DirectX 12 games ran through Proton/Wine on Linux perform so much worse compared to Windows. This can’t be just the overhead from the translation as AMD GPUs perform just fine, but I think it’s due to a lack of proper driver optimizations.
DXVK and VKD3D developers have acknowledged this and they can’t do much about it due to the driver’s closed source nature. They can’t tell how exactly it works behind the scenes.
I don’t know if this is talked about enough, but I don’t see the top threads covering his topic. I think it has high priority.
I hope Nvidia developers at least take a look at this and maybe optimize things if they can. Nvidia GPUs are great on Linux when it comes to computation/CUDA, etc, but for real time applications they are sadly not performing optimally at the moment.
Update, more information:
Driver version is pretty much irrelevant, this applies even today, same goes for Proton/Wine/vkd3d/dxvk – I have been using Linux for about 3 years, and it has always been considerably slower for directx12 titles
Wayland improves performance compared to x11, which is an interesting behavior that might help pinpoint the issue
Hardware-wise, Pascal and older GPUs experience this more severe, Turing and newer are better but they are still considerably slower than Windows
CPU heavy software like emulators or some games suffer more
From what I can tell, this happens regardless of hardware (CPU, RAM, etc), as long as you are using an Nvidia GPU
Here’s a video comparing performance on Linux and Windows on an Nvidia GPU (4080 Super) under x11:
I will update the post later when I have time to dualboot to give my own numbers, but my experience matches the video. An example of a game I’m currently playing is Resident Evil 4 remake. On Windows I get 80+ FPS, while on Linux I get from 40 to 75 depending on where I am at the same settings.
On x11 it gets down to the 30s, so running Wayland actually gives me reasonably higher framerate, which is definitely nice, but I know things can be even more optimized.
I updated the post. I apologize for not providing more info initially. But it was more of a discussion than a bug report as this is a known issue and applies across different set-ups and has been like this for years now. But I did provide more information either way.
It’s widely known that DX12 games run worse in Linux on Nvidia hardware.
DX11 games usually run much better.
From what I’ve seen there can be as much as a 30% performance drop with DX12 titles. Turning on DLSS/FSR can make up for that loss but it’s a “weak” workaround for the actual problem.
I also want to emphasize that this is not really just a dx12 issue, although it is definitely more noticeable when using dx12 vs dx11. If I had to guess, it has to do with the increased CPU workload. Or having more API calls.
Emulators (running natively) also exhibit similar behavior. Emulators in general run much faster on Windows vs on Linux using an Nvidia GPU. And this time there’s no translation layers at all, both run natively using Vulkan.
Here’s one emulator that has this issue manifested in a big way, it’s Ryujinx, a Switch emulator. Here’s a screenshot running The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
Ryujinx developer said this might be because of the massive amount of draw calls the emulator makes when asked about the poor performance on Linux using Nvidia. Compared to other emulators. As while they do perform worse on Linux when using an Nvidia GPU, Ryujinx has the biggest hit.
There’s another weird behavior, it’s not just the framerate. Every time I open the game on Linux, the first ~10 seconds I get a lot of stutter, similar to shader compilation, but it’s not actually shader compilation as that should be taken care of especially running around for hours (collectively) in the same area. It seems to me like the CPU is bottlenecked by the GPU somehow. And this is probably related to memory.
I don’t know if this is related to the MTRR/PAT thing or not, but out of curiosity I enabled the variable but there doesn’t seem to be any difference. At least on Wayland.
Mmm, I have fiddled with many settings but there’s no magic switch that can be done be at software/user level.
However disabling 4G Decoding in BIOS can increase performance in some apps/games but disabling it can also decrease performance in other apps/games. Which leads me to believe that it’s Nvidias memory handling that’s causing it.
The video was very interesting especially considering Raytracing, which I never tested myself given my GPU is too weak for that. So, to summarize the video, which covers dx12, here’s the findings:
When RTX OFF
Nvidia FPS loss on Linux compared to Windows on average is about 18%.
AMD FPS loss on Linux compared to Windows is mostly non-existent.
When RTX ON
Both AMD and Nvidia suffer a massive loss im performance on Linux compared to Windows, about 50%.
Its not 50% but its still too much. With Ada cards it’s around 30% for me. But that seems to be the general loss overall and not specific to RT.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Windows
I play diablo 4 on ubuntu. Diablo 4 is vkd3d. I recently updated my video card from an AMD 6950xt to a 4080 super.
The game ran pretty flawless with the 6950xt. When I started using the 4080 super I experienced frequent problems, usually when diablo 4 gpu memory use hit 16GB (fps drops and stuttering). Long story short, I ended up setting a 14GB limit in dxvk.conf (vkd3d uses this limit) and all my problems went away. It seems like there is some sort of problem freeing memory with the nvidia drivers (550.107.02) and diablo 4. I had no such problems with the 6950xt and the gpu is the only thing that changed.
This could be an issue specific to diablo and not vkd3d though.
yes, they are still honored with vkd3d (I set it very low to be sure, like 5GB, and gpu memory usage stayed there). I am not familiar with the implementation details but it was explained why it works in the other post. If I can find it again I will post it here. Here is a snippet from the vkd3d github page:
"
vkd3d-proton does not supply the necessary DXGI components on its own. Instead, DXVK (2.1+) and vkd3d-proton share a DXGI implementation.
"
