs for Linux gaming.

The Linux Foundation and their partners are today announcing their intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to help foster 3D game and simulation technologies. As a key part of this new Open 3D Foundation, Amazon's Lumberyard game engine that started off based on CryEngine is going to see an Apache 2.0 licensed copy made available as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).

Last week Valve introduced Vulkan rendering support for Left 4 Dead 2. The L4D2 Vulkan support is similar to that of Portal 2 where DXVK is being leveraged for translating the Direct3D calls to Vulkan rather than relying on their OpenGL translations. For those wondering what this means for L4D2 performance on Linux with modern GPUs, here are some benchmarks of Left 4 Dead 2 when testing the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options.

One of the most significant underlying changes with the recent release of Ubuntu 21.04 is the default GNOME Shell desktop environment is running the Wayland-based session by default rather than the traditional X.Org Server session. But what does this mean for the Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 21.04? Here are some (X)Wayland vs. X.Org benchmarks.

Valve on Monday rolled out a new Portal 2 build that improves its new Vulkan renderer support. For those interested here are some fresh benchmarks of Portal 2 with OpenGL and Vulkan on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers.

With Valve's Portal 2 having added a Vulkan renderer by way of DXVK for converting Direct3D calls to Vulkan, here are some initial benchmarks with several different AMD Radeon graphics cards for seeing the performance of this nearly decade old game on Linux with the existing OpenGL rendering path compared to that of the new Vulkan rendering option.

With Ubuntu 21.04 planning to use Wayland by default with GNOME aside from when running on NVIDIA graphics, you may be wondering about the current performance delta between running GNOME Shell on the X.Org session for Linux gaming versus its quite solid Wayland support. Or, rather, in the case of most games still - piped through XWayland. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland performance on Ubuntu with the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

After just publishing the results of 200+ Linux benchmarks under many diverse workloads for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X we see the 16~20% performance lift is very real and very broad from obscure open-source niche software through high profile programs... What about the Linux gaming performance? This article offers a first look at the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux gaming performance compared to Zen 2 and the Core i9 10900K while being the first of several Linux gaming performance articles coming out this month.

Now that the default graphics driver stack of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is a few months old, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS out-of-the-box compared to upgrading against Linux 5.9 Git and Mesa 20.3-devel for seeing if the performance advantages are worthwhile in making the leap to the newer RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers paired with the very latest kernel.

Following the 130+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3000XT series earlier in the week looking at the CPU/system performance on Ubuntu Linux, here is our first look at the Linux gaming performance with putting the Ryzen 9 3900XT up head-to-head against the Intel Core i9 10900K.

Last month we provided some early benchmarks looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 X.Org vs. Wayland gaming performance under GNOME 3.36, but now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has been officially released, here is a look at the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance across a wide variety of desktops on both X.Org and Wayland where supported.

Last week the X-Plane 11.50 beta was released with its long awaited Vulkan renderer to complement its mature OpenGL rendering code. Since then we've been busy benchmarking with 23 different graphics cards of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce line-ups while running Ubuntu Linux and comparing the OpenGL vs. Vulkan rendering performance for this realistic flight simulator.