The YouTube channel “Maximum Fury” conducted a technical test of the new Cyberpunk add-on called “Phantom Liberty” on an older AMD hardware system, testing it separately on Linux and Windows 11. The Linux system, specifically the Fedora distribution called Nobara, performed significantly better, delivering 31% more frames compared to Windows 11.
The hardware used for testing included an Asrock B550 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU from the first RDNA generation, along with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The CPU, RAM, and GPU were overclocked, and the system utilized undervolting to save energy costs.
When testing the game at 1080p resolution with high textures, the Linux system achieved an average of 63.72 frames per second (fps), while Windows 11 managed only 48.55 fps. This suggests that the game should run noticeably smoother on the Linux system.
Too bad on Linux you can’t use frame generation and DLSS ray reconstruction.
After trying this specific game with full path tracing and ray reconstruction, I don’t think I’ll ever see normal rasterization or ray tracing with the same eyes again.
I was looking at a decorative plastic table, one of these assets you’d simply ignore on any other game, under sunlight occluded by some smoke and Jesus… I was never this impressed with game graphics before, but I am now. I felt like I was playing a movie, not a game.
Wait, DLSS doesn’t work on Linux at all? That’s a pretty big thing to gloss over whenever someone is talking about linux gaming and how comparable it is to windows nowadays. I doubt I’d be able to get anything remotely close to a stable framerate on cyberpunk2077 without it, and same goes for other newer games like dying light 2 or starfield!
DLSS works. It took a while longer than Windows, but Nvidia themselves actually provide Wine-compatible DLL files. Also, there’s a native way to implement DLSS for Linux which, I kid you not, zero games so far are using. The Windows version works fine though.
But DLSS Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction do not work, and there are zero workarounds.
Oh, so he’s just talking about DLSS3 features, gotchya. I thought DLSS 1 performance improvements are also frame generation but I see now thats different
DLSS is upscaler. Game is rendered at lower resolution and then image is upscaled in a bit smarter way than simple “stretching”.
More precisely, DLSS is a set of models that use AI to interpolate an image. This interpolation can take many different forms:
Interpolation can be used to take a lower resolution image and upscale it, which is the main feature of DLSS.
You can also use DLSS to take a high resolution image and scale it down, with less artifacts, as a type of antialiasing. This is DLDSR.
You can also use it to take information from an image, combined with motion data, and interpolate how blocks of pixels might change into a new frame. This allows you to generate intermediary frames. This is Frame Generation.
You can also take a very noisy image, composed of discrete dots, and interpolate how neighboring pixels should look. This is Ray Reconstruction.
Aren’t frame generation and ray reconstruction new? I’m sure they’ll work one day, although I’m not a big Linux head I only use steamos on the deck I just see a lot of Linux posts on Lemmy so here I am lol.
They’re new, yes. Though the folks at Proton already confirmed they’ll provide no workaround to support it, Nvidia needs to build the Linux drivers with official support. We don’t know if they’ll do that and when.
Plain DLSS definitely works, I’m guessing they mean that specific reconstruction feature. I’m sure it’ll be implemented eventually if it’s possible at all though.
Side note, a kind of related feature that is missing for sure from the Linux drivers is DLDSR, and plain DSR for that matter. As a heavy user of both, it’s a bit of a personal deal breaker.
DLSS works fine on Linux, but I don’t know about frame generation and ray reconstruction specifically. It could be those two don’t work yet.
DLSS is a matter of Nvidia’s sub-par driver support. FSR2 (and soon FSR3, which does frame gen.) works, ironically even on Nvidia GPUs :P
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I only took FSR3 for reference because it’ll support one of the things you outlined xP
DLSS ray reconstruction works in Linux. You just need to launch with
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command%.I was (happily!) wrong. See reply below.
No, it’s definitely working. Here’s proof (open the images in a new tab and zoom in on the reflections to see the difference in clarity):
With reconstruction:
Without reconstruction:
With reconstruction:
Without reconstruction:
With
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799and ray reconstruction enabled, reflections are much clearer and also resolve way faster during motion.Ah wow! I’m glad to be wrong. Though I’m very new to Linux. Could you tell me how to use these arguments? Or more specifically, how do you know which arguments to set on which games to make features work?
Sure thing! Right click on any game in Steam and click Properties. Then in the General tab, you’ll see a Launch Options box where you can paste these arguments in.
What most people get wrong when first trying to use it is not knowing how to correctly specify environment variables vs launch options that get passed to the game executable. If you just want to pass arguments to the game, just paste them into the box. So for example with Cyberpunk, you can just paste in
--launcher-skipand Steam will launch the game as if you were running
Cyberpunk2077.exe --launcher-skipHowever, if you want to specify environment variables as well, you’ll need the
%command%placeholder. So, in order to enable raytracing and bypass the driver check for ray reconstruction in Cyberpunk, I paste these launch arguments into the settings:DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command% --launcher-skipwhich is like running
DXVK_NVAPI_DRIVER_VERSION=53799 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 Cyberpunk2077.exe --launcher-skip%command%is just a placeholder for the game’s executable path.Hope that clears things up with regards to the launch options.
As far as knowing which environment variables to use, that’s on a game-by-game basis, but the two most common ones that I use for Nvidia GPUs are
PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1which enables DLSS in games that are not on Proton’s NVAPI whitelist, andVKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11which enables raytracing. I almost never bother with any other environment variables unless there’s special game issues I need to workaround (like Cyberpunk’s driver version check), in which case I check ProtonDB or the game’s issue tracker on the Proton GitHub page.Thanks a lot! Your comment is really helpful. I had a lot of issues with Linux gaming so never spent a good while on it, but now Ubuntu 23.10 is working literally perfectly for me so I completely removed Windows from my PC. Still learning how to navigate things :)
Also no HDR, either (not supported by the OS). You’re not getting the full Cyberpunk experience without HDR and Ray Reconstruction. But I suppose that people with an older PC and monitor would benefit by switching to Linux.
Gamescope allows the usage of HDR
I recently tried but can’t get the tone mapping right in gamescope, any tips?
HDR on Linux is definitely a thing, KDE supports it
I already got the full cyberpunk experience 3 years ago, and it was terrible. Making the game prettier doesn’t make it any less of a joke.
I used to say things like this too, but then I played 2.0.
Surprisingly it’s a proper game now. They turned the game into GTA in the future, and that’s a good thing. Also the perk system was completely overhauled, and weapons rebalanced so that you actually have to do more than just grab whatever has the highest DPS.
The story’s the same, but everything else is completely different. Give it another chance.
I’ve tried it. It absolutely is not “GTA in the future”. It’s just as shallow as it was at launch.