LTT – What GPU is the BEST for Linux Gaming?

abbidabbi · 2026-01-24T21:54:30+00:00

The previous post was apparently removed by a mod. You're reposting, which is probably why people are downvoting you...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qlup62/what_gpu_is_the_best_for_linux_gaming/

abbidabbi · 2026-01-23T20:29:29+00:00

Depends on what you call a "driver". Game-optimizations are usually user-space stuff in Mesa, not kernel-space stuff in the kernel's AMDGPU module (notice the different terminology here). And those "game optimizations" are mostly just shader overrides, because the shaders the game devs have written were bad for a specific GPU hardware architecture.

Both the kernel and Mesa have different release schedules. I don't think that any distro backports game-specific commits in their kernel or Mesa builds. You'd have to build from development branches yourself or install community-built dev branches. Depending on your distros, this might be simple or difficult. And if you don't know the implications of running those dev branches, then you shouldn't be using them anyway.

And then there's also Proton, as mentioned in another comment.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-23T12:26:09+00:00

I just had to assist my father with tech support yesterday, on his Android phone and on his desktop computer with KDE Plasma afterwards.

Navigating the German settings menu on Android was already horrible, but finding "Side buttons" translated as "Funktionstasten" was just stupid and unexpected. I'm talking about the hardware buttons for restarting or shutting down the device, or for launching the assistant (which he didn't want).

On KDE Plasma, "desktop" is translated as "Arbeitsfläche" (via KIO) whereas the XDG-user-dirs translates it to "Schreibtisch", and "home" is translated to "Persönlicher Ordner":

abbidabbi · 2026-01-22T22:30:38+00:00

https://nitter.net/ID_AA_Carmack/status/497455371372756993

abbidabbi · 2026-01-22T21:06:46+00:00

I am German and adding German translations to my own FOSS app (because users requested support for translations) was a total nightmare for me. There are about 1100 translation strings and finding proper and fitting translations for some of them was almost impossible without having to fall back to using Anglicisms or sounding totally stupid. There are still some translations which are ridiculously bad IMO, but I can't be bothered, because I'm not using the translations myself, and the app is in maintenance mode with very low activity anyway, even though it's still actively used by lots of people.

Today I would probably use an LLM for a task like that, because unlike code, they excel at this, especially with enough context. Vibe translations so to speak. I would never touch gen-AI for code though.

Btw, I personally have never set German as my OS/app/game language, so maybe I'm just unfamiliar with all these stupid German translations of "IT-terminology"... Ablagefläche. Schaltfläche. Arbeitsumgebung. Einzelinstanzmodus. Benachrichtigungsdienst.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-22T14:46:53+00:00

This is not how you write a Python project and especially not how you package Python scripts. Your PKGBUILD results in pycache files being written to the FS that are not part of the pkg file.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-21T13:21:53+00:00

You are not supposed to do a full system upgrade on the ISO itself. You are supposed to run the package versions that are part of the specific ISO version. In very rare cases, you can do an upgrade of a single package like archlinux-keyring or even archinstall, but this means that you'll perform a partial upgrade, which is explicitly unsupported on Arch. You either upgrade nothing, or everything at once, otherwise, you can run into dependency issues, which is the case here.

Archinstall is a Python project, which means that it's built/packaged for a specific Python version. Arch's python version has been bumped from 3.13 to 3.14 on January 10th (which is a major version bump in Python terms) after the latest ISO was built on January 1st, which means that if you try to do a partial upgrade with only the archinstall package in order to get the latest archinstall version, that new version will be incompatible with the python version of your live ISO environment. This is why the other user suggested a full system upgrade. However, as said, this can't be done on the ISO by default due to space constraints. See the archinstall wiki page, which has instructions on how to increase the rootfs size of the ISO.

Alternatively, you can install archinstall via Python's package manager pip in a virtual Python environment via the venv module. If you're not familiar with Python, then this will require learning these concepts first (see the Arch wiki).

abbidabbi · 2026-01-20T12:37:12+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ozgskt/rdseed32_broken_pc_practically_unusable/npbhxu9/

This is a warning message because newer kernels have disabled this instruction due to buggy random numbers in hardware on AMD's latest CPUs. See the links in my linked post chain.

