Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Gaming Performance With NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060/1080

Overall, these NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060/1080 Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming benchmarks ended up being quite interesting. In many of the higher-profile games ported to Linux by independent studios, the performance under Linux was only 60~70% of the Windows 10 performance. That's even for games that were released for Linux more than one year ago and has seen driver optimizations, post-release patches, etc. Most Linux gamers who dual-boot complain of newer Linux games performing slower than Windows and this is largely confirmed by our results.

But not all hope is lost. As shown with some tests like Total War: WARHAMMER and Metro Last Light Redux, there are also good ports that perform very close to the Windows numbers. Our tests like Unigine and OpenArena also show that Linux's OpenGL performance can meet/exceed the OpenGL performance offered on Windows.

The Talos Principle results were also interesting perspective and show hope for the future with the Vulkan performance coming out ahead of the OpenGL renderer. Additionally, the Vulkan Windows vs. Linux results were very close.

That's all of the Windows 10 vs. Linux gaming benchmarks I have to share today with still working to complete the AMDGPU+RadeonSI testing. If you appreciate all of our Linux benchmarks at Phoronix, consider joining Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. Thanks for your support.