Recent testing revealed that Arch Linux, Pop!_OS, and even Nobara Linux, which is maintained by a single developer, all outstripped Windows for the performance crown on Windows-native games. The testing was run at the high-end of quality settings, and Valve's Proton was used to run Windows games on ...
The impressive FPS deltas aside, it should be mentioned that, with the exception of Arch Linux, average frame times (measured as 1% lows, in this case) on Linux were generally behind what Windows managed by up to 20%
I feel like worse 1% lows makes this title misleading. Hopefully with time this gap will close.
1 % lows are likely a driver thing (Nvidia calls it "Game Ready Drivers"), with Arch you'll get new drivers (or kernel versions) much earlier, similar to Windows.
It's okay. Lemmy isn't a wiki. Content is organized temporally. Imagine these conversations as bar conversations (just because one group had a conversation one night, doesn't mean another group can't repeat it the next). If you are annoyed that the algo keeps giving you the same stuff, sort by All and New Comments and you'll find niche communities to subscribe to.
As someone on Linux, and who thinks performance is generally slightly better on my machine after switching, I totally agree. This post has been old for a while now. Get some more data and then post that new thing or stop posting it.
Testing done on specific hardware and not a broad spectrum of machines is as relevant as asking one person their political opinion and saying that applies to their whole nation.
also in the same article: "... When it comes to FPS, the overall leader in testing was Nobara Linux, with Arch Linux and Pop!_OS trailing by 1–5%. Windows 11, however, was only 6% behind Nobara Linux. So, **there isn't a massive performance delta here, **"
...switching to Linux might be worthwhile for gamers on the move looking to eke out every last drop of performance from the ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go.
So they're talking about the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go not a desktop PC or a laptop. Nice clickbait.
I still can't get anything to run consistently in Linux after 10 years, and many, many distros.
Timber born and Raft currently never open, no matter what.
I a huge Linux user but the gamin experience has always been so finicky for me and no matter how much I try it's still unattainable.
And even when they run its with a lot of configution and tinkering unless it has native support. I have no issue with that but I'm so frustrated my experience with this seems so diffent than what everyone else is having.
I want to delete my windows partition and it still feels so far away.
I'd be happy to help if you'd like
I can play 90% or more of my library on Linux. Basically, if its in steam it's a cake walk. I recommend something like Mint cinammon or pop_os all you need is proton really. I can't run games with certain anti cheat like tarkov cause the anti cheat devs don't support Linux
Running mint right now, went back to basics after a stint with majaro.
I appreciate the offer but for now the windows distro stays and every few months I will try again.
I know so many people have such a seamless experience. That is what makes it way more frustrating.
What have you been doing. Cause for me it's just install steam enable proton and install pretty much any game on my library. Or install lutris login to my accounts and play epic games / gog games. It literally just works
Let me know when you get Witcher 2 to run on Linux. With some tinkering and magic settings, it can run. But it crashes so often it is bordering unplayable, using several different versions of Proton in Steam and Pop! Os.
I know this is a very common experience, but for me it fails. The list is too long but belive me I've tried it.
It's probably some weird driver issue or some thing I use for x y or z that conflicts. Who knows.
YMMV of course but I was playing Timberborn just the other day on Mint, on an Nvidia card, through Heroic. Proton seems to have been a gamechanger. I have just made my first steps into switching my daily driver myself. I may have been lucky but all the games I have wanted to play have worked so far. I also have a Steam Deck, which is what has encouraged me that it may be possible.
This. While the experience for Gaming on linux is still not perfect, or as easy as install and play, Heroic is a good start. It still requires configuration and many hidden configs are not always obvious for the user, but I managed to run every game I threw at it flawlessly so far. All AAA games, and games from 2000 (Hitman, C&C games, Jazz Jackrabbit etc..), GoW, Cyberpunk, Hogwarts, etc. On a RTx 2070.
I’ve been out of the industry for a while, but unless Windows was completely rewritten from the ground up in the last 5 years, this doesn’t surprise me. That OS has always been a hot, bloated mess. And no, I’m not a Linux bro. I use another heavily commercialised OS that doesn’t run Windows because I no longer have the energy to care.
An OS written on Unix can outperform Windows? I’m shocked.
I wonder if they did these tests using ray tracing or not. On my AMD 7900xt in Cyberpunk, ray tracing under linux is practically unusable levels of performance compared to windows .
I think it's a combination of reposting on Lemmy, multiple communities posting similar stories, and news sites regurgitating results from other sites like it's fresh news.
Agree. My gripe with this article is that I've seen it posted on ~6+ communities. I love that Linux is beating windows in gaming benchmarks, but I think the title sensationalizes it the out performance a slight bit.
amen, i love EndeavorOS. i've jettisoned all Windows support in my house and anything that needs Windows gets put into an isolated VLAN that can't talk to anything else. and for the archaic business crap that only has a Windows release, CrossOver is a godsend. same CodeWeavers devs that made Proton and is essentially Wine Premium.
I'm not an expert in networking stuff... If I am using a Windows 11 laptop (owned by my work) on the same network as my personal laptop while working at home, am I putting my privacy/data/etc. at risk? Should I be sequestering the work laptop in some way?
I keep hearing and seeing from seemingly everyone that Linux gaming is better basically every month, how it keeps improving and stuff (like the article here)
But for me personally it never did in the last 5 years, whenever I try to step out if emulation and back to windows exlusove games? Its like 5 bullet Russian roulette, if it works at all and doesn't stop working for inexlicitly no reason
What are yall doing to actually make things work somewhat reasonable (default lutris, proton, or ge has never even renowtly worked how well for me, at all)
Anyone have a good explanation on 'Frame Time'? This is the first time I've heard of this term and after some quick googling I feel like I'm not understanding why it's worth caring about.
