Games

I found the same thing on CachyOS (another Arch fork). The increase for me was staggering. Lies of P went from an unstable 144fps on windows 11 with an overclock (OC) on my GPU to 200fps in Cachy. Settings were all maxed out at 1440p. I noticed a similar jump from other games. Modded and vanilla NBA 2K25 went a stuttery mess at 172fps (frequent dips down to 72fps) to a steady 180fps with NO dips (that’s my monitor’s limit). I like to test things on The First Descendent, and it went from an unstable 79fps with maxed settings to 119fps. And while I don’t have numbers for it, The Witcher 3 Next Gen (vanilla and heavily modded) run a lot smoother. But after ten years, that game has been optimized out the ass.

I did notice, however, that the increase in performance diminished greatly as I turned down settings. On Windows 11, I would notice a way “higher” increase in frames. For Example, I could tweak settings in the First Descendent like Global illumination and increase frames in Windows 11 to 109fps, but still unstable. In Cachy, if I did these things, I didn’t really notice a meaningful impact.

RT also performs slightly worse on Linux. But I figure anyone using Linux might be the same type of person to not care about RT.

My hypothesis is that without the CPU resources being eaten up by things like Windows Defender, the CPU is able to process more data quicker, reducing GPU wait time. I don’t have data on that, I would need something as in depth as presentmon from Intel for testing. Arch has forks of that, but nothing nearly as in depth, and PresentMon has declined any Linux support in the foreseeable future.

I should mention, the OVERALL jump is ~40% going to CachyOS. And we know that the jump from Windows 10 to 11 saw a ~27% hit due to the new Windows Defender.

My system is 64GB of SK Hynix DDR5, 9070xt (on my Windows Partition it’s OC’d, but on CachyOS I leave it stock), and a 9800x3D that has been manually OC’d in the bios and a 240mm AIO. I leave the panels off my O11 D Mini. The motherboard is a Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite (2x8 pins for the CPU delivery).

For all the FPS data, I pulled it from Steam on Cachy which uses presented frames instead of actual frames. Basically, the frames the GPU is presenting to the monitor, not necessarily what your eyes are seeing.

On my Ally, I also noticed a difference swapping to SteamOS. Something to keep in mind with anyone planning to do that, you can allocate up to 6GB of RAM to the iGPU before Arch/SteamOS gets affected. I just don’t see anyone telling you you can do this.