I just saw the GamersNexus benchmarks and I wondered to myself, why do they have so many problems with Nvidia on Bazite? I’ve used PopOS with my RTX 30 graphics card and I’ve essentially had performance parity with Windows.
Do you guys think they misconfigured something in the background or do you think that the driver has just gotten worse? What are your experiences?
I’m on Arch, with Hyprland as my Window Manager. I use an RTX 3070.
For Wayland specifically, the driver was next to unusable for a while. I jumped ship from Windows in Sept. 2023. Beginning with driver 560 iirc, it got a lot better, plus their engineers pushed a lot of changes across the Wayland ecosystem to implement explicit sync support (a net positive, but before this, Nvidia was too stubborn to implement implicit sync, so bad screen tearing was unavoidable). Also there’s been a slow migration to using the GSP processor on newer cards. They claim it can improve performance, which may be true, but I also recently learned it helps them keep some more parts of their code closed-source, which is likely why it’s required to use the open source kernel modules.
At this point, though, it does feel very smooth and I can play games like The Finals at competitive framerates!
But relative to my performance under Windows, it’s still worse, mainly in average framerate. Like others have said, DX12 games seem to be hit hardest. I sometimes have to run lower settings to compensate. Also, if my VRAM gets filled, Xwayland apps all break, so I have to be very careful with higher quality texture quality especially.
Anyways, to answer your question, I think an average gamer doesn’t notice the degraded performance, without benchmarking or comparing framerates back to back— it still runs pretty smooth and framerates are still pretty high. If they aren’t happy with it, they’ll drop quality settings or resolution, just like they’d do under Windows.
I haven’t noticed.
I think most likely the performance isn’t as similar on your system as you think it is.
No idea, I’ve been playing “normal” games and VR games with my NVIDIA card for years now on Debian and… it just works. It just keeps on working. Maybe people are hardcore tinkerers that mess with specific options but me, I just play and I’m happy with it.
I feel that “works” is a very broad term. It can work but doesn’t mean that it will perform even or better in a good amount of games compared to Nvidia on Windows or AMD in Linux or Windows. Issues depends on specific games that one plays, one may be playing games that aren’t prone for those issues reported.
Sure, but FWIW I play from AAA to indies and it “works” as in no bug, no noticeable visual glitch.
I don’t benchmark from my driver version to the previous one on Windows or Linux or a price point equivalent with AMD hardware, I just play. I don’t think anybody gain much from checking performance benchmarks before playing a game, at least I can say for sure to me that’s not part of the fun.
I would notice if something was blatantly wrong e.g 50% performance hit, but I wouldn’t if it’s 5% hit. I don’t really care for it as it doesn’t affect my gameplay. Like I said, it’s from a casual player, not a pro player nor a game tinkerer.
Working “better” on Windows means nothing to me. Either I can play and I’m happy or I can’t (which never happened) then I’d be disappointed and potentially check why.
PS: I’m also a developer of XR content so I’m relatively confident I’d spot any significant problem.
The drivers run OK, but because they were not built for my distribution with the right flag, when I sleep and resume my system, I need to log out and back in to the desktop or else it bugs out.
Is this the drivers fault for not having that be a default flag? The maintainers fault for not using the correct flags? Waylands fault for not interfacing with the driver right on resume? My fault for having the audacity to want to use the sleep function?
I have no clue, but it doesn’t happen with the open source nouevau drivers, so I’m inclined to place a fair bit of the blame with nvidia.
If it’s the same bug as what I’m seeing, I just wrote a script that changes the display settings and sets them back then bound it to a hotkey.
Any monitor that stays blank after waking up is fixed if you adjust the display settings (tricky to do with blank monitors, hence the script).
Well being it’s all vibe coded now yep that tracks.
Source please
Just take a look at their workflow and you tell me. NVIDIA uses an AI-powered code editor called Cursor. It is a fork of VS Code that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into the programming environment.
Here a quote from this article:
A high-profile endorsement from NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang in late 2025 underscored Cursor’s rapid ascent – calling Cursor his “favorite enterprise AI service” and noting that 100% of NVIDIA’s engineers now use AI assistance with a remarkable boost in productivity.
In late 2024 and early 2025, CEO Jensen Huang explicitly stated that “every single software engineer at NVIDIA uses Cursor.”
And then there is this article:
https://fortune.com/2025/11/25/nvidia-jensen-huang-insane-to-not-use-ai-for-every-task-possible/
So it’s kinda obvious they use a lot of AI in their code. Now there is no direct proof they use it in their drivers but they obviously do given the CEO’s stance.
No doubt NVIDIA is peddling AI as they are financially depending on it now.
