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Yeah, mirrors my experience with similar parameters(CachyOS, Zen3, RDNA2). On average games seem to run more or less the same and maybe even slightly better. But so far it only really mattered in like two cases where i slightly missed the performance target on windows and the 5-15% performance uplift on Cachy were actually noticeable.
IMHO the main takeaway shouldnt be to switch to Linux because of better performance. Like 8-9% more performance on average for free is nice(atleast with this specific testing scenario). But its hardly noticable in most cases. I would rather focus on driving the point home that if you want to switch to Linux anyway you dont have to worry about performance regressions at least with an AMD gpu.
Otherwise i feel like CPU bound games seem to profit the most. IDK if its just less overhead, better scheduling or what. I’m barely knowledgable enough to just spit out dangerous half-truths.
Is there a difference in performance between CachyOS and Bazzite?
you’re not going to notice anything that’s going to knock your socks off but you might notice like slightly less stutter for fps drop for some things. It does depend on the game though.
I use NixOS with the CachyOS Kernel because I play EVE Online. It’s a game that pretty much requires you have multiple clients/accounts going at the same time. For me with the CachyOS kernel if I have 3+ clients open I notice a lot less fps stuttering/lag over say the standard Linux Kernel or even Zen.
At the end of the day, honestly, any distro can pretty much be made into a gaming distro. Stuff like Bazzite, CachyOS, PikaOS are just going to make it “easier” for you because they have stuff installed and configured for gaming in mind by default. easier setup. But unless you’re constantly monitoring benchmarks/your FPS then performance increases, if any, aren’t going to be groundbreaking.
I am not a tweaker. I like throwing expensive hardware at games, dragging the settings bars to ultra, and if a game doesn’t play well after that, move on to another. I’m not opposed to switching distros if they’re as easy to install as Mint.
I’m actually trying PikaOS for a week, I installed it lastnight. If you want something like Mint, easy to install as Mint, but focused on gaming then it’s a decent distro. It actually works very well with my specific asus laptop that has an AMD iGPU and Nvidia descrete GPU. It’s also improved my battery life over NixOS (which I think is just poor config on my part).
all that being said I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it. However it does seem to be the best distro i’ve used on this laptop, just works really well with it for whatever reason.
Another way to consider it is that performance gains in Cachy are six to eighteen months ahead of “stable” Linux. But that performance increase does mean things are more likely to break with rolling updates.
For me it was just better support, on my flow z13 bazzite kept freezing the screen, I guess its a reported issue with the display manager. Cachyos doesn’t have that issue probably because its much more up to date so fixes have been applied and they take a while to get to fedora then bazzite
