Linux leaves Windows 11 in the dust in battle of the frame rates with Cyberpunk 2077 expansion

Cyberpunk now has its Phantom Liberty expansion - with patch 2.0 update in tow - and some benchmarking of the game has produced some surprising results in terms of a Linux distro performing much faster than Windows 11.

Okay, so upfront, we should note that this is just one test, and the conclusions we can draw are limited - but the difference is quite eye-opening, when running Nobara (a spin on Fedora) compared to Windows 11 on the exact same PC.

YouTuber Maximum Fury conducted the test runs which found that Nobara was just over 30% faster than Windows 11 at Full HD resolution (high textures).

As Tom's Hardware spotted, the result for Windows 11 using the in-game benchmarking facility was an average frame rate of 48.5 fps (minimum 34 fps) compared to 63.7 fps for the Linux distro (with a minimum of 41 fps).

The spec is important, of course, and the system used comprised of a Ryzen 5 5600 processor (in a B550 motherboard) paired with an AMD RX 5700 XT graphics card, alongside 16GB of system RAM (DDR4).

So, this is an AMD system, and perhaps switching components to NVIDIA or Intel parts might produce different results. (Well, we'd be shocked if it didn't, the question is whether the variance would be in the same ballpark).

What we need, of course, is for someone to do just this, and repeat the testing using a different GPU and CPU to see if the major bump for the Linux distro still holds. If so, it's a pretty striking illustration of how Linux gaming does have at least some advantages over Windows 11 in certain use cases.

As Tom's observes, this is hardly the first time Linux has been found to run a game faster than Microsoft's operating system, but the gap is not normally anything of this order.

It's an interesting finding from the YouTuber, though we should again underline that it pertains to just one specific comparative scenario (and further note some other parameters are applied by the tester here, such as undervolting the GPU).