It's how long it takes the system to render the next frame. High frame times are no good. Equates to lower average fps, and poor player experience. You also want stable frame times. This equates to smooth gameplay and less "stuttering". Anything under 20ms is considered good. 10ms and less is great. Anything over 50ms will be perceived by the player in a negative way.
I interpret it as the time taken to render a frame. Unlike FPS which is basically a moving average (or rather 1 divided by the average frame time), frame time is a single data point. Collecting frame times allows you to do things like compute the median or, in this case, the lowest 1% of the frame times. That can give you a better idea of how smooth performance appears to the player, and what the worst-case performance is like.
I'm not surprised at the confusion, because they're using it... not wrong, but very confusingly.
Frame time is literally the time to render a frame. So you'd expect that to be a number of miliseconds per frame and so for lower to be better.
But they're not looking at frametimes, they're looking at 1% lows and expressing that in fps, not in frametimes. So yeah, confusing.
For the record, the reson why the term is becoming popular is that there are now widespread visualizations that will give you a line of your frametimes in a graph so you can see if the line is flat or spiky. You've probably seen it on the Steam Deck or performance analysis videos or whatever. The idea is that all frametimes being consistent is better than high fps but low 1% or 0.1% low. So stable 60fps can look better than spiky 90fps and so on.
I'm not deep on how the core of an OS works, but to my understanding, the kernel of linux should be more robust and reliable, shouldn't it always be performing better than windows on the same hardware?
Where could I read information on the things that hinder performance on linux, does anybody have any educational resources?
On Linux, you run windows programs through wine, which is an additional layer that can theoretically slow down the program.
Also, windows supports certain constructs like io completion ports or WaitForMultipleObjects that historically haven't been emulated efficiently on Linux since it lacked comparable primitives, although those specific ones have been greatly improved in recent years with io_uring and FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE.
There have been similar issues with direct3D since wine used to have to emulate it in OpenGL, but with vkd3d, wine has more opportunities to efficiently implement the d3d apis.
Basically wine being slower was the norm until quite recently.
Thanks to the one crazy guy valve contracts making proton... It's crazy how his work basically made gaming on Linux a thing. But yeah the other major thing, which you mentioned, is games/game engines using directX9, directX10 and directX11 (the windows 3d graphics libraries) have their API/rendering calls mapped directly to Vulkan. Those APIs were easier to use but from my understanding (I'm no graphics expert) didn't have the ability to use the full potential of the hardware, and basically had a single channel/thread to the GPU. DirectX12 and Vulkan are much more difficult to use, and some games have used them horribly such that DX11 performs better than DX12, but a good implementation can take advantage of multichannel/multithreaded communication to the GPU allowing much faster and efficient data transfer. They allow the engine programmer to have much more control of the hardware. So vkd3d/proton gives that massive performance impact by mapping the graphics calls from an older API to a newer one. I have not looked into how it's implemented but it's basically magic. This was the main reason why wine kinda sucked for gaming before proton.
The Windows scheduler is actually pretty decent, it's been a few years since I looked into it but I think Windows soft-real time scheduling was better than the one Linux used, though idk if games even use that.
The thing holding Linux back, mostly just for online games with anticheat, is anticheat developers reluctance to port to Linux. I believe do to the differences between users pace and kernel space on Windows VS Linux makes bypassing the anticheat on Linux much easier, or the anticheat can use the same tricks that it does on windows.
I dual boot arch and windows 11 at home. In World of Warcraft arch is behind, and I haven't figured out what the problem is. Something just feels off with it. With any luck they'll continue to improve compatibility. (likely Nvidia driver diff)
It actually works flawlessly, except for those windows only games of those ones with anticheat bullshit. Especial on AMD, as all the drivers are baked into the kernel and it's literally plug and play.
Since Steam stops working on Win7 in january I was forced to update the OS and I went with Ubuntu since the newer windows seem like plain garbage and spyware. Installing the OS was a huge hassle and getting DayZ to run on it wasn't without an issue either but it works now and the performance seems to be about the same. I only use the Linux machine for occasional gaming so it'll do but I'm not sure if I could daily drive it. Everything seems to need you to do something in terminal which I understand nothing about and aren't interested in learning.
You may be more interested in the Steam Deck, a ready-to-go Linux gaming system that doesn't require terminal proficiency. Just turn it on and play like a Nintendo Switch.
I don't feel like buying yet another device when I already have a decent gaming rig. I've got a PS4 too but I never use it because I prefer using a mouse and keyboard.
Installing it was a hassle? May I ask how? In my experience it's windows that's a hassle to install. The non-descript error messages, it randomly rebooting like 6 times during installation was pretty jarring, it takes ages even for an NVME drive.
On Linux it's generally next next username password next next and we're done. Maybe on a laptop you'll need to install WiFi drivers manually if it's a crappy Broadcom WiFi adapter, but that's not been an issue for years I don't think.
And as for needing to do stuff in terminal I don't really see that either. Everything seems to be accessible in the GUI, I can't really think of any normal task that requires the terminal
Every time I tried installing, it failed in some new way. It wasn't consistent so I had no idea how to troubleshoot it. It wasn't asking which hard drive to install it onto, the installer was being extremely slow and unresponsive, the non-safe graphics option wasn't working at all.. I basically just had to abort the installation and start again like 10 times. What finally made it work was putting a different version of Ubuntu on the boot USB and using a different USB port and stick along with the safe graphics istallation. Even now it's still giving me some TOCBLOCK error on boot, but everything seems to work fine anyways.
I can’t really think of any normal task that requires the terminal
This was the quide for installing drivers for my wifi adapter for example. Maybe there is easier way but each one I found needed you to use terminal. Even the manual that came with the wifi stick.