Don't switch to Linux immediately

[u/ifearone]

Ladies, gentlemen and everyone in between. Everyday I see people ask about switching to Linux citing various reasons. This post aims to solve all of those questions simply.

1. Don't switch immediately. Do your own research on what distro to choose. There are tons of them and what works for one person won't necessarily work for another person.

2. After you've narrowed down your choices load up VMware or something similar and test all the distros to your hearts desire. Get a feel for a whole bunch of them. I mean it.

3. If you're still adamant about switching at this point congratulations. Get a secondary drive and dual boot. You'll see that some games and software simply dont work on Linux. If you're a gamer I'd recommend dual booting 100%.

4. If you really hate windows that much and you dont mind not playing certain games or using certain software then backup all your files and give windows the boot.

5. Welcome to linux forever.

[u/LynnIsReal]

CS2 runs terribly. Just tried it today on Fedora with the nvidia drivers installed. Unfortunate

[u/True_tomato_soup → u/LynnIsReal]

You have a driver issue. CS2 run flawlessly.

[u/LynnIsReal → u/True_tomato_soup]

How could i fix it? Im not sure what else i could try or what I should look for. I installed the newest driver and got it working with secure boot.

I installed the most up to date nvidia driver. I also have the most recent VBIOS installed on my GPU.

I used Wayland.

I am VERY particular with my setup. I notice many small variances in frame pacing.

I was 27k last premier season and peaked at 2200 last year as well (I don't play faceit too much though).

Here are my specs: CPU: 7800x3D GPU: RTX 3080 (ROG STRIX RTX 3080 10GB OC - got it on Newegg in Dec 2020) Motherboard: ROG STRIX B650E-F

Keyboard: Wooting 60hev2 Mouse: Hitscan Hyperlight (2000hz, but also tested the game in 1000hz, same results).

I also use a Scarlett 2i2 for my mic and headphones and have those drivers installed on windows.

Game settings: 1280x960 stretched 350fps cap. G sync + v sync, reflex not enabled (no low-latency mode either). I tested this with capframex too and i got the best results with that setup.

Windows 11 settings: Exclusive fullscreen (unchecked fullscreen optimizations in the cs2.exe properties HAGS off Resizable BAR off Game mode on (game bar disabled) Nvidia overlay disabled Steam overlay disabled

Observations:

1: the game feels very floaty compared to windows 11. The consistent input lag is immediately apparent. I enabled VRR/adaptive sync and it didn't change.

2: observed framerate was significantly lower. It barely hit above 300fps in Valve DM and often dipped to the 170s. It lived in the 200s.

After i felt this, i didn't even bother benchmarking the frame times. I legitimately will not play like this.

In W11, the game is nearly always capped to 350fps. The 1% lows usually sit in the low 200s. DM is similar. Frame times consistently sit close to 3ms.

No significant spikes that make the game stutter like stock Windows 11 settings; it very rarely goes above 5ms for any immediate moment (except for me dying, which doesn't matter).

Any ideas? I've just come to the conclusion it won't work.

[u/True_tomato_soup → u/LynnIsReal]

For hardware I have a very similar setup to yours, only a difference with the video card. I have an amd 6800xt, one of my friend who also has the same processor has us has a 4080 and reports no particular problems with CS2 under cachy in 4k. Gamer nexus (they used bazzite for their test, which is just a fedora fork) reports that with Nvidia GPU, some games have a very very bad standard deviation for lows. Which kills the performance for Nvidia users. ( With my amd, it's the opposite, I have a much smaller standard deviation for lows under linux.)

At 300 fps (average fps don't matter anymore, if you have a 1ms monitor, worst case scenario, you will get an update a 3-2 ms (I doubt even pro player can notice that, personally above 100fps I don't see a difference, (so 10 ms in the worst case scenario)) what matters is lows and stability. Any stutter you see is FPS dropping significantly lower for a while and increasing your time reaction windows consequently.

As I stated before the problem come certainly from the Nvidia drivers which notoriously suck balls and give a huge standard deviation for lows on some applications.

Nvidia has promised to release better drivers this year, but in the meantime,

A few things ideas you can try:

Try x11 or check if CS2 perform better under x11 or wayland.

Wine 11 if ran through proton. (But I think there is a native linux version now? not sure) It's just out, maybe it will help.

CachyOs wizardery, my nvidia friend reported that NVIDIA worked better under cacyhy for him than under other wayland distros. (Not sure if true, I know they have their own version of proton, cachyproton, optimised for gaming, maybe there is more wizardery, but you need to ask the cachy community, I don't use arch, or cachy and the only complicated distro I would be willing to install is LFS )

Use 1 monitor , disable steam overlay in processes (that one really killed my perfo on some games), don't run other software in background like discord, or restrict discord via taskset so 2 cpu cores or so, ingame high res, mid to low settings only csmaa2 antializing.

Disable Vsync completely.

Lower your framerate caps at 300 or 320.

I saw a while back that some people reported that killing virtual cores in bios actually increased performance drastically for CS2 I have never tried as I don't play competitive games. Here is the video , they use an intel proco, but sure if applicable to our amds but hey you asked for ideas.

Not sure any of this helped, but I tried my best. :)

Edit: 535+ and newer Nvidia drivers are apparently much better.

[u/LynnIsReal → u/True_tomato_soup]

Well, avg fps technically matters in the sense that it is my frametime baseline. And the lower the frametime AND lower variance makes the game look significantly smoother. Pro players can and do notice it. 3ms frame times with variance to 5ms tops on a 360hz monitor is obviously different than 10ms with variance. Im not focusing on ms as in a button is pressed and something happens that many ms later. 360hz is visible from 240hz and definitely from 144hz. My setup is 1280x960 explicitly because i get the lowest avg frame times and the lowest 1% highest frame times.