Linux Gaming

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21962053

> Valve announced a change for Steam today that will make things a lot clearer for everyone, as developers will now need to clearly list the kernel-level anti-cheat used on Steam store pages. > > In the Steamworks Developer post Valve said: "We've heard from more and more developers recently that they're looking for the right way to share anti-cheat information about their game with players. At the same time, players have been requesting more transparency around the anti-cheat services used in games, as well as the existence of any additional software that will be installed within the game."

Got greeted with this message today. I've been playing Apex on linux for more than a year. Not sure if this could be related? Is this just me?

I've contested the ban and I'm currently waiting for a response from ea support.

UPDATE : Got an email response from EA today. It's basically a generic message saying that my account was associated with "cheating practices" and so they will not remove the ban.

This is absolutely fucking ridiculous! I've been playing this game since 2020 and have 3K+ hours on record, now this shit happens and there's no recourse ? Fuck this company.

As per the linked FAQ,

>What platforms will Sid Meier's Civilization VII be available on? > >Sid Meier's Civilization VII will be available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam (which also supports Mac and Linux) and the Epic Games Store.

The Steam store (preorder) listing shows all three platform icons so I’m guessing they’re not just talking about making it work with Proton.

No mention yet of Aspyr (who ported Civ 5 & 6) as far as I can see.

Gaming On Linux has a write-up too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20820565

https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher

Cross-posted from "DLSS Frame Generation is now available on Proton Experimental" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

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> Added support for NVIDIA Optical Flow API and DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

> There's a lot of blog posts and news articles being written right now centred around Microsoft's plans for updates to Windows 11, and potential kernel changes, with some thinking this means big things for Linux gaming.

> Sorry to say, but I'm here to bring a more realistic take and to help keep all your feet on the ground.

quite relevant to yesterday's discussion.

Been daily driving Bazzite for almost half a year now. I currently have two seperate 2TB SSD’s, one with Windows 11 and the other has Bazzite. Bought a 1TB SSD so I can migrate my Windows install to a smaller SSD since I much prefer Linux now.

Just need to stop being lazy and finish migrating everything I care about off my old Windows install onto my new 1TB Windows install, then I plan to install CachyOS onto the soon to be free’d up 2TB SSD, since I’m curious about Arch Linux. I’ll always have Bazzite to fall back on if need be, or god forbid, Windows.

> cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20175694

I mean games you played / you are going to play.

My list looks like this for example:

• Summer: DAVE THE DIVER
• Autumn: Against the Storm
• Winter: Frostpunk 2
• Spring: Terra Nil

What are yours?

For context:

I've been using Linux since 2000. Started with Mandrake Linux (Helios?), then I moved to Ubuntu in 2004 and alternated between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE for a time until I settled with Kubuntu for the last few years.

Ubuntu has been rock solid for me for the past 20 years and I'm used to the APT package management and Ubuntu/Debian environment overall with all the various services and configs, setups and release cycles, etc. The stability allows me to enjoy my spare time playing games and doing other important tasks instead of troubleshooting my system and figuring out how to make something work. Ubuntu has been awesome in that regard.

I've also been dual-booting this whole time with Windows. Gaming on Linux simply wasn't up to snuff up until very recently with Steam working on Wine and Proton for the Steam Deck and Bottles, which makes running Windows games on Linux almost comparable to Windows.

Windows 10 was a great OS, except for a few flaws and privacy issues with the introduction of mandatory Microsoft accounts and One Drive integration. But you could work around those things. It was supposed to be the last Windows we would have to install with perpetual rolling releases, but apparently they changed their minds about that. Windows 11 was released and reading about it gives me nightmares. Using it for work also has been an incredibly buggy and frustrating experience. The invasion of privacy, data collection, screen monitoring and AI integration plus the additional advertisement are all reasons for which I will never install this OS on my personal computer. And some of these features have started to leak into Windows 10.

So I've made up my mind. I'm wiping Windows from my PC and will be running Linux only. I believe it's become good enough to use as a daily driver for a home gaming desktop and for productivity. But... Which distribution should I choose?

