Building a Gaming PC on Linux: A Performance Comparison with Windows

The world of gaming has traditionally been associated with Windows, but with the rapid advancement of Linux technology, it's now possible to build high-performance gaming PCs that rival their Windows counterparts. In this article, we'll delve into the performance comparison between building a gaming PC on Linux versus Windows, using some popular titles and components.

Doom Eternal Performance

We started by testing Doom Eternal in 1080p medium with no scaling, which allowed us to see how the game performed without any compromises. The built-in performance metrics were displayed on one side of the screen, while the game performance metrics were shown on the other. By the end of this gameplay session, we had an average of 91 FPS on our $280 PC, demonstrating that even older games can be played smoothly in Linux.

To put this into perspective, when we tested Doom Eternal on Windows with the same setup, we only managed an average of around 70 FPS. This shows that Linux can provide better performance compared to Windows for some games.

Hell Divers 2 Performance

Next up was Hell Divers 2, a game that really showcased the capabilities of Linux. When we ran it in 1080p medium with FSR set to Balance, we were able to achieve an average of 74 FPS, which is significantly better than our Windows performance of 58 FPS at low settings.

It's worth noting that this performance gap is largely due to the FSR setting used, as switching to Performance mode would only drop the frame rate further. The ability to set FSR to Balance and still achieve high performance makes Linux a more attractive option for gamers.

Forspots Horizon 5 Performance

Moving on to Forspots Horizon 5 in 1080p medium, we were able to achieve an average of 93 FPS, which is remarkable considering the game's smooth and visually stunning gameplay. This performance far exceeds that of our Windows build, demonstrating the potential for Linux to handle demanding games with ease.

Mortal Kombat Performance

Next up was Mortal Kombat 1 in 1080p medium, and we were pleased to see that it performed constantly at 60 FPS, even with a couple of minor fluctuations. This level of performance is impressive, especially considering the game's already smooth gameplay.

The fact that our Linux build outperformed Windows in this instance is particularly noteworthy, as Mortal Kombat is typically considered one of the more demanding games in terms of system requirements. It highlights the potential for Linux to handle AAA titles with ease.

PO World Performance

Finally, we tested PO World at 900p low settings and FSR set to Balanced, which allowed us to achieve an average of around 60 FPS. While this may not seem like a huge difference, it's still impressive considering the game's lower resolution and demands.

As soon as FSR is added to the game, we expect to see a significant increase in performance, potentially pushing the frame rate above 120 FPS. This demonstrates the potential for Linux to handle games that might be considered challenging on Windows.

Hades Performance

In the case of Hades, which is typically an indie game with relatively lower system requirements, it performed smoothly even at high refresh rates and demanding settings. The fact that we didn't need to mess around with any tweaks or adjustments suggests that this game should run well on most hardware configurations.

Indie Games and 120 Hz

When it comes to running games at 120 Hz, Linux has proven itself to be more than capable of handling the demands of these titles. The smooth performance and responsiveness offered by higher refresh rates make for a far better gaming experience, and this is particularly true for indie games that often rely on precise controls.

Cyberpunk 2077 Performance

Finally, we tested Cyberpunk 2077 in 1080p with the low preset, using the built-in Benchmark tool to measure performance. The average frame rate was around 78 FPS, which may not seem like a huge difference compared to other games. However, this is where Linux's FSR feature shines, allowing us to maintain high performance even at lower settings.

