Suggested Linux gaming hardware

Bluelion · 18 Sep 2013 at 21:35

Having recently discovered the merits of playing Windows games through the Wine interface, I am a little disappointed with the performance provided by my aging little box (2600K at stock clock, 16Gb RAM, ATI 6970).

For comparison, I have two boxes of almost identical spec to above, but the Windows one has an nVidia 680 in it, and in LOTRO, I get approximately:

Windows: 60fps on ultra-high graphics settings (capped on vsync)
Linux: 30fps on medium graphics settings, although putting up to high doesn't seem to drop the average framerate that much, but the framerate variance becomes too great to play.

Combined with another desire to go 6-core for heavy photo processing, its time for the moths to fly and open my wallet for a 4930K, 64Gb RAM and a graphics card.

Here's the rub - does anyone know how much performance I can expect with a more modern GPU, such as the nVidia 780? I'm hoping/wishing that I can get something close to the current Windows setup with that kit, am I in cloud cuckoo land with this thinking? I would prefer to go to nVidia because of what I perceive to be more stable proprietary drivers.

I'd try the 680GTX in my current setup, except both systems are water cooled, so a 'quick swap' of the cards is not that easy to achieve (although I guess I could swap the hard disks over and watch Windows panic at a change of components).

Hades · 19 Sep 2013 at 13:58

I don't game on Linux. But from reading around I think that AMD drivers are not as pereformant as Nvidia. They both take a bit of a hit when running under Linux but Amd appears to suffer worst. That may change as AMD have made efforts recently to make information available about their cards for drivers. Also Steam is having a positive effect. But ultimately most games will run a little slower under Linux.

If it were me and gaming were the primary issue on Linux then I would probably get the fastest Nvidia I could afford, although dual booting will usually yield better results.

mjones1 · 19 Sep 2013 at 14:49

Why are you trying to play games through WINE and expecting the same sort of performance? Just dual boot as said above.

Bluelion · 19 Sep 2013 at 22:21

mjones1 said:
Why are you trying to play games through WINE and expecting the same sort of performance? Just dual boot as said above.

I'm not expecting the same performance on the same hardware, I'm hoping to get similar performance on better hardware. I don't want to dual boot with that behemoth of a space hugging OS which is Windows, which is why I run two boxes at the moment.

Anyway, I've just swapped the SSD from the Linux box into the Windows box, reinstalled the drivers (5 mins to completely uninstall the ATI drivers and install the nVidia drivers, no other drivers needed, Windows take note) and been pleasantly surprised - wine seems to be resulting in only around a 25% drop in frame rate on identical hardware. That's close enough for me, new PC order going in