I’ve noticed lately that Nvidia employees have been quite active in taking issue reports from Linux gamers and root causing them. Unfortunately there is no public bug tracker, but they seem to be quite active on their official forum.
User reports an issue with a game that just launched, while running the latest production Nvidia driver.
An hour later, an employee responds, letting the user know that an internal bug was opened.
An hour later, the employee updates the thread, indicating that the bug was reproduced, and a fix is present in today’s beta driver. Lets the user know that the fix will be incorporated into the current 595 production branch, too.
Usually, things are not that straightforward, but still pretty cool to see.
I don’t really understand why Nvidia is dedicating resources to Linux gaming like this, but I welcome it. Maybe they’re aiming to make GeForce Now run games on Linux at some point?
I’m sure they’ve got good telemetry on the user base, maybe they see the writing on the wall. Windows may continue to be around for a long time but its position as the only choice for PC gaming is over and it’s only going to get worse over time, not better.
We’ll see though, they’ve got their work cut out for them. Perhaps they can talk to Valve about how to not ship shit drivers on linux.
Hard to say if they (Nvidia) care much about Linux gaming. What you saw with the user reporting issues and getting them fixed isnt typical behaviour of Nvidia.
Even if you do use their forums, its more about luck getting the attention (Maybe you have a higher chance if youre someone semi-important) Other than that, its still cool to see them responding to users in the linux-gaming-space.
I won’t even consider NV cards for gaming anymore, too many headaches. I have some for LLM stuff but Gaming on my 9070 just works on linux in a way that I can’t beat.
I believe Linus said the one thing about the AI boom is NVIDIA is playing nice with linux for now. I wonder if they still would put so much trouble in to Linux drivers if the boom pops?
Honestly, i was surprised to see Nvidia actually responding. Wonder if OP is a troll, because CachyOS forums are absolutely flooded with Nvidia users not getting any attention to their gaming issues from Nvidia. Its not normal Nvidia Linux behaviour and OP somehow manages to make it seem like Nvidia users actually get any attention, which i heavily doubt.
They were complaining for Nvidia gaming problems in the CachyOS forums. Even though CachyOS is specialized and the people there know a lot, they still cant fix most common gaming problems. Its proprietary after all, meaning Nvidia needs to put attention to gaming, otherwise it will just fail, especially on Wayland.
I would say both. Most seemed to know what they were doing, but somehow didnt know much about Wayland / X11 / XLibre or it wasnt mentioned that much. Gaming on Nvidia should be much simpler (Yes, even now) On a xorg variant than Wayland, because Wayland is still in beta phase whether the people like it or not… It also seems the beta phase of Wayland, will last quite a while..
These days the idea that NVidia care about gaming at all would be surprising. They’d probably be happy to see all the gamers go away so they could put all their efforts into the AI bubble. (Oh, that and maybe “online gaming” just to make sure you don’t actually own anything, just the way the WEF likes it).
True, but NVIDIA was always great with Linux drivers for compute purposes. It was why they had better drivers than AMD for the longest time. Completely different situation with Linux gaming, because there’s little money in that…
Yet, I have noticed that their developer forum has been getting more active attention with game issue debugging and fixes, especially in the past year or so.
They also mention box64 and FEX, so it could be related to what you mentioned.
But thinking about the GeForce Now angle: User instances are VMs running Windows Server currently. How expensive is that license wise? How much money could be saved if they ran all those sessions on Linux VMs instead?
NVIDIA is just a bag of bugs on both windows and linux. The only Linux I could get to work properly with my 3090 and usb display dock was bazzite. The rest just refused to display on the dock with an NVIDIA driver loaded, the 3090 still wont display an image when it wakes from sleep.
Nvidia are maybe concerned because on Linux AMD is mostly trouble free and they aren’t; and currently the growth curve for Linux vs. Windows is pretty nuts.
Interesting for you to mention that. Are you using the USB-C output from the GPU itself?
For a really long time I used my 3090 for display, with a DP cable that connected it to the DP in of my motherboard (previously a B550 ProArt, now a x670e ProArt), and used its USB-C into my KVM switch for both my display as well as peripherals. Never had any headaches with that.
With my previous 5950x setup I had no option other than use it for display since it lacked an iGPU, but with my current 9950x I actually used it to drive my display for a long time because of some weird issues with amdgpu (from sound crackling to the driver just restarting or crashing), but now those issues seem to have been resolved and I’m just using the iGPU in order to free up some VRAM from the 3090.
This was my experience as well–on linux at least, My 9070 had zero issues, my 50 series would timeout, fail to boot, corrupt game files upon loading, it was a sensational disaster. I use that card on Windows now for work and its fine. But Linux gaming on AMD is so much easier.
