I've recently switched to Linux Mint on my laptop, and I'm noticing something strange with game performance. My system usually only uses about 1.7 GB of RAM when it's idle, which is significantly less than the 5.5 GB I used to see with Windows 11. This should mean I have more RAM free for gaming, but some games are actually running slower on Linux. For example, Warframe performs significantly worse on Linux compared to Windows. When I played on Windows, I could get around 55-60 fps on low settings, but on Linux, I'm struggling to hit 10 fps despite having 4 GB more RAM available. I installed Warframe through Lutris after the Steam version crashed on me with an unknown error. My laptop features a 16 GB Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics card that supports DirectX 12. Can anyone explain why I'm facing this performance drop?
1 Answer
It sounds like your performance drop could be due to the graphics rendering process in Linux. When you run games through Wine or Proton, there's extra overhead due to the translation layer, which might be creating a bottleneck. Even though you’ve freed up RAM, the way Linux handles graphics can impact your frame rates. You might be hitting that limitation rather than running out of memory.
Any tips on how to improve that? If I can’t figure it out, I might just have to see if Warframe works better through Steam.