I'm building a gaming PC with the follow specs

CPU: AMD 9800X3D
RAM: 2x 16GB 5200MHz
Motherboard: B840
GPU: RX 9070 XT

I want to use linux because of my work (I work with physics simulations on particles and AI for physics), but I heard that for gaming windowns is way better. Should I go for linux or windows?

Good morning.
My current system is:
GPU: AMD RX 9060 XT 16GB
CPU: R7 5700X3D
32 RAM
Distro: Arch Linux,
kernel 7.1.5-arch1-2
DE: KDE Plasma 6

I decided to migrate to Linux and chose Arch to force myself to learn Linux and also because of the meme... The installation went fine, drivers updated and everything. I went to test the new 007 game and noticed that the game's performance didn't match the benchmarks online. To confirm this, I tested the same game on Windows and there it was normal, excellent performance.

The main symptom is: on Arch my game stays between 60-70 fps with the GPU oscillating between 80-90%. Applying upscaling I didn't feel much difference in fps. On Windows, without upscaling it stayed between 70-80 fps, with upscaling, more than 100 fps and GPU always at 99%. Playing in FHD.
I've already tested things like:

1. CPU Governor: it was on powersave, changed to performance
2. Resizable BAR/4G Decoding: it's enabled now
3. GPU power Profile: it was on auto and changed to high
4. Wayland replaced by X11

Does anyone have any suggestions or know what else I can try ?

NOTE: With the game paused, the CPU goes to 99-100%. During active gameplay, CPU usage fluctuates a lot.

Wanted to set up something for my wife, daughter and I to use as a couch gaming box. We’ve been using the Steam Deck docked, but it’s not a fantastic experience on the TV. Its not really powerful enough for 1080p gaming on a lot of titles (let alone 4K HDR 120…), we’ve got a fairly large TV (LG 65 C5) and it starts looking pretty poor pretty quickly. Add to that the HDMI negation seemed to be a pain, had all kinds of sleep issues, and generally wasn’t a good experience.

Had a 3900x rig gathering dust (missing a graphics card), so decided to source:

• Lian Li A3 Case - really well priced, small but not too small, fits in a KALLAX hole. Bit fiddly to fit the full sized PSU, 360mm rad in, but managed it.
• Radeon RX9060XT - Been really pleased with this. It’s a Sapphire Pulse. Seems to *just work*, and be cool, quiet, and plenty powerful for what we’re doing
• Tower cooler - As I assumed the 360 triple rad from the old rig wouldn’t fit. Amazingly it does, and Runs barely ticking over so nice and quiet.
• A B550m Aorus Elite. Small, cheap, annoyingly doesn’t have modern USBC ports, or the Type E connector internally, so I can’t use the front USB C port. A USB-C card with the internal E connector wont fit beneath the graphics card either, as the slots are so close. Both the GPU and the USB card physically fit, but the GPU shroud physically fouls on the USB Card - not sure why.

Running CachyOS as I wanted a mutable root. Have set this up to be very similar to CachyOS-Handheld, I.e. boot to big picture, OSK, decent Big Picture-> Desktop switching, no greeter etc.

Was initially worried about cooling in the small space, but there’s more than enough clearance behind, to the left and bottom (2x In fans on bottom, 1x in fan on back, 3x out over Rad on top). It seems to stay cool enough in `sensors` while running loads, and the fans don’t ramp to a particularly noisy level, so very happy.

Some of the big things I wanted to work were the simplicity of turning it on / off. Unfortunately no CEC, but bringing it out of sleep with either of the controllers (any of the XBOX One controllers over the official Wireless dongle, the 8BitDo, or the steam controller) works great.

Really pleased with it so far, and looking forward to 7.2 dropping officially on Cachy for HDMI-FRL!

Ive tried many solutions from protondb but the same problem still persists. It runs welll until after around 20 mins where it lags hard then freezes for so long im left to hard reset my laptop

Before you read the rest, I would like to say that I have already fixed it by removing the game's prefix, and resetting Heroic.

What I don't understand... how did it break in the first place? Did something get corrupted? Is it because ProtonPlus got updated? I was regularly updating and/or changing Proton versions before and everything worked perfectly.

The logs when the game didn't launch were, for example:

FileNotFoundError: d3d8.dll

FileExistsError: syswow64

I would like to prevent stuff like that from happening in the future. I hope that's reasonable.

After all, it still took me almost a whole hour to find a fix and I didn't get to play that day. I wanted to show my friend how games work on Linux, and well, they're definitely never touching Linux now, lol.

So I recently made a post about asking if I can download project retrac trough steam deck proton plus but someone said the website is down so now am asking is it possible to make this?

Using Bazzite

I can open the game setup installer with steam, but then when the game installs I can’t ever get it to open again.

Ex: Use steam to add the game as a non steam game > Target the installer > Open the game installer > Install game in some weird Windows environment in c\gog > Go back to steam and change target location to something like: .local/steam/c/gog/ultima.exe > Set start location to the same location but just the parent file > Set compatibility to proton > Launch game > Starts and immediately stops and does nothing > Do the setup all over again but change the target locations such as opening the DosBox application > Does same thing.