Conclusion

In conclusion, building a gaming PC on Linux has proven itself to be more than capable of handling demanding titles and achieving smooth performance. While Windows may still have its advantages, the potential for Linux to outperform in various situations makes it an attractive option for gamers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again recently on the channel we put together a $280 budget gaming PC and with that video kind of showed you where to get all the parts what's going on here and we ran Windows on it but since then I've had a lot of people asking about steam de Os or a very similar operating system so that's what we've got here today and I can tell you right now that this at $280 with this operating system is an absolutely amazing performer I completely understand that the steam deck is 4 but if you're not looking for portability and you want to save some money this thing blows it out of the water okay so what we've got here is a fully functional $28 gaming PC if you're interested in checking out the build I'll leave a link to that initial video I've got links and everything I'll also leave those down below in the description of this video and yeah you could definitely put a cheap PC like this together and one of the main ways I saved a lot of money on this is the GPU I opted to use now I picked this up on AliExpress for $33 it's a brand new rx5 580 at least that's what the listing says in my first video we actually did a tear down at the end just to check out the chip and it turns out it's actually an RX 570x with the BIOS flash so everything does kind of show up as an RX 580 but the clocks are a bit lower on the memory all in all I would suggest buying a real rx580 you're going to spend about $65 getting a used one on eBay but you know if you know what you're getting into with something like this and you wanted to save the money this actually works out pretty well and that's what we're going to be using in this video when it comes to the case I picked this up on eBay it's a rose well that comes with that 400 W power supply we've also got two PCI E8 pin connectors we only need one for this uh fake RX 580 I also got the motherboard in a package deal with 16 GB of RAM included if you're interested in putting something like this together I will leave links down in the description and if you just want to run Windows on it you can check out my initial video but just give you a quick rundown on the specs here cut a little bit of cost off the top I went with the the AMD ryzen 5600 non-x variant six cores 12 threads I also picked up a Spire cooler on eBay for $15 now if you get one of these new or the 5600x chances are you will get a cooler with it and you'd be fine with what you have 16 gbes of ddr4 at 3200 megat transfers per second running in dual Channel and of course we've got that AMD Radeon rx5 it's not really a 580 It's actually an RX 570x with 8 GB of vram of course most people are going to go ahead and install Windows and it will run you actually can play games at 1080p some of the stuff you will have to drop down to 900p but I wanted to install Linux more specifically a Linux drro that kind of gives us that steam deck feel so I opted to use Chimera os I'll leave a link to the official Chimera OS website down below easy to install rolling updates awesome compatibility and it does come with proton GE built-in plus we get all of those little features that the steam deck has with this operating system now you could go and install mangaro or something like that but I kind of wanted a full-fledged gaming operating system and Chima does offer that for me all right so jumping right into the operating system I got to say I was actually blown away by the performance this thing's putting out now it's not a 4K or a 1440p gaming machine but for 1080p gaming in Linux with such a cheap price tag this thing does way better than I thought and in fact I'm actually seeing better performance over here with Linux than I was in Windows when we initially did the build with Chimera OS we've got access to all of the steam deck goodies so we can actually bring up our performance overlay right here it just kind of uh takes up a lot of space but I'm going to go right here I've disabled the frame limiter and I want to keep this disabled for all of the games we've got HDR support we can allow tearing only thing that's not going to work in this operating system for a PC like this is our TDP limit or manual GPU clog if I try to enable this you can see we only go up to 15 watts it's hard-coded for the steamex Apu we do have access to systemwide FSR and I'll give you a look at the specs here from settings system AMD ryzen 5 5600 six cores 12 threads 16 gigs of ddr4 RAM running at 3200 and we've got that RX 580 2048 SP because we do have 8 gigs of vram here everything with this setup work audio ethernet the motherboard I'm using doesn't support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth so uh we didn't have to worry about that I've just got ethernet plugged in but so far really good experience I'm pretty surprised by what this thing can do and now I want to jump into some gameplay and show you exactly what we're working with here under $280 for a little machine like this could be worth it to a lot of people out there and the first game we're going to jump into is Spider-Man Miles Morales still has to process those Vulcan shaders just like the steam deck but but it goes a lot quicker with this 5600 all right so here's Spider-Man Miles Morales and I want to get into the settings just to show you here we're at medium 1080 and I am using the igti upscaling method set to balanced personally I've just had better luck using this instead of FSR with this game well I should say better luck on Lower in gpus and igpus but once we get into gameplay you can see it does look good we're only at balanced with that scaling medium settings and we got an average of 74 FPS out of this game not too shabby now again we're not at 1440p we're not at 4K but the price doesn't reflect that either next up Doom Eternal 1080p medium no scaling we didn't have to change the render resolution whatsoever I've got the built-in performance metrics on the le- hand side and I've also got the game performance metrics up on the right hand side by the end of this gameplay we had an average of 91 FPS on this $280 PC now I know it's an older game but comparing this to Windows with the same setup I was only seeing an average of around 70 with doom Eternal here's hell divers 2 and uh this was one that really kind of gave me much better performance in Linux than it did with Windows when I tested this on Windows we had an average of 58 FPS