Cyberpunk runs 30% faster on linux than on windows 11
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.
30% is extremely surprising. I'd expect single digit percent gains, if any, on Linux. This 30% difference was in the opposite direction 10 years ago, when Windows had access to low-level graphics APIs and Linux was only on OpenGL. I wouldn't expect there to be 30% worth of frames per second to be tied to Windows bloat.
30% means either Windows is doing something dumb, or the game is doing something dumb and the compatibility layers are mitigating the issue on Linux.
Exactly. Some people here seem to be completely detached from reality if they honestly think that this isn't just some weird bug and these tests being an indicator of one OS being better than the other.
Sure there are some aspects where one OS's philosophy has some performance gains over the other when doing very specific tasks, mostly when it comes to file access or creating processes. A 30% difference is just way too much, particularly for a game, where those differences shouldn't matter as much.
Like how Elden Ring ran better on Linux at the start because Wine could patch in cache precompilation which normally the game devs would need to do themselves
Exactly. And usually there's a 5-10% performance penalty on Linux because of WINE overhead when running Windows games on Linux, but sometimes Linux makes up for it in other ways (maybe the scheduler) and can get 5-10% faster.
Honestly, on Proton, performance differences between the two operating systems are a dice roll in either direction, but still single digit percentages like you said.