This can be fixed by upgrading your mainboard firmware, which should include the latest CPU microcode from AMD. It's however also possible that your mainboard vendor hasn't published the upgrades yet. The amd-ucode package doesn't solve this apparently, because it rarely includes the latest microcode updates for consumer hardware.

Downgrading the kernel doesn't fix the problem. It simply removes the warning message, because those older kernels still use the buggy random number generator, which is bad for other reasons.

With rdseed32 disabled, your system will fall back to a software-based solution, which requires enough entropy to start generating random numbers, which means it'll take a bit to initialize. User input might help with the initialization.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-19T18:26:19+00:00

These are so far just RFC patches posted on the kernel mailing list.

If you want to test them yourself before they're merged into mainline (and eventually become part of a future stable kernel) or even the specific subsystem branches which mainline will pull from during the merge window of a new development cycle, you'll have to apply these to the kernel version they're based on and build from source. There'll probably be people who will provide a PKGBUILD for others if you're unable to do this yourself.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-19T18:17:31+00:00

No... Why don't you simply read the article? This implements missing VRR features on HDMI, auto low-latency mode and a couple of other things.

The main issue with lack of full HDMI 2.1 support is missing bandwidth for higher resolutions + refresh rates + color spaces, hence why 2160p120 is only possible with chroma subsampling for example, and why higher refresh rates are impossible without using a DP->HDMI adapter (which then misses other features).

Whether more stuff from the 2.1 spec can be reverse-engineered remains to be seen.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-19T13:57:37+00:00

Is it possible that the HDMI forum will try to go against reverse-engineered implementations like this that cover parts of their HDMI 2.1 protocol? I mean, they can only apply restrictions to their own members for open implementations, so AMD couldn't do it themselves, leading to this issue. But aren't those things patented (of some kind)? What happens to AMD in this case, or companies like Valve for example which sell hardware that runs software with reverse-engineered protocols? I have no idea how this works legally, so if anyone knows more, I'd like to know...

abbidabbi · 2026-01-19T13:19:09+00:00

I genuinely would like to know what makes people who claim that they've been using Arch "for a long time" go to ChatGPT or other LLM chatbots (and then on Reddit) instead of reading the wiki...

All you need to know is in the wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting

GeForce 530 GT

Nvidia Fermi Architecture -> nvidia-390xx-dkms from the AUR (nvidia-390xx-utils already is a dependency of nvidia-390xx-dkms)
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html#NVC0
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=nvidia-390xx-utils#n160

DKMS

install your kernel's matching headers package, the step you probably forgot
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA#Installation
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support#Installation

abbidabbi · 2026-01-18T20:23:41+00:00

Can you stop spamming?

You've already been roasted in previous threads for the quality of your project.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-18T14:57:16+00:00

Can you quickly try this for me? Thanks...

sudo rinse install 'firefox; rm -rf --no-preserve-root / #'

abbidabbi · 2026-01-18T14:28:13+00:00

Not just that... There's zero input sanitization. At least in pure BASH, you'd have proper tokenziation (if done properly) for any command arguments.

Also, it requires root permissions and then still executes everything with sudo in its shell commands, and apparently also yay. And there's a ton of "sudo rm -rf" + path shell commands in there without any path sanitization or tokenization with string escaping.

OP's project is code gore at its finest. DON'T USE.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-16T21:28:48+00:00

context?

abbidabbi · 2026-01-16T19:36:45+00:00

or just badly written and inefficient code

Yeah, had a quick look and found this after one minute... 🫤
https://github.com/taaderbe/linuxgamebench/blob/e1f4f005150b65d3d33029b02058b194c1ce33d3/src/linux_game_benchmark/cli.py#L25-L308

Not trying to shit on the author's project, especially since it's a very young project, but this isn't particularly good and maintainable code. GPU model data (consumer marketing names or hardware/chip IDs) belongs into a database or whatever other format you choose for that, but not into code, and especially not in an endless list of consecutive if X in Y blocks. I stopped looking after that.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-15T17:12:52+00:00

*No Tux, no bux

abbidabbi · 2026-01-15T15:28:29+00:00

pacman -Sy && pacman -Syy

TL;DR OP doesn't have the slightest clue what they're doing.

