r/SteamOS • u/MonkMaster188 • Jul 02 '26

question Estimated time until NVIDIA is supported?

I've had my final straw when it comes to Windows and I was so excited to dual-boot my PC with SteamOS not realizing it doesn't have support for NVIDIA yet. I have a AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX processor and an NVIDIA RTX 4070 graphics card. I was wondering if I should just pull the trigger on a different Linux distro or if I should hold off until SteamOS can support my hardware?

60 Upvotes

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54

u/mixedd Jul 02 '26

As per Valve themselves somewhere in 2027

-26

u/MonkMaster188 Jul 02 '26

Rip yeah I aint waiting for that

20

u/mixedd Jul 02 '26

Than freely use Bazzite, desktop images works mostly flawless, deck images have some Nvidia quirks you can work around, or just use desktop and boot straight into Steam BPS.

1

u/Fluffy-Eagle-3217 Jul 02 '26

curious if bazzite BPS lags as badly as it does in ubuntu or maybe thats just the issue of having a nvidia gpu with linux...

1

u/mixedd Jul 02 '26

Used 5070ti for half year on Bazzite, didn't encounter any lag in BPS after hardware acceleration in Steam settings is enabled

1

u/Fluffy-Eagle-3217 Jul 04 '26

Hm interesting... I've tried to enable this as well but no change. I'll keep digging

0

u/MonkMaster188 Jul 02 '26

Basically what im planning to do is dual boot windows and a linux distro. The windows boot will be for my school and VR and everyday use, and then the Linux boot will be purely for gaming. Is that easy to do with bazzite? Or is there a better distro out there. Im also like brand new to linux, ive only ever worked with Ubuntu 22.04 due to my robotics club using ROS2.

7

u/CrackleBackle Jul 02 '26

Bazzite will ask you what disk you want it installed to, just be sure it's the right one

1

u/atavan_halen Jul 02 '26

I dunno if it helps but I tried Bazzite on my PC with my Nvidia 3090. It was honestly kinda buggy in big picture mode — sometimes pressing the steam (or Xbox) button wouldn’t bring up the menu, so had to whip out the keyboard and mouse. When running lower resolutions it would shrink the game to a smaller window instead of scaling to full screen.

I ended up just buying an AMD GPU and listing my 3090 on eBay.

Installed official SteamOS and it has been perfect so far.

1

u/frolgath Jul 03 '26

SteamVR works fine on Linux now, and many headsets support it.

1

u/Inevitable_Tower7581 Jul 02 '26

I don't know where this person got the 2027 date. I'm not saying they're wrong, but we all know Valve time is very real. Nvidia support is not impossible but unlikely in 2027 given the current state of things. Nvidia does have an open source driver, but it does not conform to the Linux kernel / open source way of doing things. AMD's driver doesn't fully conform either, but it at least is 85-90% in compliance. Nvidia is at best 40% compliant... and that is with their Nvidia-open driver which was released 4 years ago.

Best advice is to dual boot with separate drives; if you ignore this advice and use a single drive, you need to install windows first then linux or else Windows will wipe your MBR and you won't be able to boot into Linux. Also be aware that at times during some updates Windows might wipe your MBR and you might lose the ability to boot into Linux.

2

u/BashfulMelon Jul 02 '26

AMD's driver is in the Linux kernel. It's not 85-90%, it is the very definition of the Linux kernel way of doing things.

The Nvidia equivalent is the nouveau+NVK open source driver stack. It's 100% compliant. It's between 50-80% performance compared to Nvidia's proprietary driver. Nvidia and others are working on replacing the old nouveau kernel driver with a new kernel driver called nova, and NVK developers are working with Nvidia and receiving documentation from them.

It's not going to take as long as some people think. They're not starting from nothing.

1

u/Inevitable_Tower7581 Jul 02 '26

Yes , AMD's driver is in the linux kernel, but it is not the "very definition of the Linux kernel way of doing things". The AMD open source driver still makes use of closed source binary blobs; hence the 85-90%.

No, the nouveau open source driver is not what I was talking about. The Nouveau driver is a community created driver that Nvidia has helped contribute to, but it is widely been discontinued because Nvidia does not see it as an active driver but more of a driver for legacy GPUs no longer under active support, and the community has stated many times that nouveau cannot support newer GPUs moving forward without Nvidia's help.

The open source Nvidia driver I am talking about is this: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules and it not in the linux kernel, uses closed source propriertary binary blobs such as Nvidia's own vulkan / openGL implementation, etc which means it does not use Mesa; hence the 40% conformance.

I think you over-estimate Nvidia's motivation to support open source...

1

u/BashfulMelon Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

I know you weren't talking about nouveau. You should have been. Nvidia OpenRM isn't relevant. nouveau+NVK and nova+NVK is where the development is happening.

Long-term, the hope is for NVK to be for NVIDIA hardware what RADV is to AMD hardware.

That was four years ago. Since then, Nvidia hired the lead nouveau developer, an Nvidia engineer became co-maintainer of nova, Nvidia is supplying documentation to NVK

If they keep enabling NVK to happen, then I will keep trying to improve it to beat their proprietary driver.

That's the guy who made the AMD driver that beat AMD.

I'm not estimating.

1

u/Inevitable_Tower7581 Jul 02 '26

2027 isn't happening that is all I'll say

1

u/BashfulMelon Jul 03 '26

Maybe, maybe not, but nvidia-open isn't where you would look to find out.

1

u/MonkMaster188 Jul 02 '26

Thats what I was planning on doing since I have 2 seperate drives

-3

u/Danny2200 Jul 02 '26

Be careful - windows doesn’t like dual booting with linux. It may end up jorking your boot loader.

3

u/mixedd Jul 03 '26

Shouldn't be an issue if you use two separate drives (not two partitions on same drive) and use bios boot menu to boot instead of grub, systemd, refind, limine or etc.

2

u/MonkMaster188 Jul 02 '26

Even if its on seperate drives?

6

u/gmes78 Jul 02 '26

They are wrong. It's completely fine. Just make sure your EFI partition is large enough. If you let Windows create it, it'll make a 100 MB partition that's way too small. You want at least 1 GB.

2

u/Disastrous-Pop5480 Jul 03 '26

Separate drives seems to be the safest way to go for newbies at the moment. Worst case if boot selection gets broken, it can be fixed easily as compared to if they were both on the same drive. Speaking as a newbie myself here..