I’ve been thinking about switching to Linux for a while, but there are some things that make me want to stay on Windows. For example, Gaming and installation of graphics card and software availability.
My G-Card was GT 730 2 GB ddr5.
Can I be able to play the games that Windows supported without losing frames?
My suggestion is to use a beginner distro with easy dual boot options. Linux Mint comes to mind. Get that going and try it out. If it works for you, you can then move on to ditching your Windows install and/or using a more advanced distro.
Unless you’re more of a “dive into the deep end” sort. If that’s the case, grab Fedora Workstation and make sure to enable the proprietary software repositories. Fedora is stable, and the desktop will be a reminder that this isn’t Windows and it won’t act like it. From there, you can find help all over the place, from Fedora’s documentation and forums to simple internet searches.
Dual boot, don’t switch.
This is the way. My advice is to add a second hard drive to your pc and install linux on that. Distro hop, install arch and break it horribly, swear at your printer, learn. Then when you screw up, you’ve lost nothing, you can switch back to your “‘ol faithful” and get the job done. What will eventually happen is you’ll find yourself spending more time in linux than windows until you almost never boot it up.
If you do it this way, there’s really only two things to worry about. 1) if you’re using mbr or want to still use mbr with uefi, you’ll have trouble dual booting cleanly and will probably want to reinstall windows. You can’t break anything, but you can’t dual boot from both methods (or at least I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a motherboard that can). 2) when installing linux, learn and be careful about what drive contains windows - don’t ever pick that drive when formatting and partitioning. Bonus points if it’s a different brand and size - makes it almost impossible to pick the wrong drive. When using a single drive for dual booting, there’s much more opportunity to make a mistake and break your windows install if you’re not familiar with partitioning and boot loaders.
I literally can’t think of a way to break windows if you keep the above in mind, and then you can “make the switch” gradually.
Actually his card does support Vulkan 1.2, which included Kepler, just not the newer 1.3 that requires Maxwell or newer. He’d have to find the latest compatible driver.
edit: possibly this, haven’t found newer yet
edit: also possible that latest drivers could be used, but would be restricted to 1.2 features, not certain how that works with nvidia drivers and older gpus.
What is vulkan?
So, if my card doesn’t support vulkan am I not able to play any games?
Vulkan is a graphics API next to OpenGL and DirectX, generally faster than OpenGL which is why most emulators like yuzu, cemu, dolphin, etc use both Vulkan and OpenGL as backend options.
Your card is supposed to be vulkan 1.2 compatible so you could play any vulkan-related thing that doesn’t require 1.3. Not sure what that means for you exactly.
OpenGL would probably still work if it’s an option, pretty sure DirectX wouldn’t since it’s a Microsoft thing, but I could be wrong about that.
DirectX 9/10/11 can be converted into Vulkan using DXVK which is part of Proton
You’ll likely lose some frames by switching to Linux but not much. It really depends on the games you are playing. Check ProtonDB for some of them
If I don’t game, then Linux is worth for my config?
