Hey there, I’m relatively new to Linux, and I must admit, I’ve been spoiled by Nobara Linux. The gaming experience is seamless, with excellent performance and no issues so far. I know many people claim, “The distribution really doesn’t matter” or “There are only minor differences,” etc.
However, I don’t fully subscribe to this belief. Just recently, someone advised against recommending Linux Mint for gaming. If you take a closer look at the Nobara Project, Glorious Eggroll has implemented numerous patches, and benchmark videos do reveal a noticeable difference.
I’m eager to explore various distros, leading me to my question: How can one genuinely optimize their system for gaming? I’ve heard about applying kernel patches, but I’d love to hear more from those with experience. Achieving the level of optimization seen in Nobara Linux, thanks to GE’s efforts, seems like a lofty goal for me. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
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While you may not subscribe to the belief, it’s a fact. The patches GE has implemented aren’t really all that important. You get a few % extra performance over standard Fedora but you don’t get the stability of Fedora.
I would say it depends on your distro of choice and how well you understand its strengths/weaknesses, and what you can do on your end to tweak it to its possible maximum. Finding what works best for you with the most minimal possible configuration that’s needed that you’re willing to go through would make much more sense than trying to find that one “panacea distro that trumps everything else.”
The distribution doesn’t matter because the majority of optimizations made to “gaming” distros like Nobara are achievable on any distro. Here are a few things that you can do on any distro:
- installing a new kernel (zen probably?)
- installing gamemode
- installing gamescope (mostly optional)
- using fsync
- setting CPU governor to high performance (already done with gamemode)
- disabling compositor if using KDE
also installing an up to date mesa if you are using a AMD or Intel GPU - that’s where most of the graphics optimization work goes. Updating kernel is mainly if you need support for stuff rather than performance tuning, e.g soon the upcoming 6.7 kernel for overclocking/undervolting support for 7000 series AMD gpus and at some point in the future Xe driver for discrete intel gpus.
installing a new kernel (zen probably?)
i used zen for years only to get a weird wake-up bug with newer amd gpus, the mainline kernel did not have this so i for the first time went to the barebones mainline kernel
disabling compositor if using KDE
Additional note: If you’re on X11, yes. The compositor stays on in Wayland by default and has no “off” toggle.
True, I forgot to mention that. Although Wayland isn’t the best for gaming in general, so if a distro defaults to Wayland, I guess the first optimization would be to switch to Xorg.
Wayland supports VRR and x11 doesn’t though to my knowledge.
Only with one monitor in X11 does VRR work. I wanted to try so I set my other monitors to another machine and use KVM software.
Not exactly true. You can enable it on xorg in your AMDGPU config, and Nvidia should enable it by default (the monitor needs to support Gsync though).
By default, Wayland forces vsync, even at the cost of latency. VRR doesn’t exist in the vast majority of desktops, and requires installing a patched compositor in Gnome. Only KDE supports it by default, but only in fullscreen applications.
You can find more info on the arch wiki
Edit: why downvote? Surely people don’t think that suggesting Xorg over wayland for gaming is offensive?
Wouldn’t exactly downvote, it’s just a moot point IMO when they’re starting to yank out Xorg in favor of Wayland.
Wayland is the future , old man 😊 Been running Fedora as my daily for 2 years and I Haven’t had any real issues related to Wayland on my 3060ti. In all reality xorg is the past and Wayland/XWayland is the future.
Wayland may be the future, but it sure isn’t the present 😂.
Why isn’t wayland recommended for gaming? I just bought myself 2 screens, both of different resolutions and framerates, and as far as I’m aware x11 will set both to the same one because it doesn’t support different ones.
X11 is going to be garbage in your setup. Use Wayland.
Not everyone needs tearing enabled in their games (tearing allows for some input latency improvements), which is why some people avoid Wayland. Enabling VRR is as good as allowing tearing in almost all games. Tearing support is coming.
Enabling VRR is as good as allowing tearing in almost all games.
I use VRR on sway, and it’s as low-latency as it gets.
Plus, no tearing nor juddering.
why would x11 be garbage in his setup?
X11 can’t do different refresh rates on multiple monitors.
> X11 can’t do different refresh rates on multiple monitors
That’s just flat out wrong and has been for 2 years but morons like you keep flaunting the idea around and repeating it because you saw it on the reddit. You were a 30 second google search away from figuring it out by yourself
> Also you can’t do VRR with multiple monitors in X.
Fair enough
x11 does support 2 monitors with different rates, I don’t know what you’re on about
It does, just not very well.
If you want both displays to run smoothly, the refresh rates must be integer multiples of one another.
E.g: as 55Hz+165Hz, or 72Hz+144Hz would work, but not 75Hz+144Hz.
So you have occasional minor tearing on secondary monitor… okay ?
This guy flat out said that X doesn’t support 2 monitors with different rates which is false.
Ever since they made it possible in 2021 I’ve barely ever noticed it
installing a new kernel (zen probably?)
As someone who uses The Zen kernel, it hardly makes a difference for gaming.
The other patches to the kernel can be quite useful, though.
disabling compositor if using KDE
New to gaming in Linux, I use KDE, how much does it affect in terms of performance on disabling the compositor?
