Trying to ditch Windows completely. Struggling to make my most played games run smoothly.
I'm trying to move all my gaming to Linux. Initially I asked for help at r/linux_gaming, but some people saw negatively that my setup was not a bare-metal gaming distro and some others recommended I posted here. You can check my post there if you want to read any of my comments. But I'm trying to gather all the useful info here.
My host is:
- OS: Unraid
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- RAM: 128 GiB DDR4
With KVM + QEMU + Libvirt I'm running a VM:
- Operating System: NixOS 26.05
- KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.6
- KDE Frameworks Version: 6.26.0
- Qt Version: 6.11.1
- Kernel Version: 7.1.4 (64-bit)
- Graphics Platform: Wayland
- Processors: 6 cores, 2 threads of AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- Memory: 48 GiB of RAM (hugepages of 1G)
- Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (driver 595.71.05)
- Manufacturer: QEMU
- Product Name: Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)
- System Version: pc-q35-10.2
The VM has three storages:
- Primary drive. A qcow2 file in the NVME drive of the host.
- "Fast" Virtiofs device mounted. It's a share of the host that uses the NVME drive.
- "Slow" Virtiofs device mounted. It's a share of the host that uses the NVME drive as cache and the array of HDD drives as main storage.
I prefer to install games in the Virtiofs devices to be able to have that in common with other VMs. But I've tried the primary drive for the problematic games too.
The games I'm trying to run with good performance and failing at that are The Binding of Isaac and Elden Ring: Nightreign. Both with mods. In Isaac I use a bunch of quality of life mods. Nothing that adds characters, floors, bosses, enemies... And not using Repentogon. For Nightreign I use the More Map Variations & Weapons Mod.
The Binding of Isaac takes 15-20 minutes just to start. And then, during gameplay, there are slowdowns and micro freezes anytime something new happens or I change rooms. I guess it's shader compilation, but if it's that, the cache of shaders is not working because it happens again any time the game starts again. And uninstalling the mods doesn't improve things.
Elden Ring: Nightreign has just low FPS. 15-20 fps is the average. But my CPU rarely goes above 60% with no single core going above 85% and my GPU doesn't go above 50% either. The game doesn't work online without the mod because of Easy Anti-Cheat and VMs. So I cannot test it properly without it.
Other games I've tested:
- Control Ultimate Edition: +70 FPS
- Dark Souls III: 60 FPS
- Heroes of the Storm: ~60 FPS
- Lies of P: ~75 FPS
- Outer Wilds: +100 FPS
- Satisfactory: ~50 FPS
HVM and IOMMU enabled. Cores of the VM are isolated in the host. CPU and GPU are in performance modes during gaming. I've run some benchmarks too. I'll put them in a comment so that this is not even longer.
Any idea of what I can do to improve the performance in what are probably 2 of my 3 most played games? (I was really unlucky here I guess)