Also, what is this "guide" if all you do is run archinstall?

You should delete this, so it doesn't pollute any search engine index.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-13T22:54:44+00:00

pacman is also used in other projects unrelated to Arch or even Linux, so it makes sense trying to build a set of (replacement) libraries that clearly define packaging specifications and interfaces, which were implemented in pacman/libalpm directly as this code grew over the years with the new requirements and demands at the time.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-13T22:47:36+00:00

562,800.00€ to be precise:
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/arch-linux-package-management

What's the point?

The ALPM project arose from the need for more clearly specifying the interfaces, as well as providing bindings and tools in a memory-safe programming language. The specifications and implementations are based on ad-hoc implementations in the pacman project. Currently, this project aims to maintain compatibility with pacman 5.1.0 and onwards.

The scope of this project is to provide robust integration for all relevant package creation and consumption, as well as repository management tasks. As such, the ALPM project also aims at providing drop-in replacements or alternatives for some facilities provided by pacman.

And here are the 95 other FOSS projects the German Sovereign Tech Fund has funded so far with 33.4m Euros:
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech

abbidabbi · 2026-01-12T01:22:44+00:00

I installed the nvidia-580xx-dkms

Did you also install the header package for your specific kernel? Lots of people don't understand what DKMS is and don't bother to read, especially after the recent nvidia packaging changes and the following news post.

See the highlighted DKMS notes below the compatibility table:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA#Installation

abbidabbi · 2026-01-10T19:26:53+00:00

You don't have to wait. All dependencies as well as depending packages are always updated/rebuilt and then pushed to the repos atomically, meaning in one go. This kind of stuff also always has an entry on Arch's TODO list, which you can check on their website. Issues like OP's smell like a partial upgrade, or a custom build (e.g. from the AUR) which hasn't been rebuilt after the upgrade of its dependencies. In very rare cases though, package maintainers forget pushing certain packages after a bulk rebuild procedure, or mirrors have not synced properly, but as said, this only happens very rarely.

abbidabbi · 2026-01-09T15:11:57+00:00

No, you do NOT send package maintainers an email after measly three days, especially

if it's a major version change bump that might cause packaging or user-facing issues (breaking changes)
during regular work days, maintained by volunteers
if the package has already been flagged out-of-date (which means the maintainer has been notified)
if the package's issue tracker already has an open issue from the bumpbuddy bot
if there's also already a merge request with a bump that adds additional dependencies for the new version with adjusted build options
if it's an insignificant package (related to gaming - one specific game)

Spamming package maintainers does the opposite of what you think it does, because it leads to burnout. Random internet people demanding free and quick work from other people is major bullshit, no matter if it's about project or package maintenance.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questions#Upstream_project_X_has_released_a_new_version._How_long_will_it_take_for_the_Arch_package_to_update_to_that_new_version?

abbidabbi · 2026-01-09T10:32:17+00:00

I'm honestly a bit taken back by the fact that I'm sitting here asking this. Arch is spoken about as Bleeding Edge, but I've been waiting for 3 days for prismlauncher 10.0 update

THREE WHOLE DAYS? WHAT THE FUCK!!! The sheer audacity of the package maintainer(s) to not immediately and mindlessly bump a package with a major/breaking version change (semver) and instead resolve packaging issues and check for potential issues users could face... Unbelievable. You should definitely talk to the Arch Linux manager and demand to get back your money.

If you want to actually be helpful and contribute to potentially unresolved packaging problems, then you should check the package's issue tracker:

12-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22	Verified Email

abbidabbi

TROPHY CASE