JAARRRR, Mateys!

Fine, I’ll stop with that. But you’d better ready yourself for a metaphorical mutiny. Now, somehow Hardware Unboxed sneakily boarded my pirate-pun galleon and raided its treasure chest full of allegories for their GPU benchmark video. So, if I happen to parrot one of theirs, it’s sort of by accident. Captain Morgan forbade me from memorizing them, and I’m not double-checking their video just to avoid looking like a filthy privateer. Their exhaustive Black Flag GPU benchmark intro is full of quips that I now have to Sailor’s Jig around.

Thanks, Steve!

You should watch it, though, to find out the baseline performance of your GPU. But: Chances are you probably already did. So, after you finished my analysis, please tell me whose pirate jokes you preferred.

With that out of the way, ahoi to another Linux performance analysis.

Let’s find out how the remake of the darling of Assassin’s Creed games runs on Linux. Does it float my boat, or is it a drunken sailor? And how does it stack up against Windows 11?

Grab your favorite beverage as long as it’s rum, and then let’s go on a quest for ships.

Stellar Blade’s first signs of life appear to come from a Tech Trailer in 2019, when it was revealed as „Project EVE“. Sony showed a first real trailer in a 2021 PlayStation showcase, and in 2022, a story trailer revealed the name: Stellar Blade.

What initially looked like a dress-up meme game with a bit of fistycuffs turned out to be a top-notch action game with a compelling, deep combat system. What also helped, of course, were the generally attractive visuals and female charms of the game’s heroine. The latter is an endless source of click-baity thumbnails (😉).

A PC demo was released in May 2025, and about one year later, I actually noticed that. The final version for PC followed in June of 2025.

And with that, hello and welcome to another Linux Performance Analysis. We’re taking a look at the Stellar Blade demo on PC on Bazzite Linux. Since it’s only a demo, access to levels is limited, and as such, so is what I can test and show.

We all know about Eve’s virtues, but how does she do on a Linux PC? Let me already put one fear to rest: the many… physics effects run without NVIDIA’s PhysX, so RTX-5000 users can relax now. And yes, AMD users, too. It’s just more fun to mock NVIDIA right now. AMD isn’t any better, I know. Back to the topic.

The more important questions we want to answer are how many FPS we can get and whether typical Unreal 4 issues intrude on the fun.

As always, I’ll briefly go over the hardware and software, and we’ll look at the game launch and main menu before we dive into the performance.

I also have a German version of this video.

I recently took a look at four Open-World games in a benchmark battle between Bazzite Linux and Windows 11. Fifty percent of the results were as expected, and the other fifty percent turned out to be suboptimal for Linux. Since viewers often comment on my videos that they get better performance with a different distro, or ask whether I have checked out this or that distro, they eventually wore me down. I installed CachyOS and benchmarked the four titles from the previous blog post again, and we’ll briefly take a look at the results.

Three quarters are business as usual, and one quarter is actually interesting.

This is going to be a short affair without much fanfare, so let’s get to it.

I also have a German version of the video.

Nioh 3 is highly anticipated by many gamers, and it looks like Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja are confident in the game’s quality, as they have released a demo on Steam and PlayStation. Kudos for doing that. I’m primarily interested for technical reasons. Team Ninja games usually have a, let’s call it, interesting performance-to-visuals ratio.

To save you time, let me say right up front that you can easily achieve 100 FPS or more with hardware similar to mine if you stick to the default presets. Let me repeat that because it’s an important detail: if you stick to the default presets. As you can see in the background, the FPS counter is essentially stuck at the 120 mark.

The visuals are attractive and serve their purpose, although nothing to write home about. More important in a fast-paced, combat-oriented Team Ninja game is how it feels to play. If you enjoy games like this, I think you won’t be disappointed.

But Nioh 3 is not without its idiosyncrasies. And I’m not talking about how quickly the story turns batshit crazy like a Jim Carrey performance.

If you’re interested, stay tuned.

I also have a German version of the video.

Marvel Rivals is published by NetEase, the same company that also publishes Where Winds Meet. Unlike its sibling, Marvel Rivals uses Unreal Engine 5. And as we all know, this piece of software can be as volatile as Deadpool. So, let’s have a look at how the hero-shooter performs on Linux and Windows.

Welcome back to a new benchmark battle between these two operating systems. Today, we answer the question of whether the proprietary AI-Super Villain or the Open-Source hero comes out victorious.

As I’ve done more often recently, I compared the beloved 🤭 Windows 11 to Bazzite’s Steam Gaming Mode and its KDE-Wayland session. Let’s go and find out which operating system has a field day in Marvel Rivals.

To do that, we grab Thor’s Hammer – don’t worry, no sleezy jokes today – and hope we can prevent Windows from sprinting ahead with a few well-placed lightning strikes.

I actually have no idea if Thor’s even in this game, but let’s just ignore that.

I also have a German version of this video.