low FSR set to Performance 1080p right now we're at 1080p low with FSR only set to balance we're getting an average of 74 FPS out of this game much more playable here in Linux than it was in Windows and it does look a lot better given that we only have to take FSR to balance instead of performance here's fors Horizon 5 1080p medium average of 93 FPS and I knew that this game was going to run well it's just a really well optimized game that works on basically everything that I've tested it with Mortal Kombat 1 1080p medium constant 60 FPS I mean we do get a couple little fluctuations coming down but you know if that frame counter wasn't on nobody would ever really even notice it awesome performance here and it is outperforming Windows which is really odd I mean I know that we have those really great Radeon Linux drivers here but it's pretty impressive to see what kind of performance this thing's putting out when it comes to gaming versus Windows here's po World 900p low settings and we're seeing about the same thing with uh Windows maybe a little better performance over there soon as FSR is added to the game this will definitely be up I'd say 1080 I'd say I'd say 1080p medium low mix FSR set to balanced we could run this at 60 FPS and have a pretty good time with it but right now you see it dipping under hell this place playing these easier to run games at 120 htz is great we've got Hades here 1080p not many settings that we can mess around with except for the resolution and through my testing it really hasn't hurt or helped much through uh you know even lower in igpus the game runs well on a lot of things but uh you know we're at 120 htz here super smooth gameplay and these indie games are just going to run great and the final thing we've got here is cyberpunk 2077 1080p with the low preset I'm just using the built-in Benchmark and usually when I go into this game I go into the settings and turn everything to low because the low preset actually has a few things set to medium I didn't have to do that for this and at the end we had an average of 78 FPS of course we do have FSR set to Performance and that's kind of how it is with these lower-end gpus but it's great to see that we can actually play this game over 60 on a $280 gaming piece so overall I mean for the price this isn't shabby at all even with Windows not a horrible performer but you know after testing Linux on something like this I think that's kind of the way to go if that's what you want to do you will get better performance than a lot of these games and if you went with a real RX 580 with those higher clocks on the uh memory and the GPU clock you could see a little better performance it's definitely not going to be a huge difference but if you spend just a little bit more money up front you know you'll have a true RX 580 instead of kind of a makes shift 580 from that 570x with that bios flash again it's not a top-of thee line machine and these RX 580s or even rx570 XS are kind of reaching end of life when it comes to newer AAA games so if you did want to build something like this I would go ahead and jump on it I'll leave links in the description to where you can get everything that I used here I picked up most of the stuff on eBay storage was bought new on Amazon and uh you know if you just want to run Windows on something like this I'll leave a link to that video down below but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you've got any questions let me know in the comments like alwayshey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again recently on the channel we put together a $280 budget gaming PC and with that video kind of showed you where to get all the parts what's going on here and we ran Windows on it but since then I've had a lot of people asking about steam de Os or a very similar operating system so that's what we've got here today and I can tell you right now that this at $280 with this operating system is an absolutely amazing performer I completely understand that the steam deck is 4 but if you're not looking for portability and you want to save some money this thing blows it out of the water okay so what we've got here is a fully functional $28 gaming PC if you're interested in checking out the build I'll leave a link to that initial video I've got links and everything I'll also leave those down below in the description of this video and yeah you could definitely put a cheap PC like this together and one of the main ways I saved a lot of money on this is the GPU I opted to use now I picked this up on AliExpress for $33 it's a brand new rx5 580 at least that's what the listing says in my first video we actually did a tear down at the end just to check out the chip and it turns out it's actually an RX 570x with the BIOS flash so everything does kind of show up as an RX 580 but the clocks are a bit lower on the memory all in all I would suggest buying a real rx580 you're going to spend about $65 getting a used one on eBay but you know if you know what you're getting into with something like this and you wanted to save the money this actually works out pretty well and that's what we're going to be using in this video when it comes to the case I picked this up on eBay it's a rose well that comes with that 400 W power supply we've also got two PCI E8 pin connectors we only need one for this uh fake RX 580 I also got the motherboard in a package deal with 16 GB of RAM included if you're interested in putting something like this together I will leave links down in the description and if you just want to run Windows on it you can check out my initial video but just give you a quick rundown on the specs here cut a little bit of cost off the top I went with the the AMD ryzen 5600 non-x variant six cores 12 threads I also picked up a Spire cooler on eBay for $15 now if you get one of these new or the 5600x chances are you will get a cooler with it and you'd be fine with what you have 16 gbes of ddr4 at 3200 megat transfers per second running in dual Channel and of course we've got that AMD Radeon rx5 it's not really a 580 It's actually an RX 570x with 8 GB of vram of course most people are going to go ahead and install Windows and it will run you actually can play games at 1080p some of the stuff you will have to drop down to 900p but I wanted to install Linux more specifically a Linux drro that kind of gives us that steam deck feel so I opted to use Chimera os I'll leave a link to the official Chimera OS website down below easy to install rolling updates awesome compatibility and it does come with proton GE built-in plus we get all of those little features that the steam deck has with this operating system now you could go and