I am currently using a gaming PC. I got dual boot with Windows 11 and Manjaro Linux. The Windows partition is only there for gaming purposes, and the odd unsupported app. I barely use it, and prefer to daily use Linux.
Particularly, for many single-player controller-focused games, I like to hook up my PC to my HDR OLED TV and play there. But at the same time, I prefer using Linux for everything. But Linux does not support HDR, and many games do not run well on Linux, so I boot to Windows for those.
I did hear however that HDR is almost here on Linux, and that the Steam deck supports using HDR. So would it be practical to run games in HDR with my setup?
I am on X11 because I’m using an Nvidia GPU and I heard Wayland is wonky on Nvidia. I have not really tried it however. I am also using Plasma, and I hear that they recently added a good amount of support for HDR in Wayland.
Instead of relying on hearsay, why not try Wayland yourself for a few weeks? You can always switch back to X11 in the event you have an app that isn’t supported in Wayland; or find a replacement that is.
Good luck.
(Wayland has served me well personally for a year (with AMD graphics), but if your Nvidia is stable enough (generally) then you might be pleasantly surprised with Wayland).
Thanks for the links. I was hoping I could get community tips and experiences from forum members as well, which is why I opened the thread.
I actually do use Wayland on my laptop, which has an Intel GPU. The main reason being I can plug in different monitors with different scaling each, which is much more difficult to do with X11. But I stuck to X11 on my desktop because that’s generally the recommendation for gaming and nvidia users.
Though I’m more interested to hear what people’s experiences are with HDR
I think the biggest issue that you face actually in Manjaro stable, is the still old Nvidia driver.
You need the newest nvidia driver in unstable branch for Wayland that gives the right performance for games from what i heared:
And for that feature you need atleast a nvidia 20x0 or higher GPU with GSP support.
From my understanding, this is mainly related only to RTX effects.
The default rendering performance is equal to Windows at least under X11, where i personally compared a few games already but i also saw several game benches where Arch performance in general 5-10% better as Windows11.
The newest AMD CPU Gen (Ryzen 9700X) add’s additional percentage to Linux also compared to Win11.
Im still unsure about HDR+RTX compatibility/performance.
Interesting, I always thought that Manjaro gets the latest GPU drivers because of its rolling release model.
Certain games not running well on Linux basically boils down to the fact that they simply weren’t designed for Linux and that you’re relying on a compatibility layer (Proton) that tries to reverse engineer the Windows APIs. In order for something to run, you’d often have to do some special configuration, enable or disable certain things, get a specific version of proton, etc. etc. And in my experience, the framerate often isn’t as stable or as high as on Windows. Of course it depends on the game. But eh… it’s good enough so that’s what matters in most cases.
You mean Manjaro stable branch, i guess. Which always had a few weeks delay compared to Manjaro unstable branch.
But since nvidia open the path for their driver change which lead to some problems to integrate or adjust settings for a smooth driver change for the end user, at least from what i could read yet (i don’t have first hands experience here, because this new nvidia driver are still in Beta).
The point is, that Win11 is filled with so much bloat today… Manjaro or Arch wins in gaming performance in around 60% from all the games that i have seen yet (Around 30 different games that i have seen).
The most older games archive under Linux/Proton sometimes even a ridiculess 150% performance gain and destroying Windows Games with their Native DirectX support, because Proton gives so much better performance and fix some bugs that occured under Windows, that lead to a passive handbreak.
Yeah thats true… but it really depends on the games and the GFX that are enabled. As i said, RTX performance are still superior under Windows.
While on the other hand, rtx sucks anyways and demands/reduce heavily the performance even under Windows.