Testing games on Linux - a Collection

For anyone here who is interested in gaming on Linux for whatever reason, I've started a Collection listing games that I've tested...

Testing Linux Gaming (AMD GPU)

These will be games from various stores (initially Steam, but also Epic Game Store, Gog, Itch and Humble) that I've been able to install, run and start playing without ANY extra configuration or tinkering to get them working, beyond using the launcher apps Lutris and Heroic.

I'm currently testing each game on the newly released Fedora 40 distribution of Linux (using the default Gnome desktop environment on both Wayland and X11 windowing servers). Depending on how I get on I might also test the most recent versions of Debian-based beginner-friendly mainstream 'distros' Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Pop!_OS (which is my favourite one for general stuff).

For reference, my PC specs are as follows:

CPU: Intel 13600K CPU
RAM: 32Gb DDR5 6400MHz
GPU: AMD Radeon 6700 XT 12Gb
SSD: 2Tb NVME 7300MB/ps

I'm using a 32" UHD/4K 60Hz monitor and I play most games at 1440p with max settings and limit them to 60fps. However, many games can be played at 1800p and even 4K.

I do also have an Nvidia RTX 3060 12Gb and I might do another list using that. However, gaming on Linux is known to be more problematic on Team Green, though it is said to be rapidly improving.

Obviously this is just a simple list recording my experiences... for more detailed in-depth results for thousands of games, please see the incredibly good online crowdsourced database ProtonDB.

[double post doh!]

To fill the space, heres a picture of my tuxedo cat Happy, with her frenemy Rudy who is sadly no longer with us…

I've now finished my experiment testing gaming on Linux and I'm surprised and pleased with how things turned out.

Of the 100 games I tested on Linux across Steam, Epic Game Store and GOG, only 5 didn't work. All those that were successfully installed, run and played, worked OOTB and needed no tinkering whatsoever, and as far as I can tell most were more performant than under Windows 11!

All games tested were single-player only apart from Path of Exile and Fallout 76. I did successfully test Elden Ring but don't play it online.

The 5 games that didn't properly work for me were Civilization: Beyond Earth, Generation Zero, The Last of Us Part 1, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and Skyrim: Special Edition (which actually only needed minimal tinkering to get running, but there were no NPC voices or background music! I'm sure I can get this and most of the others fully working.)

You can see my collection where I detail my results here: Testing Linux Gaming (AMD GPU)

So I've decided that I'm now going to be using Linux as my main gaming platform going forward, so as to avoid the bloat, ads, telemetry and 'AI' nonsense that Microsoft has been increasingly incorporating into Windows.

I'll still have Windows installed on a secondary SSD, so I can play the few games I bought on Microsoft Store that I play online with a friend's son who I mentor (Forza Horizons 3, 4 & 5 and Minecraft) and some PCVR games... well, basically Half-Life: ALYX... Oh, and the few that I can't get working on Linux ;)

I play almost exclusively on Linux nowadays, so I can share the games I tested if you want to add them to the list. There is surprisingly a lot of them that work flawlessly.
Let me know if you'd be interested.

Also, since you mentioned it, I played TLOU1 recently, and it worked fine for me. Only 1 crash in about 13hrs of gameplay, stable framerate and frametimes (Nobara 37, Proton, 7900 xt)

I play almost exclusively on Linux nowadays, so I can share the games I tested if you want to add them to the list. There is surprisingly a lot of them that work flawlessly.
Let me know if you'd be interested.

Also, since you mentioned it, I played TLOU1 recently, and it worked fine for me. Only 1 crash in about 13hrs of gameplay, stable framerate and frametimes (Nobara 37, Proton, 7900 xt)

I'm not sure what was up with TLOU1 - it installed and started, but crashed during the initial load screen with the spinning dogtag.

I'm sure I got it running OOTB under either Pop!_OS or Linux Mint a month or so back when I first started investigating Linux seriously.

With all this testing under Fedora 40, I didn't spend any time looking for solutions, as I wanted to see what was possible on a mainstream distro without any tinkering with settings or config files. I only really bothered with Skyrim as I was surprised it didn't work and just had to change a setting in Heroic to make it skip the launcher, and edit the user .ini file to set the resolution, which was an easy fix.

Anyway, nice to see someone else mainlining Linux :)

Very cool collection!

I used to play almost exclusively under Linux (Debian), except for some games that required a SSD (which my Windows installation owns exclusively).

Recently I only play under Windows though after I had a few bad experiences.

Higurashi: a few titles ran without any issue whatsoever and then some entries in the series didn't allow me to save the game under Linux (Steam).

Digital Combat Simulator: Downloaded and installed this huge game (with some DLC included it's > 100 GB) and then it didn't run at all.

So no really major issues but I have little time for gaming these days and just no mind or nerves at all to tinker with installations or run into issues. A bit sad though. I loved that I was actually able to play almost any game on Linux. Such an advancement to 20 years ago.

Wow it's amazing how many games can run on linux.

I have been gaming on Linux since Proton came out. Literally never looked back. All my games play, if they don't they probably aren't worth playing to begin with (GaaS titles).