For people who dual boot Linux and Windows on the same system and has PA installed, is the performance better on Linux, or Windows?
What make is your GPU? From my experience, AMD's Linux drivers are significantly worse than their windows counterparts, whereas nvidia's drivers are roughly equal. I don't know much about the open source drivers though if you use those instead.
The AMD open source drivers work, with varying degrees of performance, nvidia... not so much. As for PA, in my experience (and with an AMD gpu) performance is similar as the game is more cpu bound. The major caveat is that you have to fiddle more with PA to get it stable under Linux as the coherent ui system is a bit unstable. That said I haven't used the Linux version in a while as everything else I play / use is windows based. @DeathByDenim is the guy to ask though. He's built all sorts of 'quality of life' tools that help make the Linux version easier to handle...
i dunno about that i've NEVER had issues with linux nvidia drivers as compared to AMD quite to the contrary. perhaps if you have a laptop. but still the performance is virtually identical nowadays where it used to be much worse for linux
Well, I only wrote one tool for updating PA under Linux, but that is moot nowadays with everybody using Steam anyway. Some tricks may be necessary to get it to work under Steam, but it just works most of the time. As for performance, yeah, it's mainly CPU bound. Though a recent review of the NVIDIA drivers under Linux vs Windows can be found here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-linux-pascal&num=1 That being said, PA works fine on my laptop with the GT 650M. I mean, it won't get you 60fps of course, but very playable.
I've found playing on Ubuntu with official Nvidia drivers to be at least as fast as playing on Windows 7/8.
To be clear I'm talking about the open source drivers- nvidias proprietary drivers are excellent in linux. The open source drivers were essentially non functional last time I tried though....
Exactly- a big pull of Linux for many is the fact that the community can provide their own fixes. AMD have been very good at opening up their driver- which has allowed the community built open source Radeon to get quite proficient (they usually work with a small performance hit compared to the propitiatory drivers in most games, although in a couple of cases they are now faster). nVidia on the other hand is really cagey with providing anything to the Linux community (other than their own, in house drivers)- so nVidia open source drivers are only capable of the most basic functions and really only support very old nVidia gpus, well at least they were back when I was running on my GTX 560. It's interesting, as nVidia aren't loosening their grip at all, whilst AMD are actually moving more open source with their driver efforts. I guess it's partly necessity on AMD's part- although historically ATi and AMD have both been fairly linux and community friendly for a long time. At the end of the day, if raw performance is all you are interested in, then nVidia are the better choice under linux, as you give up very little performance compared to their Windows drivers (although you *do* give up a bit). That said if ethics are part of the reason you are on Linux then AMD's much better support of community efforts are worth keeping in mind- and given the mind set of many Linux users (who essentially want to 'control their own destiny' so to speak) that's worth mentioning imo.
if that's true (and I'm willing to believe it is) it really hasn't reflected in their behavior. When I had a Sapphire RADEON HD 5970 i was appalled to see what their take on a proprietary driver was. while games ran just fine the care put into the soft was absolute zero. it must have been tested on one of their top cards probably not even in linux. the result was that plenty of ui was there but plugged into functionalities available to higher level cards so that was already pretty unprofessional but it looked like it had been made decades ago and the configurability for dual screen was godawful and full of bugs. I dunno i personally believe AMD and ATI's involvement with linux needs to feel more personal. You know as if they're actually using the crap they're handing out. I can on a side-note relate to how unethical and straight-up evil Nvidia's behavior has been. yes they do actually test their drivers on linux but the business with wanting wayland to do things certain ways so as to handicap AMD isn't just shady, it's low brow. I'm guessing why Mir is nvidia-capable is simply because Canonical's "radical" solution to this was to create their own api : Mir and cave to Nvidia's evil schemings. this seems to point to a confirmation of the above : http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst-fglrx-driver-16-04
Yeah I wasn't saying AMD were perfect with Linux- their in house drivers have long left quite a lot to be desired (although if we're talking multi screen, I've had much less issues on AMD than nVidia hardware in that regard- last I tried it wasn't possible to run Linux dual screen desktops with different resolutions on an nVidia card- though that was on an older version of Ubuntu with a GTX 560, still a pretty basic requirement if you ask me). What I mean by 'friendlier' though is specifically towards the open source community / developers. AMD's approach has been to provide the info needed to bake most of their advanced feature support directly into the linux kernel, and open up *most* of their functions so the community can sort out their own drivers. This is how (at least as I understand it, I'm no developer) the community have been able to create the open source 'Radeon SI' driver (for more detials see here: https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/). I agree though, AMD's own linux catalyst driver is very poor compared to the Windows counterpart- as I mentioned to the stage where RadeonSI is actually out performing catalyst in some titles. nVidia on the other hand have much better in house drivers (so long as you only run two screen with the same resolution)- however they actively lock out community software projects from accessing much of their functionality and I'm not even sure why? I mean I understand them not wanting to reveal their secret optimization tricks to competitors, but surely providing *basic support* wouldn't really give that information away? I guess they must have their reasons however it strikes me as somewhat of a 'no brainer' to let the community do the job for you.
@cdrkf yeah. it must just be over-preparing for unlikely legal ramifications just your general "we don't known and since we don't care to look and find out we'll just keep it closed" take and of course i disagree with it. I dunno about your different screen issues perhaps it was the case in the past with the shittier nvidia driver ports but I've personally always had one 16:9 screen and one 4:3 and nvidia always handled that just fine in my ubuntu. now ubuntu even first boots and liveKEY-boots (so that's without driver and even during the boot loading screen) up to the separate resolutions with full resolutions on both it's pretty impressive.
