Linux Gaming

Proton with NVIDIA is fine. The issue is NVIDIA drivers for Linux when using Wayland (the compositor for your user session)

If you stick with the old compositor called XORG/X11, Nvidia drivers are more stable but you won't ever get VRR, HDR or fractional scaling.

To simplify what's been said already, if your nvidia card is working on Linux in your system, it will work fine with Proton.

From what Ive heard the issues with Nvidia on linux are less about proton not working and more about the closed source drivers being a little more effort to install, and causing issues with more bleeding edge and rolling distros because nvidia drags its feet on supporting the newer features and standards. Plenty of people use Nvidia on linux and it does come with benefits as well such as better video decoding and encoding, better work drivers, and since its not foss they can just support HDMI 2.1's closed nonsense without having to worry about stepping on toes.

I dont use Nvidia so I cant say for sure but I feel like the solution to the typical "oh no I ran an update and everything is broken!" is to just use a stable/lts distro.

Up until recently I was using a gtx 1060 just fine. Not sure about the high end ray tracing stuff though.

I'd say give it a try, I had a great experience. Never had any proton issues with an nvidia card my self. Just keep in mind nvidia drivers on Linux are notorious for being bad. If you choose an LTS distro or one that packages the drivers you'll be fine though. Pop!_OS LTS with the nvidia drivers is what I ran.

I don't know of anything about nvidia being "way behind", apart from wayland support. The only case I can think of the top of my head where the bad wayland support comes into play is if you have multiple monitors with different refresh rates. But maybe even that is not an issue anymore with new nvidia drivers. Maybe others can comment on it as I no longer have an nvidia card to check.

Use protondb to check whether your games play well on proton. It shows each commenter's system specs as well, so you can see if a game has issues on nvidia specifically.

https://www.protondb.com

One warning: don't try to install software, including the nvidia driver, as you would on windows. On linux, you don't go and download it from nvidia's website, you get it from your distro's package repositories, and you let it get updated automatically via your system updates. Depending on the distro you install, it might be as easy as checking a tickbox to automatically install "Additional drivers" or "Proprietary drivers" during installation.

EDIT: I assumed "way behind" to mean that nvidia is behind amd on linux. If you meant how much linux gaming is behind in general, that's another story. Linux does tend to lag behind in implementing newer features like newer DLSS versions. If you're worried about this, then perhaps you will get more information if you post a question about what specifically you care about.

It works great. It's usually not proton that's the issue. Iirc the drivers tend to lag behind a little bit and it really depends on your distribution's maintainers for how quickly and seamlessly the newest drivers are made available. PopOS is one of the best(imo the best) for Nvidia support.

I had a 3070ti (that I sort of regret swapping for a 6700xt) that worked really well. I swapped because I bought into the myth that "Nvidia sucks on Linux" and I figured if my 3070ti was this good, then a Radeon card would be even better. I just traded small nvidia issues for more annoying Radeon issues and, for me, I got the bad end of the deal. I miss CUDA and the nvenc encoder. Radeons equivalents are 5 years behind it feels like and/or the open source driver that people rave about doesn't support them, so you have to use the proprietary driver which isn't as good for gaming.

All that to say, don't let having an Nvidia card hold you back.

I have an Nvidia 2060 Super with Pop_OS driver version 535.xx(?), and I haven't run into a game proton doesn't work with.

Was running an RTX2080 on for a couple years until just recently when I gave the system to a relative. More stuff worked than didn't by far. As someone else said, it's been at the point for awhile where I just assumed anything I wanted to run would work. Not literally everything does, so if you have one game that you must have, it could be worth a google search to see what folks are saying.

i have more choppiness on the desktop, booting takes longer, and a few more annoyances here and there.

gaming usually works well.

its not ideal and a few details are out of place but is perfectly usable. they have a better oss driver on the works too.

nothing but bad experience running an nvidia laptop though so be wary of that