Nvidia has always been a second class citizen with regards to Linux, with creator Linus Torvalds famously handing them the middle finger in a rather heated moment, years ago.
Things have most certainly changed for the better though, and Linux support for Nvidia hardware is now a mostly painless procedure. However, there are a few performance related regressions, especially when compared to native Windows performance (most infamously in DirectX 12 games).
The driver issue might likely be fixed now, and we might see some meaningful improvements across the board for Nvidia GPUs on Linux.
Nvidia’s Linux DirectX 12 Performance Could Finally See a Fix
In a nutshell, as of commit 87e6442 the Vulkan performance of Nvidia GPUs should theoretically see a significant step up, thanks to the addition of a few new extensions.
The change was also brought to the winevulkan merge requests, which has since been merged and incorporated within Wine 11.1, which is a monumental change.
Both Vulkan and DXVK games will be able to use these new extensions, which could in turn help fix the DirectX performance regressions observed when moving from Windows to Linux.
DirectX 12 in particular has a noticeable drop in performance (mostly exhibited in games) for Nvidia on Linux, and there is no workaround to date save for switching to team red, who enjoys far superior Linux support (that often manages to outpace Windows!).
So much so that I’d personally recommend using AMD over other alternatives for now.
With the help of these extensions/patches, we should hopefully be able to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux, and finally have a chance to recommend Nvidia users to the operating system.
Don’t go expecting any meaningful gains as of now though, as these features will need to be implemented over time. It’s quite a complicated process as well, and will need a bunch of QA testing before being shipped.
