The YouTube channel "Maximum Fury" conducted a technical test of the new Cyberpunk add-on called "Phantom Liberty" on an older AMD hardware system, testing it separately on Linux and Windows 11. The Linux system, specifically the Fedora distribution called Nobara, performed significantly better, delivering 31% more frames compared to Windows 11.
The hardware used for testing included an Asrock B550 motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU from the first RDNA generation, along with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The CPU, RAM, and GPU were overclocked, and the system utilized undervolting to save energy costs.
When testing the game at 1080p resolution with high textures, the Linux system achieved an average of 63.72 frames per second (fps), while Windows 11 managed only 48.55 fps. This suggests that the game should run noticeably smoother on the Linux system.
Is there a Linux distro specifically optimized for gaming?
SteamOS technically, but you probably don't want it on a regular computer.
SteamOS is perfect on the deck. Honestly it's probably fine on a PC if all you do is game and browse Firefox. Obviously some games won't run in Linux.
Nobara is great, based on fedora so very stable and fairly up to date with many built in gaming features and no after install setup required to get gaming. https://nobaraproject.org/
Running it for over a year now on my gaming rig and very happy
Nobara and Pop!_OS do well in this regard.