And is it only necessary on KDE or any desktop environment?
Isn’t fsync enabled by default with zen kernels?
The futex required should be enabled on mainline kernels beyond 5.16. It’s been a while since zen was required.
- choose a rolling release distro (either arch or openSUSE TW) or leading edge point release like fedora
- compile the kernel yourself with march=native, LTO, O2 or O3 (requires benchmarking but O2 is a sane default), apply patches if any, optionally choose a custom scheduler. linux-tkg is good for this and really easy on arch since it has a PKGBUILD written for you
- compile everything else that is important for performance: RADV/nvidia-dkms, proton (maybe), etc
- run games in gamescope without a DE/WM (like the steam deck), try performance governor and/or gamemode
I’m pretty sure that’s it, with this setup you will squeeze every single digit of FPS you can
otherwise, go with openSUSE since their packages are compiled with x86-64-v3 support, -O2 and LTO which seems to give it an edge in benchmarks
By this point of compiling everything you might as well just use Gentoo.
Thx. Yes I really would like to try a rolling release. What do you think about Debian Sid? Tbh, I dont think I can do everything, you just mentioned by my own, still need to learn a lot!
I don’t think distros like sid or rawhide are worth it for daily use, they’re more geared towards developers to adopt changes early.
I’ve been researching for a long time upon the topic of performance and distros, and my conclusion is that there are only 2 rolling release distros worth your time: arch (big community and very helpful wiki) and tumbleweed (if you want both stability and rolling release without a hassle this is the way)
the rest are either based on arch, are a sort of testing ground for the main spin or are just niche, like gentoo
from the above, compiling the kernel will have the greatest impact, and like I said, really easy to setup a kernel like tkg. in short, you clone the repo and just run a console command,
makepkg -siafter the compilation is done, you have your kernel! the rest is a matter of setting up your bootloader, afaik for grub it’s automatic but I use systemd-boot so I had to add the entry manually. that takes 5 minutes at most
applying the said optimisations is trivial as well, you don’t have to know pkgbuild or gcc for that. tkg made sure that anyone can do it, the pkgbuild has plenty comments to explain which line does what and you only have to modify one line to add optimisations. I’ve never compiled kernels before compiling linux-tkg but it was easy to figure out. but all if this only applies to arch
I also disabled CPU mitigations and SELinux, that’s a couple of fps for a more vulnerable system, but I’ve been rocking this way for 3 years or so and got no problems whatsoever, just be careful when you use the AUR if you go the arch route
and don’t listen to people saying whether it matters or not, you should try it yourself first and then judge which is the case
Thank you. Yes I also did a little research and read that Tumbleweed, Arch and Sid are very good rolling release distros, but I’m just too afraid to try them atm. I’m still a Linux virgin.
I will also look into the kernel part . . . . .
remove power profiles daemon, tlp or other stuff Accidentally removed it and realized i get 20 more fps in sc2.
Use x11 for wine and pcsx2 for now (i guess)
i use edevaouros with zen kernel dwm and proton-ge/lutris
Did you notice any performance gains? I just recently switched from Nobara to Endeavour and absolutely fell in love with it. However, so far I was too afraid to click Zen Kernel in the Kernel Tool :D
sudo pacman -Syu linux-zen --needed --noconfirm
If you want Mesa-Git, use yay and it will install both the main git and lib32 packages. When it tells you mesa conflicts with mesa-git, do you want to remove, choose yes. Repeat with the lib32 package. The core of Nobara is now on your EndeavourOs.
Use Tumbleweed (or any other rolling distro, that is stable for you) to get latest stable packages quickly (mostly about kernel and Mesa). That’s 90% of what’s important.
How can one genuinely optimize their system for gaming?
Run a semi-recent distribution that is decently fast at adopting kernel/driver updates.
There you go. 99% optimized.
Due to their bleeding-edge nature, Tumbleweed and Fedora are great for gaming. But if it is specifically Wayland gaming then Fedora comes out ahead. I am on wayland kde fedora 39 so far haven’t run into problems caused by the system. I was also using Tumbleweed wayland kde a few weeks ago before fedora 39 was released, but I did experience a heavy fps drop when alt-tabbing from a game, which can only be fixed by relaunching the game. So basically, my urge to figure out how gaming on wayland works gave me an oppportunity to discover these things. (they’re dropping x11 support on the next release of kde plasma, I heard)
many things don’t really help, but things that make the biggest difference are:
- recent kernel, zen and stuff doesn’t really matter just a new kernel makes the bigger difference
- mesa-git on AMD/Intel
- proton experimental
- gamemode
- fsync (litterally everyone has this now)
I use out of the box Pop OS for development and gaming :)
Works just fine. Distro literally doesn’t matter, any change in Nobara can be easily added to any other distro.
Use what you like. That’s the takeaway.
99% of difference you’ll see is just different (vulkan) driver versions.
And even then, sometimes the uplift is minimal
set the graphics card performance profile to performance :)
if nobody else already said it.
im pretty sure there are some kernel parameters that can be used to speed up performance on intel cpus but idk if they are game specific