The dilemma:

There's been a whole slew of new Linux distributions that have come out lately. Some have been early in the Linux gaming aspect such as POP! OS. Others have tried to become a solid replacement for the default immutable Steam OS such as Bazzite. And there are now some pretty awesome sounding gaming-focused distros such as Nobara. And that's on top of the various existing Ubuntu flavors, Fedora's spins, OpenSuse and the many Arch variants that almost seem to pop up monthly.

I've been shopping around for a distribution to become my daily driver from now until who knows when. I'm expecting to stick to that distro as long as possible. Here's some of the things that I am looking for:

• Not immutable : I find this to be adapted for devices like tablets, IoT devices and handhelds instead of an actual PC. I'll need to be able to change my system configs as I please and an Immutable distro seems like a pain in the butt to deal with that.
• Rock solid : This is the most important aspect and is why a lot of the Arch or other bleeding edge distros won't do. (With some exceptions)
• Hardware support : The second most important aspect. I think that's pretty much covered by most popular distros, but some have better support than others. Especially for ease of getting the right drivers. (Especially for NVidia GPUs, or gaming controllers and devices.)
• Performance : Most popular distros offer ok performance, but some have been enhanced to provide improved performance according to the hardware. This is a very big nice to have, especially for gaming.
• Desktop choice : I'm really not a big fan of Gnome 3. It seems nobody really is. Many Gnome based distros come with quality of life extensions out of the box to fix that. Not a big fan of GTK apps' UI ergonomics either. That's why I prefer KDE over Gnome or Cinnamon. Budgie seems like a great alternative as well. Also having a PowerToys-style FancyZones tiling system is a big big plus (KDE has that OOTB)
• Applications : The thing I love about Ubuntu is the amount of available applications in their repos. I'm hoping to have the same availability in my next distribution.
• Online community/support : Having a great online support community is very important. The more users, the larger the knowledge base and the easier you can find answers to questions to troubleshoot problems.
• Online services integration : Optional but a very nice to have would be to have integration with Google apps like GMail, Calendar, Keep and Google Drive to name a few.
• Customization : As funny as this sounds, I want to use the desktop in its most vanilla form as possible with as few customisations as possible. Over time I found that having extra customisations like extensions, applets, etc tends to break things because of lack of support over time. It's also more difficult to troubleshoot when very few people are using them.

The distributions that ended up meeting my requirements are the following in order of preferences :

• Kubuntu : So far its been working great for gaming but I think there could be some performance improvements. It's my first choice because I'm just so comfortable with it already. Zero effort, but with some compromises in performance.
• Nobara with KDE Plasma : This looks solid and ticks all the requirements. I think there's some amount of learning to do for using YUM/RPM packages and to understand some of the customisations, but I think this effort will be minimal. I am concerned about long term support however since this is a fairly new distro supported by individuals.
• Ubuntu Budgie : I really like this DE, very simple but elegant. But, like Kubuntu, I don't know how it's going to fare performance wise. And I don't know what kind of tools there are to configure gaming controllers, etc.
• Ubuntu (I'm willing to deal with Gnome 3 for simplicity's sake)
• Fedora KDE Plasma spin : Everybody is raving about Fedora so maybe I'll give it a shot as an Ubuntu replacement.
• Manjaro Endeavour OS with KDE desktop :Possibly the only Arch distro I'm willing to install because they focus on stability, however learning about the packaging system and configs/environment feels like a drag. But with the great community and documentation I'm willing to make an effort for this one.

What are your thoughts on this? What are your recommendations based on my requirements?

EDIT:

Thank you very much for everyone's input. I've spent a good part of the day installing distros in a VM to check out some of your suggestions and reading more about my choices.

I can't believe I am saying this, but I am reevaluating my choice of using Kubuntu. After some reading I have found out that Ubuntu and it's flavors will not be supporting flatpaks starting in 23.04. And there are several known problems with snap, such as serious performance issues. A task that would take 1-5s as a regular .deb installed app, would take up to 10 times that time to complete. Canonical is also working to modify apt to use snaps instead of installed .deb packages. They are aggressively pushing snaps to a point where they'll want to replace the majority of the software with snaps eventually.

