Is it safe to say that this positively affected me?
For the very first time I installed Linux Mint on my old gaming with a 1080 TI and installed Minecraft/Steam. Minecraft ran beautifully and it is Java Edition 26.2.
I've had a harder hit and miss time with games on Steam.
I once tested the MS-Windows version on Wine on Linux vs MS-Windows on the same box. Both wine and native were faster on Linux, with the native Java version being the fastest (but not by much).
I even (quite a few years ago) successfully ran an older version of Minecraft on a laptop released in 2003. That had a Radeon 9000 graphics with a whole 32MB of VRAM.
And yes, it was playable with IIRC around 20fps, with minimum settings and a performance-tweaking mod (Optifine?). I played it a lot, since that laptop was all I had.
Even 0ad (the open source RTS game) was playable on that.
That was maybe in 2013 or something like that, so the machine was "only" 10 years old.
Im so annoyed i did not pick up a few of those cards last year when we where decommissioning a old video editing system at work. Could have picked up 4x1080ti for about $100 + shipping!
Minecraft Java is notorious for running like absolute dogpoop regardless of the hardware. Most people play with optifine or whatever the current optimisation mod is
Why? "Game ready drivers" are just a marketing thing to add game-specific performance hacks to new games, you don't expect "instability" just because nvidia doesn't do that anymore
No, this is my first time attempting to game on Linux full stop. Minecraft ran beautifully and this post may explain why - I should mention that I did enable the Vulkan setting in game (without knowing too much about it)
