Linux

For gaming, you should be using the most current version of nvidia's proprietary drivers that supports your GPU, unless that GPU is really old. Have a look at this page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

If your GPU isn't listed there, use the most recent driver you can find.

If your GPU is on the 470.xx supported list, try 470.223.02, as that seems to be the last in the series.

If your GPU is on the 390.xx supported list, try 390.157.

If your GPU is on one of the other lists, it's a really old chipset and you should be using the Nouveau driver that's built into the kernel.

If you're using the nvidia proprietary drivers on a system that also has Nouveau installed, make sure you've blacklisted Nouveau so that you're loading the correct driver.

Dual-graphics laptops are a bit of a bear to work with under Linux generally. Good luck.

Short answer: no. I'm using Linux Mint with an Nvidia card and it works great. From the games you've mentioned I've played Guild Wars 2 and Warframe with zero problems, they actually ran like on Windows where I had them installed before. Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, Bottles, Lutris - they all work fine for me.

Also some of the issues you're describing don't sound like a typical GPU problem. But sure, try a different distro, maybe your particular hardware setup doesn't play nice with Mint.

I wouldn't say unusable but NVIDIA definitely makes things way more painful than they ought to be with their closed source drivers and general stubbornness to support newer technologies under Linux, see Wayland. Mint's generally older packages also might be working against you.

In my experience, I've had the smoothest experiences with gaming focused/adjacent distros which just include the NVIDIA drivers out of the box, such as Nobara or Bazzite. Those just work for the most part with no user intervention, and you don't even have to think about it.

It's possible that the issue you're running into is with Proton and not your GPU. My anecdote is that running Ubuntu 22 LTS (which Linux Mint, Pop! OS, etc. are all based on) with my 3060 has always worked just fine—usually for machine learning and video rendering. I'm not a gamer, but the occasional Minecraft session does get the GPU kicking.

Anecdotal, of course, but I've been gaming with almost zero big issues on POP! _OS with the baked in nVidia drivers since half a year ago. Both via Steam and via Lutris w/ Wine/ProtonGE. Some bugs here and there, but nothing that makes it impossible to get a satisfactory experience.

Of course it's a different distro which you might not like, but if you really can't make your games work on Mint do consider changing to POP! at least for the time being

It might be Mint or an issue with your laptop. I've been using Arch for a while and haven't had major performance issues. Before I used Arch, I used Pop!OS and didn't have any issues either. What are your laptop specs? Have you already looked into Nvidia Optimus? Have you tried other distros?

Have you not watched the famous Linus Torvalds video on this? If you haven't, here's a nice upscaled version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPh-5P4XH6o

But yeah, there's a good reason why most of us here avoid nVidia.

I would suggest trying other distros like some people here mention like popOS, nobara, garuda, open suse (try the semi-rolling release one), fedora, endeavourOS, etc.

This might give you a better experience out of the box without too much tinkering, since sometimes compatibilities with the hardware and with some software can occur (for example I tried to do a garuda install in the past and it didn't work for me but to a lot of people it worked).

Also when you get more experienced with linux, you probably can fix those issues more easily, but for now probably the best option is to try a different distro and see how it goes.

It's probably something with your OS.

People like to meme about Nvidia being unusable on Linux, but before switching to AMD I was running various Nvidia GPUs for more than a decade and they were always rock-stable.

Running Fedora 38 on both desktop and laptop, both former Windows machines with NVIDIA GPU (laptop has the intel IGPU and NVIDIA DGPU). I’ve been able to run every single game I’ve tried (Elden Ring, Mass Effect Andromeda, Starcraft 2, Sea of Thieves, etc) using Steam+Proton. In some cases Proton GE was required, and on the laptop there was a special proton launch argument required for Elden Ring to work. Additionally, on Wayland there is one specific issue being worked on (explicit sync) that does cause some annoyance, flickering apps etc. But it feels like NVIDIA is catching up in terms of Linux compatibility, hang in there!

