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Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
01:06 Sponsor: Ground News
02:47 Testbench: the Atlas S
06:38 Bazzite
10:20 Nobara
11:38 HoloISO
12:17 Chimera OS
14:01 Tuxedo OS
14:46 Conclusion
16:16 Support the channel

#linuxgaming #gaming #linuxdistro 

Testbench: Tuxedo Atlas S: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-Atlas-S-Gen1-Intel.tuxedo

It's mini ITX, with 3 potential finishes: a jade green, a silver, and a matte black, which is the one they sent me.

It comes with Intel 13th or 14th gen CPUs, up to an i9 14900, it can accommodate 2 M.2 SSDs and 2 SATA 3 drives, up to 24 terabytes in total. It can come with or without dedicated graphics, which can go up to a Radeon RX 7700XT, or an Nvidia RTX 4070. It can also get up to 96 gigs of DDR5 RAM, and it obviously has wifi and bluetooth, and it comes with Linux preinstalled, Tuxedo OS being the default.

The model Tuxedo sent me has an i7 13700, 1TB of PCIe 3 SSD, 32 gigs of RAM, and the RX 7700XT with 12 gigs of VRAM.

This video IS NOT sponsored by Tuxedo.

Bazzite

So, Bazzite is a weird one: it's based on Fedora Atomic, so it's an "immutable" distro, and it's built using universal blue, which is a build system that lets you create tailored distro images for plenty of purposes.

I ran all the games at the native resolution of my monitor, so 3440x1440. Horizon is run using the latest version of Proton from Valve, the rest are native Linux games. Everything was ran at their max settings, at the native resolution, without any resolution scaling. Everything ran under Wayland, with all the latest updates applied.

So, For Horizon Zero Dawn, running the benchmark gave me an average of 80 FPS at these maxed out settings.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got 105 FPS on average in the benchmark, and for Total War Warhammer 3 on the battle benchmark, it reached 56.4 FPS and 52.5 FPS on the campaign benchmark.

Nobara

Next is Nobara. This isn't an immutable distribution, it's Fedora, plus a lot of kernel patches, addons, drivers and tools focused specifically on gaming and on improving performance


In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got 106 FPS on average in the benchmark.
In Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, I got 57 FPS on average, and 54.7 FPS on average for the campaign benchmark.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, Nobara got 80 FPS on average.


HoloISO

I also gave a shot to HoloISO, in its new immutable form, but it never managed to give me a bootable system, no matter how hard I tried.

Chimera OS

Chimera OS is an arch based distribution, it's an atomic distro, so immutable, and includes a bunch of emulation tools as well as optimizations for gaming. It defaults to GNOME as its desktop, compared to KDE for the other distros I tested.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got 102 FPS on average in the benchmark, similar to other distros I tested.
In Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, I got 55.3 FPS on average, and 51.1 FPS on average for the campaign benchmark.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, Chimera OS got 73 FPS on average, strangely lower than other distributions. 

Tuxedo OS    

Just for fun, I decided to also run all of these games on the preinstalled Tuxedo OS, to see if these gaming distros offer improved performance compared to a "normal" system. Here are the results.

In Horizon Zero Dawn, at the max resolution and max settings, with any upscaling, The Atlas S running Tuxedo OS got 81 FPS on average.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at the max settings and resolution, Ubuntu 24.04 reached 106 FPS on average.

In Total War Warhammer 3's battle benchmark, at the max settings and resolution, I got 57 FPS on average, and in the campaign benchmark, it reached 54.9 FPS

The Linux Experiment

This post reviews the Tuxedo Atlas S small form factor PC, assessing its performance as a Linux gaming console. It compares multiple Linux distributions, including gaming-focused ones like Nobara, Chimera OS, and Tuxedo OS, to see if they provide better gaming performance. Benchmark results from games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Shadow of the Tomb Raider indicate that there are minimal performance differences between specialized gaming distros and general-purpose distributions. The Tuxedo Atlas S is highlighted as a compact, powerful option for living room gaming setups.

Comparing Linux gaming distros performance (with Tuxedo Atlas S)