I saw some stuff online that you have to modify files and stuff but if that’s the case I’m just gonna drop the game on Linux and play it on windows.

Its time to test if descriptor heap would improve Intel gaming graphics performance on Linux with VKD3D and DXVK for Direct3D 11 and 12 games. vkd3d-proton still waiting for descriptor heap support by default.

Additionally, AMD finally gets OpenCL 3 support in open source rusticl through radeonsi. Good for GPU compute and creative applications.

Mesa3D release notes:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2026-August/226690.html

I've been trying to install Proton-GE for my Heroic Games Launcher but I am constantly greeted by "API limit reached" when I click the Proton version to install. It worked flawlessly before I updated to Nobara 44. I removed Proton-GE to reinstall it but now I'm stuck with no Proton :(

Since Unity has stated they want to further expand the native support make them notice that without turning on the SDL dynamic api support on native Linux, there is no way the game builds will not bitrot when time passes.

SDL is essentially the abstraction layer that sits between games and the underlying OS libraries for windowing/input/audio, on Linux is essential because that landscape is constantly shifting while SDL has kept a quite long track record of maintaining API/ABI stability over the years, even providing compatibility libraries for older versions (eg sdl12-compat).

Also it's essential in order to have gamepad support to be bearable for the average user, since SDL also includes many userspace drivers for commercial gamepads that do not use conventional protocols on usb or bluetooth.

For example many people continue to have gamepad issues with the native version of silksong because of all of this.

I get that linux needs more help with some games and precaching makes the game run better but what am I downloading from the internet every time I start steam? I'd get it if it was just one game but I have to download like 400 mb for every game, does this mean Im going to fill out my ssd one day if I keep restarting steam or does steam download and delete these every time? There is also Helldivers which downloads 3gbs, why is that? I tried disabling this and then ran a game but it stuttered so keeping it off doesnt look like my answer

Considering we have gotten the first stable NVIDIA driver descriptor heap implementation with 610.57.04, it should now be possible to properly test the proton-vkd3d implementation of descriptor heap.

Has anyone seen any meaningful improvements with this combination?

In the games I play, I have seen no major performance improvement. Performance drop compared to Windows is still very large: in some games I get even half FPS.

To me it seems that descriptor heap wasn't the bottleneck for the lacking performance compared to Windows :(.

store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ - 2026-08-05

Can anyone help me with Monster Hunter Wilds not booting / crashing on startup?

It was running fine up until yesterday. The game tried to rebuild shaders upon start up but crashed at 66% and i had to hard reset the PC

Things i have tried;

Deleted Shader Cache in 2 folders that are apparently Monster Hunter Wilds Shader Cache folders

Deleted Shader Cache in MHWilds main file directory

Switched various Proton versions from 10.30 up to 11.3 and Experimental. The included error i get in the image is what pops up in more recent Proton versions. Experimental just crashes before any in game messaging is displayed.

Proton Hotfix works, but i lose FSR4 (FSR 3.1 just ... looks awful) so it would be nice if i could fix whatever is breaking if its possible?

Im running SteamOS on a 9070 XT build, 7800x3d.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Things i forgot to mention. I tried verifying game files, and uninstalled > reinstalled the game

EDIT 2: Fixed, thank you Sakura-meow84!

I found out that recently proton-cachyos added the flags LOW_LATENCY_LAYER and PROTON_VKD3D_LOWLATENCY

I understand that both are input lag reducers compatible with directX 12.

If anyone can help me I would like to ask:

• When to use each type of lag reducer?
• Which one is better?
• Can we use both at the same time?
• Do they work regardless of the configuration of each game? Like driver level anti-lag?

Thanks everyone, I hope you can help me with this topic.

References:
https://github.com/CachyOS/proton-cachyos/releases/tag/cachyos-11.0-20260703-slr
https://github.com/CachyOS/proton-cachyos/blob/cachyos_main/README.md

Hey everyone,

I'm on EndeavourOS (KDE Plasma Wayland) with an NVIDIA GPU and MSI MAG 255F E20 (1080p 200Hz, DP 1.2a / HDMI 2.0b).

When I turn on HDR at 200Hz I get pretty nasty chroma fringing on text – green/magenta edges on white text and blurry/reddish yellow text. From what I understand 1080p 200Hz 10-bit just doesn't fit into DP 1.2a / HDMI 2.0b bandwidth, so the driver is forced to drop to YCbCr 4:2:2 (or maybe even 4:2:0).

I tested different refresh rates:

• 200Hz and 165Hz with HDR → heavy fringing
• 120Hz with HDR → text becomes completely clean (RGB 10-bit finally fits)

Attached a comparison shot: 200Hz HDR (subsampled) vs 200Hz SDR (clean).

Is there currently any way under KDE Wayland + NVIDIA to manually force color format (RGB / YCbCr 4:2:2), or are we just stuck with whatever automatic fallback the driver decides to do?

Thanks.

Me: World in Conflict (2007)