Yeah there's security features built-in and all, which flatpaks don't necessarily have. And the security is tighter around Canonical's snap repos compared to flathub for example. But I don't know if I'm ready to move to that new way of doing things. And Canonical is going against what the community wants.

I don't know. I think I'm more confused now that I was when I started...

I smile every time I see an improvement that will make it easier for games to run near full speed while confined to a virtual machine. Another step forward for security and privacy.

Almost every distro I've used so far ends up having problems installing Steam due to mismatching i386 packages. I've heard that they're being removed upstream. Anyone happen to know a timeline?

Nice to see this will be finally fixed. You have to make a udev rule to work around this at the moment.

Navi 10: RX 5700, 5600 Navi 14: RX 5500, 5300

Hotfix build:

Proton:

• Updated wine to latest bleeding edge -- fixes regression in video playback from 9-14

• Updated dxvk to latest git -- fixes regression which causes black textures and stuttering on NVIDIA cards.

• Updated vkd3d-proton to latest git

• import upstream changes for lsteamclient

• update xalia to 0.4.4

Protonfixes:

• Remove deprecated workaround for Total War Rome 2

Proton:

• Update wine to latest bleeding edge
• Update dxvk to latest git
• Update vkd3d-proton to latest git
• Update dxvk-nvapi to latest git
• Import upstream proton changes
• Update mono to 9.3.0
• Rebase wine-staging

Protonfixes:

• Added god of war ragnarok SteamDeck=1 workaround (thanks UserNamesAreNotMyThing)
• Added Star Citizen libcuda nvidia fix (thanks ProjectSynchro)
• Added fix for Plain Site (thanks iodream)
• Added fix for Worms: Blast (thanks iodream)
• Remove deprecated Sleeping Dogs: DE fix
• winetricks now built from source
• Elden Ring fix updated (thanks UserNamesAreNotMyThing)

> This is the major release of Cemu 2.1 with a cumulative changelog which includes the changes from all 93 experimental releases since Cemu 2.0.

This release also is the first release of Cemu on Linux that is not marked as experimental.

The release was a few days ago, I didn't notice until today.

Memory managment

Resource and memory management were completely rewritten in order to use allocated video memory more efficiently:

• Reduced fragmentation may reduce peak memory usage in games such as God of War by up to 1 GiB in extreme cases.
• Memory defragmentation is now performed periodically to return some unused memory back to the system. The goal is not to reduce VRAM usage at all costs; instead this is done conservatively if the system is under memory pressure, or if a significant amount of allocated memory is unused. Keeping some unused memory is useful to quickly service subsequent allocations.

Note: Defragmentation is currently disabled on Intel's ANV driver, see #4434. The dxvk.enableMemoryDefrag config option can be set to enable or disable this feature via the the Configuration file.

Driver support

While technically not required, the new memory management works best on drivers that support both VK_EXT_memory_budget and VK_KHR_maintenance5. The Driver Support page was updated accordingly.

D3D8 / D3D9

Software cursor

Support for emulated cursors was implemented for the D3D9 cursor API, which allows games to set an arbitrary image as the mouse cursor. This fixes an issue in Dungeon Siege 2 (#3020) and makes the cursor appear correctly in Act of War and various older D3D8 games. (PR #4302)

!Bildschirmfoto-693

Sampler pool

Unreal Engine 3 games using D3D9 have a quirk in that they pass a seemingly uninitialized value as the mipmap LOD bias. In order to avoid creating more Vulkan sampler objects than the driver supports, previous versions of DXVK would round the LOD bias to a multiple of 0.5, which could introduce visual inaccuracies. As a more correct soluition, DXVK will now destroy unused Vulkan samplers on the fly and use the correct LOD bias.

Note: The aforementioned workaround was never needed or used in the D3D11 implementation, it only affected D3D9.