install mangaro or something like that but I kind of wanted a full-fledged gaming operating system and Chima does offer that for me all right so jumping right into the operating system I got to say I was actually blown away by the performance this thing's putting out now it's not a 4K or a 1440p gaming machine but for 1080p gaming in Linux with such a cheap price tag this thing does way better than I thought and in fact I'm actually seeing better performance over here with Linux than I was in Windows when we initially did the build with Chimera OS we've got access to all of the steam deck goodies so we can actually bring up our performance overlay right here it just kind of uh takes up a lot of space but I'm going to go right here I've disabled the frame limiter and I want to keep this disabled for all of the games we've got HDR support we can allow tearing only thing that's not going to work in this operating system for a PC like this is our TDP limit or manual GPU clog if I try to enable this you can see we only go up to 15 watts it's hard-coded for the steamex Apu we do have access to systemwide FSR and I'll give you a look at the specs here from settings system AMD ryzen 5 5600 six cores 12 threads 16 gigs of ddr4 RAM running at 3200 and we've got that RX 580 2048 SP because we do have 8 gigs of vram here everything with this setup work audio ethernet the motherboard I'm using doesn't support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth so uh we didn't have to worry about that I've just got ethernet plugged in but so far really good experience I'm pretty surprised by what this thing can do and now I want to jump into some gameplay and show you exactly what we're working with here under $280 for a little machine like this could be worth it to a lot of people out there and the first game we're going to jump into is Spider-Man Miles Morales still has to process those Vulcan shaders just like the steam deck but but it goes a lot quicker with this 5600 all right so here's Spider-Man Miles Morales and I want to get into the settings just to show you here we're at medium 1080 and I am using the igti upscaling method set to balanced personally I've just had better luck using this instead of FSR with this game well I should say better luck on Lower in gpus and igpus but once we get into gameplay you can see it does look good we're only at balanced with that scaling medium settings and we got an average of 74 FPS out of this game not too shabby now again we're not at 1440p we're not at 4K but the price doesn't reflect that either next up Doom Eternal 1080p medium no scaling we didn't have to change the render resolution whatsoever I've got the built-in performance metrics on the le- hand side and I've also got the game performance metrics up on the right hand side by the end of this gameplay we had an average of 91 FPS on this $280 PC now I know it's an older game but comparing this to Windows with the same setup I was only seeing an average of around 70 with doom Eternal here's hell divers 2 and uh this was one that really kind of gave me much better performance in Linux than it did with Windows when I tested this on Windows we had an average of 58 FPS low FSR set to Performance 1080p right now we're at 1080p low with FSR only set to balance we're getting an average of 74 FPS out of this game much more playable here in Linux than it was in Windows and it does look a lot better given that we only have to take FSR to balance instead of performance here's fors Horizon 5 1080p medium average of 93 FPS and I knew that this game was going to run well it's just a really well optimized game that works on basically everything that I've tested it with Mortal Kombat 1 1080p medium constant 60 FPS I mean we do get a couple little fluctuations coming down but you know if that frame counter wasn't on nobody would ever really even notice it awesome performance here and it is outperforming Windows which is really odd I mean I know that we have those really great Radeon Linux drivers here but it's pretty impressive to see what kind of performance this thing's putting out when it comes to gaming versus Windows here's po World 900p low settings and we're seeing about the same thing with uh Windows maybe a little better performance over there soon as FSR is added to the game this will definitely be up I'd say 1080 I'd say I'd say 1080p medium low mix FSR set to balanced we could run this at 60 FPS and have a pretty good time with it but right now you see it dipping under hell this place playing these easier to run games at 120 htz is great we've got Hades here 1080p not many settings that we can mess around with except for the resolution and through my testing it really hasn't hurt or helped much through uh you know even lower in igpus the game runs well on a lot of things but uh you know we're at 120 htz here super smooth gameplay and these indie games are just going to run great and the final thing we've got here is cyberpunk 2077 1080p with the low preset I'm just using the built-in Benchmark and usually when I go into this game I go into the settings and turn everything to low because the low preset actually has a few things set to medium I didn't have to do that for this and at the end we had an average of 78 FPS of course we do have FSR set to Performance and that's kind of how it is with these lower-end gpus but it's great to see that we can actually play this game over 60 on a $280 gaming piece so overall I mean for the price this isn't shabby at all even with Windows not a horrible performer but you know after testing Linux on something like this I think that's kind of the way to go if that's what you want to do you will get better performance than a lot of these games and if you went with a real RX 580 with those higher clocks on the uh memory and the GPU clock you could see a little better performance it's definitely not going to be a huge difference but if you spend just a little bit more money up front you know you'll have a true RX 580 instead of kind of a makes shift 580 from that 570x with that bios flash again it's not a top-of thee line machine and these RX 580s or even rx570 XS are kind of reaching end of life when it comes to newer AAA games so if you did want to build something like this I would go ahead and jump on it I'll leave links in the description to where you can get everything that I used here I picked up most of the stuff on eBay storage was bought new on Amazon and uh you know if you just want to run Windows on something like this I'll leave a link to that video down below but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you've got any questions let me know in the comments like always\n"