I actually own a steam deck and I never had any major issues with it, so my only conclusion is that this time it’s the fault of either linux mint

Isn't Steam Deck use AMD and not NVIDIA? Btw, playing CS:GO2 on Nvidia 3070 Ti on Linux desktop using driver version 545 doesn't give me a major issue so far.

Currently running Pop!_OS 22.04 with a 3090 GPU, and it purrs like a happy cat. Getting significantly better performance than when the same hardware ran Windows 10.

From my own experience on my older Lenovo Legion with the optimus GPUs (intel integrated, nvidia 3060m dedicated) it was always a bit of pain.
Though I think I settled on using optimus-manager and with just the right tweaks it worked, when I wanted to game I restarted my whole desktop session to run on the nvidia gpu.

Are you using bumblebee/primus with optirun/primusrun ? back before these were the main pain points. (I am also assuming you are on X11 Desktop Environment - afaik wayland on older nvidia gpus is basically impossible. Also, are you sure you are using the proprietary nvidia driver and not nouveau? Nouveau is unusable for gaming.)

Works fine for me. I'm on Manjaro with a GTX970 and it works just fine.

I'm on EndeavourOS and it works without issues. I'm using a 3070TI, maybe older cards are more troublesome? Like others have said, I'd give other distros a try.

Back when I still had a desktop system with an NVidia GPU, I never had these problems. On my gaming laptop with an onboard intel + nvidia gpu, I also didn't have these problems. But....I'm very experienced with linux, so most noob problems are not an issue for me. That being said, POP_OS supported GPU switchting out of the box, without having to faff around. YMMV.

I've been having the best experience with a laptop with an Nvidia GPU on my fedora 39.

Try a different distro? Linux mint wouldn't output display on my Nvidia laptop but Ubuntu worked just fine.

I have had zero issues with nVidia on multiple Leap machines. nVidia works great on SUSE / OpenSUSE since nVidia hosts their own repo to support SUSE, OpenSuse, (and maybe REL?) Since it is an nVidia package it works as expected and the nVidia configuration GUI app gives you granular control

I have some window resizing/tiling/moving lag spikes with KDE and notifications lag the whole system with kde/gnome. This sis apparently a bug in the nvidia driver. Besides that games run pretty much perfectly. The card gets hotter than on Windows with PoE but that's basically it. For reference, I play PoE, league (for now), ffxiv, D2 mods, last epoch, some indie games, bg3,... I have a 3080 card and a ryzen 5800x processor.

Always using the newest proprietary driver of course.

Please let us know if changing distros did the trick, I really hope it does, good luck!

Not my experience at all. Running :

• Ubuntu 23.10
• NVIDIA 525.147.05
• latest Steam stable (1705108172) with latest Proton

and I have been playing "flat" and VR games with no tinkering for years now. I honestly spent at most 1h on drivers or compatibility since I bought my desktop. In fact thinking back I probably spent more time on Windows years ago than now.

No but better go with an LTS kernel – is what i heard.

I do believe you but I've only used Nvidia cards for over 20 years with Linux. Idk where all these difficulties people have with Nvidia on Linux come from. Every issue I've ever had with a GPU was from a hardware failure. Maybe something is busted.

I have several machines with Nvidia GPUs, they are all working fine, one thing I like about Intel internal graphics that you can't do with Nvidia is to use pass
through of virtual GPU's to get OS's in kvm-qemu virtual machines, giving the ability to play Windows video games in a virtual machine with usable performance.

@Kaldo

On my laptop, everything pretty much works fine, even with nvidia gpu, so it 'can' work.

Can you provide more information about the laptop and GPU model, and the driver you used?

If your card is still supported by nvidia, I'd try to use the latest proprietary driver 'nvidia-dkms'. It should ensure the driver's playing well with your kernel.

Depends if you only use a computer to play video games.

Nvidia is shit on linux. It works if you’re lucky or know what you’re doing but dont expect anything to work oob.

If anyone ever needs to decide if amd or nvidia on linux, its amd 11/10.

MSI GTX1060 on PopOS works great for me