NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 GPUs Tested In Steam Play, Windows 11 Still Fares Better Than Linux

wccftech.com:

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 GPUs have been tested in Valve's Steam Play but it looks like Windows 11 still fares better than Linux in results published by Phoronix.

Larabel tested two games, Cyberpunk 2077 and Hitman 3, while also testing two synthetic apps, Unigine Heaven 4 and Uningine Superposition. The test configuration featured an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and the GeForce RTX 4090 / RTX 4080 graphics cards from NVIDIA. The cards used the Linux 530.41.03 drivers and 531.61 drivers for Windows 11.

Starting with Cyberpunk 2077, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 & RTX 4080 performed were tested at both 1440P and 2160P at High and Ultra settings. While the graphics cards performed the best in Windows 11, Linux performance was still within the 90% performance range of Windows 11 and that shows the work NVIDIA has put into optimizing its Linux drivers over the years. There's still a lot that can be done but getting this close to Windows which is the primary OS of choice for the vast majority of gamers is great to see.

Hitman 3 was slightly different in the performance rankings compared to Cyberpunk 2077. At 1440p Ultra settings, the game underperformed in Linux Ubuntu, but not as much as Cyberpunk 2077's testing. The performance showed a 5% difference but changed the most at 4K Ultra settings, which showed the most significant difference at upwards of 15%.

Coming to the synthetic benchmarks, Unigine Heaven & Unigine Superposition held similar results between the GeForce RTX 4090 & RTX 4080 when running on Windows 11 and Linux. Since both benchmark builds are native to both operating systems, there's virtually any GPU performance difference.

Larabel's testing showed that Proton, utilized by Valve's Steam Play, can still use some work.