He certainly claims to have used the correct Bazzite images:

A few folks have asked but yes every machine got it’s own specific install, each machine has it’s own Bazzite ISO download for their specific hardware. No cloning, no short cuts, each was treated like a brand new machine with a fresh install 🕊️. After updates installed I rebooted and checked updates again, I’ll never take PC benchmarks for granted again 😅

He also mentions that he used the “Nvidia (GTX 9xx-10xx Series)” image for the 1080 Ti system.

Of course, it could be that he messed up, but it could also be that Bazzite didn’t work as intended. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that Nvidia drivers broke on a Linux distro.

And in case this was indeed user error, perhaps it would be a good idea to have a mechanism to let users know that they chose the “wrong” image.

If that was the intent, then I think this was a very bad way to show that. A much better way would’ve been showing that it didn’t work on system X and resolving it (e.g. with some external help). Instead he just showed a large number of invalid/irrelevant benchmarks. This now leaves people thinking that Linux has a massive performance deficit instead of an issue with the driver installation. I would like to see a follow-up to address the driver issues and explain what went wrong, s.t. we can actually learn something from this.

I would also hope that the typical experience is that it works out of the box, especially on a distro like Bazzite, but that’s besides the point.

Yes, they could even show a list of detected GPUs, the driver used, and some status indication (e.g. warning if NVK is used).

One of the main selling points of Bazzite is that it works out of the box. They even advertise this on their website:

Bazzite focuses on hardware compatibility out of the box, with full support for accelerated video encoding and decoding, built in Nvidia drivers, additional HID drivers, and just about every udev rule you could need.

On Bazzite, one should not need to look up how to install drivers.

MangoHud may be able to show the driver too, but I’ve never used that myself.

Agreed. I think the main takeaway from the video is that it’s still hard to set up Nvidia GPUs on Linux, even on Bazzite :(

I love flatpak for how easy it makes it to install apps on almost any distro, but I also hate the spokes that it puts in the wheels. Drivers are ugly (that’s true for containers in general) and I also often stumble over file system permissions issues :(

In the video, it was sometimes showing the driver version at the end of the benchmarks (e.g. in Horizon Zero Dawn). If it says llvmpipe or NVK there, it’s not using the proprietary Nvidia driver.

But, if you want to check if your Nvidia GPU is detected correctly, you can run nvidia-smi on the terminal and if it shows you the installed GPU and driver, then it’s using the proprietary driver. Most desktop environments also have a “System Information” / “About this system” screen to show this information in the GUI.

It looks like most of the Nvidia systems were not running the proprietary Nvidia drivers (580/590) but instead falling back to NVK or even LLVMpipe (CPU rendering). All of the tested Nvidia GPUs are supposed to run using the proprietary driver on Bazzite. So, assuming that he downloaded the correct images, Bazzite really screwed up here.

But, unfortunately for the video, this doesn’t really show the typical gaming experience on Linux, it just highlights a Bazzite bug (?).