Now from claiming something is powerful and even used to actually shipping code on something low level and benchmarkable like (GPU) drivers I have doubt. I imagine they can say they use AI there to rephrase comment and it would “technically correct” but beyond that I’m still skeptical.
Regarding chip design, AI has been used for decades … if you consider routing to be AI. It’s not generative in the modern sense, it’s not using LLM, but it’s automated a process.
To me it’s the typical Harvard Business School playbook. C-suite repeat keywords they read in their peer most popular magazine, they aggregate in a document they call “strategy” they lower down the chain of commands people “execute” that because they must, thanks to KPIs.
I’d love to hear it from an actual engineer working on drivers but I imagine it’d be hard to get a honest opinion with NDAs and all.
Thanks for providing all the sources!
I could barely launch games on Wayland 2 years ago. I have been gaming on Wayland now, no problems. So if anything, it has massively improved.
The only thing I know for sure in regards to why nvidia kinda blows on linux is that system RAM sharing doesn’t really work the way it does on windows or with AMD cards on linux. This means that particularly VRAM intense workloads will suffer. Unreal 5 games in particular suffer because of this.
This might explain why Manjaro waits so long in between updates for Nvidia. A really old driver didn’t have as many problems until 580.82.90.
I just bought Avowed. Splitegate 2 has been running great on my 3060 but splitegate 2 is also very plain looking. I hope Avowed runs well too
The problem for me is that its so damn back and forth. One driver will be perfectly fine, and then the next will introduce some random new issue. Rn 580 has caused elite dangerous to crash with some out of memory error, and VR is completely broken. Im really considering switching from Nobara because I want a distro that has a built in tool to easily downgrade nvidia drivers.
I think the biggest issue they had was with consistency of frame rate. Maybe the graphic drivers have matured more for the RTX 30 than the later versions. Are you using the proprietary drivers, or the open source ones?
I have always used what PopOS bundles. It used to be the proprietary driver, but ever since a certain driver version, they have switched to the Nvidia-made FOSS driver. Because nvidia stopped developing any sort of proprietary components in the driver and just made the FOSS driver instead, which became the “official” Nvidia driver in May 2025 i think.
Edit: Correction, only the kernel modules are all FOSS, while the userspace modules such as CUDA for example are still proprietary.
It’s a bazzite issue. Many people share that the drivers are pretty reliable on other distros.
From experience, they got pretty good over last 2-3 years.
Does Bazzite make their own Linux drivers?
No, bazzite does some weird stuff that does not interact well with the linux nvidia drivers
In the past (2021-2022) I remember that Nvidia drivers were really pain in the ass and installing them always ended for me with black screen. For right now everything is working for me in debian-based distributions and arch-linux. Yesterday I was looking for new linux distros, I wanted to try Fedora and OpenSuse but drivers didn’t work there at all. In Fedora this Nouveau driver was okay but in OpenSuse even open-source driver wasn’t working.
I have a 5060ti 16gb version and don’t experience any issues with frame pacing and stuff like that on nixos, while when I tried bazzite I was experiencing some issues with the gpu.
It’s most likely a bazzite specific issue, especially if you use something like the steamos interface.
For example my monitor is a 160hz monitor that support’s gsync, but if I enable global gsync in any wayland compositor the bottom part of my screen is cut off and experience weird vissual bugs, but if I make them only enable gsync on my steam games when they are fullscreen I don’t experience that issue. The steamos session inside of bazzite doesn’t have that feature, so when it enables gsync I experience that same issue of cut off part of the screen with weird visual issues.
No, but then I have quite an old graphics card. Even for my card, the open source drivers are recommended.
I have 3080 and I’ve seen significant performance issues too (e.g. in Cyberpunk 2077, KCD2). I think it depends a lot on the games you play. Apparently DX12 (via vkd3d) doesn’t perform well on Nvidia cards.
My next GPU will probably not be an Nvidia card.
When I upgraded my GPU last I tried for the first time since ATI was a thing to leave nvidia and go AMD. I tried to get a 6900XT but just had endless issues with drivers, which I was surprised about because if you believe a majority of Linux users it should have been flawless - it was not. I had endless issues with drivers and games running badly. I caved and returned it for a 3070ti - trust me I tried a lot of things.
Anyway, I’ve since tried AMD again and upgraded to a 9070XT and the transition this time has been absolutely flawless, even keeping the same install (CachyOS has a guide to swap from nvidia to AMD).
This is all to say, don’t believe the hype around AMD but at least give it a try and don’t feel too bad if it doesn’t work out for you. Ultimately both nvidia and AMD have been improving significantly over the years