Bug fixes and Improvements

• On Nvidia driver version 565.57.01 and newer, strict float emulation is enabled by default for improved correctness. Games for which this option was already enabled may see a small performance uplift on this driver.
• Made various changes to potentially improve performace on certain mobile GPUs. (includes PR #4358)
• Display modes are now ordered by refresh rate to be more consistent with wined3d and fix issues with some games picking the wrong display mode.
• Fixed a large number of wine test failures.
• Ascension to the Throne: Fixed old regression that would cause parts of the ground to render black. (#4338, PR #4341)
• Command & Conquer: Generals: Fixed performance issue caused by a missing D3D8 entry point. (PR #4342)
• King's Bounty: Warriors of the North: Fixed water rendering issue. (#4344, PR #4350)
• Tomb Raider: Legend: Fixed flickering geometry with strict float emulation. (#4319, PR #4442)
• Rayman 3: Fixed a regression that caused rendering issues. (#4422, PR #4423)

D3D11 / DXGI

Resource management changes

In order to reduce system memory pressure and improve stability in 32-bit games, creating, uploading and discarding resources is now throttled if the amount of temporary staging memory allocations exceed a certain threshold. This fixes crashes in Total War: Rome II and a number of other games. Additionally, large DYNAMIC textures commonly used for video playback will no longer use a staging buffer.

The d3d11.maxDynamicImageBufferSize and d3d11.maxImplicitDiscardSize options were removed accordingly; affected games such as Total War: Warhammer III and Ryse: Son of Rome should now perform well by default, without excessive memory usage.

Note: These changes negatively affect CPU-bound performance in a number of games, including Shadow Warrior 2.

Bug fixes and Improvements

• SEQUENTIAL swap effects are now implemented for DXGI swap chains, which allows games to read previously presented backbuffers. This fixes an issue wherein savegame thumbnails would appear black in certain visual novels. (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7017)
• Devirtualized some D3D11 method calls to improve compatibility with Special K.
• Fixed incorrect shader code generation for EvaluateAttributeSnapped.
• Lock contention is reduced in certain games that use Deferred Contexts for rendering. This may improve performance on older CPUs in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and some other games.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered: Fixed a possible GPU hang. (#3884)
• Diablo 4: Work around an issue where the game does not start if an integrated GPU is exposed.
• The Sims 4: Work around a use-after-free bug in the game's D3D11 renderer for real this time. (#4360)
• Vindictus: Work around potential rendering issues caused by uninitialized constant buffer data. (#4405, #4406)
• Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami: Fixed a regression introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 that would cause these games to lock up on start. (PR #4297)

Miscellaneous changes

• An SDL3 backend was added for dxvk-native. (PR #4326, #4404)
• Fixed an issue introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 which would lead to error messages about failed buffer creation.
• Fixed a long-standing issue where overlapping occlusion queries would lead to incorrect Vulkan usage. (#2698)
• Fixed a rare issue wherein timestamp queries would not be tracked correctly and could read incorrect data.
• Fixed various other issues that led to Vulkan validation errors in games such as Dishonored 2, Tales of Arise and The Sims 4.
• Fixed various issues with MSVC builds. (PR #4444)
• Disabled a workaround for boken render target clears on Nvidia drivers prior to version 560.28.03 on unaffected drivers.
• If supported, VK_EXT_pageable_device_local_memory is now used to enable better driver-side memory management.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20491286

> For those unaware, about umu-launcher > > > This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.

While I think something like this makes sense, the pricing seems off. For $600 you can build a PC with a desktop GPU. If you want to make it easy to set up, you could just use an off the shelf mini-PC and preinstall everything so a non-technical user can get started without any hassle. I really hope we'll see more Steam machine like devices in the future.

Hey! I'm going to finish up university soon and as part of that I'm required to do an internship related to C++ development. I'd love to do something in the Linux gaming space and help promote it that way, but I'm not aware of many studios in Europe that are big enough to take interns. So I turn to Lemmy: what are some studios that may be open to Linux development, either through supporting it natively or creating/improving developer tooling on Linux?

Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems.

Original post: https://idtech.space/notice/AmJ60Dc5Vn0yigcxPM

Discussion about the same topic: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22526765