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Comparing Linux gaming distros performance (with Tuxedo Atlas S)
tilvids.comGo to https://ground.news/TLE to to know where your news is coming from. Subscribe through my link for 40% off unlimited access this month. 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to: a Daily Linux News show, a weekly patroncast for more personal thoughts, polls on the next topics I cover,, your name in the credits, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thelinuxexp/join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment Or, you can donate whatever you want: https://paypal.me/thelinuxexp Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/TheLinuxExperiment/ 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: https://the-linux-experiment.creator-spring.com/ 🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! https://podcast.thelinuxexp.com 🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE: Website: https://thelinuxexp.com Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/web/@thelinuxEXP Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/TLENick PeerTube: https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos Discord: https://discord.gg/mdnHftjkja Timecodes: 00:00 Intro 01:06 Sponsor: Ground News 02:47 Testbench: the Atlas S 06:38 Bazzite 10:20 Nobara 11:38 HoloISO 12:17 Chimera OS 14:01 Tuxedo OS 14:46 Conclusion 16:16 Support the channel #linuxgaming #gaming #linuxdistro Testbench: Tuxedo Atlas S: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-Atlas-S-Gen1-Intel.tuxedo It's mini ITX, with 3 potential finishes: a jade green, a silver, and a matte black, which is the one they sent me. It comes with Intel 13th or 14th gen CPUs, up to an i9 14900, it can accommodate 2 M.2 SSDs and 2 SATA 3 drives, up to 24 terabytes in total. It can come with or without dedicated graphics, which can go up to a Radeon RX 7700XT, or an Nvidia RTX 4070. It can also get up to 96 gigs of DDR5 RAM, and it obviously has wifi and bluetooth, and it comes with Linux preinstalled, Tuxedo OS being the default. The model Tuxedo sent me has an i7 13700, 1TB of PCIe 3 SSD, 32 gigs of RAM, and the RX 7700XT with 12 gigs of VRAM. This video IS NOT sponsored by Tuxedo. Bazzite So, Bazzite is a weird one: it's based on Fedora Atomic, so it's an "immutable" distro, and it's built using universal blue, which is a build system that lets you create tailored distro images for plenty of purposes. I ran all the games at the native resolution of my monitor, so 3440x1440. Horizon is run using the latest version of Proton from Valve, the rest are native Linux games. Everything was ran at their max settings, at the native resolution, without any resolution scaling. Everything ran under Wayland, with all the latest updates applied. So, For Horizon Zero Dawn, running the benchmark gave me an average of 80 FPS at these maxed out settings. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got 105 FPS on average in the benchmark, and for Total War Warhammer 3 on the battle benchmark, it reached 56.4 FPS and 52.5 FPS on the campaign benchmark. Nobara Next is Nobara. This isn't an immutable distribution, it's Fedora, plus a lot of kernel patches, addons, drivers and tools focused specifically on gaming and on improving performance In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got 106 FPS on average in the benchmark. In Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, I got 57 FPS on average, and 54.7 FPS on average for the campaign benchmark. In Horizon Zero Dawn, Nobara got 80 FPS on average. HoloISO I also gave a shot to HoloISO, in its new immutable form, but it never managed to give me a bootable system, no matter how hard I tried. Chimera OS Chimera OS is an arch based distribution, it's an atomic distro, so immutable, and includes a bunch of emulation tools as well as optimizations for gaming. It defaults to GNOME as its desktop, compared to KDE for the other distros I tested. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got 102 FPS on average in the benchmark, similar to other distros I tested. In Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, I got 55.3 FPS on average, and 51.1 FPS on average for the campaign benchmark. In Horizon Zero Dawn, Chimera OS got 73 FPS on average, strangely lower than other distributions. Tuxedo OS Just for fun, I decided to also run all of these games on the preinstalled Tuxedo OS, to see if these gaming distros offer improved performance compared to a "normal" system. Here are the results. In Horizon Zero Dawn, at the max resolution and max settings, with any upscaling, The Atlas S running Tuxedo OS got 81 FPS on average. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at the max settings and resolution, Ubuntu 24.04 reached 106 FPS on average. In Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, at the max settings and resolution, I got 57 FPS on average, and in the campaign benchmark, it reached 54.9 FPS
Unfortunately, I can’t take this seriously as 1% lows and additional variance due to difference in DE haven’t been accounted for.
Furthermore, you bet that Tuxedo OS has done a splendid job at optimizing performance on a device that’s sold by Tuxedo. Therefore, I wonder if it’s even a fair comparison to begin with.
If you’re only testing on one set of hardware, it isn’t going to tell the whole story. The results might be very different on an AMD vs Nvidia GPU, or even on a brand-new vs 1-3 generation old GPU.
Probably the most important thing for gaming is driver support and ease of installation. This sometimes runs directly counter to other general-purpose needs.
I’m still on the hunt for a distro where everything I need is easy to install. I don’t think any exist, primarily because GPU drivers suuuuuuuck, especially when you need CUDA or ROCm to work.
Have you looked at the opinionated images by uBlue, i.e. Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin? FWIW, e.g. for Bazzite, AMD’s ROCM OpenCL/HIP run-times are fully supported OOTB and there’s a workaround for CUDA. It does a lot of good stuff in general. Heck, I’d argue they’re one of the most handsfree and easy experiences you may find on Linux.
Thanks for the recommendation! I was looking at the Fedora family since AMD officially supports RHEL 9. Hadn’t gotten as far as to figure out how well that transfers to Fedora and its derivatives. Good to hear that it works.