So, my PC haves an RTX 4070 super, and i was wondering if my RTX-compatible Steam games would still be able to use RTX in Zorin OS.
Does it works ?
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When You have installed the Nvidia Driver it should. But it wold be good to use Your System in Xorg. By default Zorin runs in Wayland.
To switch, go to the Login Screen (not the Lock Screen). Simply rebot for that. On the Login Screen click on Your Profile so that the Password Field appears. It has to be appeared. When it is appeared, you should see in the bottom right corner a Gear Icon. Click on it and choose the Option ''Zorin Desktop on Xorg''.
@Michel explains here how to install the latest Nvidia Drivers if You should need them:
@Zac0511 I have a rtx 3070 ti 8GB card and my games i play are running perfectly fine. However in the Crysis remastered trilogy when i enable raytracing my fps drops from 150 to 40-50 fps. When i disable raytracing but looking at the water quality and so on it does look like it is on when it is turned off (see pictures below). The reflections of buildings in water is just there.
Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition: What games do you play on Linux? - #170 by Michel
Crysis Remastered: What games do you play on Linux? - #185 by Michel
Crysis 2 Remastered: What games do you play on Linux? - #193 by Michel
Crysis 3 Remastered: What games do you play on Linux? - #201 by Michel
My anger with reflections knows no bounds, because you don't need Raytracing to do a convincing enough trick to reflect things that you don't see. Witchfire actually, a more recent game, does a good job of this.
I never understood the hype around ray tracing. Before RT games already had those stuff. Or i am blind and miss something.
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The biggest improvement would probably be when you go full path tracing and have an incredible number of bounces for both the light AND the colours involved with that light, which can then bleed onto the surfaces of other things naturally.
However you can get very close to that same effect with traditional rendering and tricks, depending on how you do things. It takes more effort though than just ticking a box in Unreal that says yup, do your thing. And I'm not saying proper ray tracing is easy to implement, it isn't, but pros and cons to both.
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Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: How you launch the game may matter a lot. Using Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, RTX features only worked for me using Steam to launch the games. If I launched from Bottles or Heroic (other ways of running Windows games on Linux), I didn't have those options.
Extra information: I wanted to fire up Cyberpunk 2077, which I haven't played since switching to Linux, to double check which features worked before I answered you. Interestingly, when running Cyberpunk from Heroic or from Bottles, no RTX features were available and using Cyberpunk's benchmark presented my driver version as AMD Radeon software 23.10.2. When I ran from Steam, however, my driver was correctly reported as 570 and all expected RTX features were available and worked. My CPU does have an AMD integrated GPU, but it's absolutely impossible that the integrated GPU produced the frame rate I was getting.
One notable caveat: HDR doesn't work. Zorin doesn't support HDR, and even distributions that have HDR support don't seem to get it working in games. I've only seen it functional on Steam Deck.
Another way to put it, which Applecheeks' image demonstrated pretty well, is that without ray tracing, the most performant means of reflections are tricks rather than literal reflections. That's why the framerate in Crysis dropped so hard when you turned on raytracing: it went from using a very efficient trick that wasn't ACTUALLY calculating reflection of light, to actually doing the math involved in reflection. Whether or not that trick is adequate depends on a lot of things: your tolerance for the reflection not being perfect, how good the trick is in the first place, and how well it's implemented; how complex the scene is, and so on. Ray tracing and path tracing will accomplish more accurate reflections (unless they've been poorly implemented somehow), because the GPU is actually calculating reflection. That's a lot of extra math and may not be worth it depending on how hard it hits your performance, and your tolerance as mentioned a moment ago.
My first ray traced game was Control, and I found some RTX features well worth it, reflection included, but others less so.
Interestingly, I just ran the benchmarks on Cyberpunk 2077 at 4k and got the following:
Ray tracing (not path tracing): 72.72 average FPS
Path tracing: 42.65 FPS
Traditional rendering: 57.34 FPS
Those numbers aren't mixed up. Having ray tracing on improved my framerate at 4k over having it off. Whether something strange is going on or whether it's actually faster to ray trace than convincingly fake that benchmark's lighting, I couldn't tell you.
Finally, let's not forget that RTX features are about a lot more than just reflections. I'm yet to see traditional rendering come close to ray tracing on complex light and shadow in a game that uses RTX well, and in the games that come closest it takes the level/world designers a LOT of extra work in laying out invisible light sources to fake light bouncing off of walls and things.
Setting ray tracing aside, DLSS upscaling has worked decently since DLSS 2.0 on the RTX 2080 to get higher frame rates with decent visual quality, and has improved a fair bit over time. Frame generation is honestly hit or miss, but for what I play (non-competitive games), I've found it can be worth it to me to have frame generation on for a higher frame rate. It does introduce a small amount of control latency (worse the lower your initial framerate is), but not enough to bother me. Multi-frame generation (a new feature only on RTX 50 series cards) is dicier from what I've been hearing: generating more than one frame per two rendered frames can increase latency too much and is more prone to artifacts. This is especially true when the frame rate is very low to begin with, as you have more time spent on generated frames than with single frame generation.
...this post wasn't supposed to be this long.
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To answer the question as to what GPU I have running on Zorin OS 16.3. (Old Zorin OS Version)
To answer the question which Nvidia driver I am using.
To answer the question about utilizing RTX features. Very few games on Linux support RTX, even to this day. And only some games on Windows, have had their support for RTX updated for Linux usage, mostly through the Nvidia driver support.
Activating Ray Tracing, will always bring your FPS down by half. This has been common knowledge since the beginning of the pandemic, since, the 2000 series cards and beyond. This is why its always recommended to use the 80/90 variant's of each generation, to get any usable FPS, with Ray Tracing enabled.
In regards to HDR support, that is hit or miss on Linux. First, the Nvidia driver has to support it, which they do, since the past several versions now. Then the cable you use has to support HDR, and the display obviously has to support HDR.
My new monitor has a few different HDR settings on it. I wasn't 100% sure which HDR version to pick on the monitor, so I just selected HDR 600. In my experience in the past using a TV, I saw HDR label show up on corner of screen, when HDR was activated by streaming service.
I admit that I have yet to see that label pop up on my new monitor, when I have opened up a game. Maybe its because the game lacked HDR support due to its age, IDK. I am honestly not the right person to answer that question, cause I don't have any 2024/2025 games yet.
Most of the games I play, are a few years old or more. Cause I am still waiting for a new release, to actually capture my interest, instead of making me disgusted by dev's who push social/political interests, that don't belong in games.
I have an RTX 3070 Laptop GPU on my Asus laptop. I'm on Zorin OS Pro 17.2 with the Nvidia proprietary drivers installed. I played BioShock Infinite and Elden Ring via Steam the other day without any issues.
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I've played the Bioshock games on Linux as well, using Steam, with Proton. I got the remasters versions of the games cause they are old, and I wanted to leverage my computer's abilities to produce great performance and graphics. For anyone who's never played the Bioshock games before, its going to be weird and shocking to them. But if one gives them a chance, I think they will find them quite enjoyable.
Welcome to Rapture, enjoy your stay. 
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That looks great, i got the gog versions free from amazon prime gaming. This week they added bioshock infinite as well. I never really played those games, only bioshock for a hour or 2.
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