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Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

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Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#171

Post by cwel »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #128
trashface wrote: post #109

Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old). The laptop actually has plenty of power for the games I play, but I underclock to keep the heat/fan speeds down (been doing the same on the win10 install on the same system), still getting acceptable framer…

I'm looking to finally get off Windows for good. My experience with the SteamDeck started me, later I upgraded to a ROG Ally X for beefier performance but found Windows insufferable on a handheld, and installed SteamOS. I was blown away by the performance gains. A few months later I installed Kubuntu for the first time since 2013 or so, Steam shortly after, and while the desktop linux route is definitely more taxing…

RE: Sea of Thieves on linux w/ xb/microsoft auth. I was able to work around it by just removing 2fa from my microsoft acc. Obviously not a great solution. but yeah. You may be able to reenable it afterwards, I never tried, its the only thing my microsoft account is useful for at this point anyways.

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#172

Post by gm678 »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #157

Anyone move completely over to Linux for gaming? What is the experience like and what are you using?

I am, I have an Nvidia 5070 Ti, Aurora for my OS (from the same people as bazzite, but I'm a light gamer so I'm fine using flatpak steam/heroic/etc). the only problems I've faced are

- occasionally an online game breaks and it's usually fixed within a day or two. for example at some point a Battle.net update broke the launcher under Wine some time last year, then for a while Overwatch would intermittently crash once every few sessions. I haven't gamed on Windows in years so I can't even compare anecdotally, but I suspect Windows is probably slightly more stable with live service games. I've never had any issues with a single player game, period. (YMMV)

- DX12 performance is 10-20% worse on Nvidia. This should be improved Soon (TM) - I think the last piece is https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/tree/descr...

- Some anticheats block Linux - the only times I've switched over to windows in the last year have been when some friends wanted me to play Marathon with them

- Running 'sidecars' alongside your games or modding works but is generally more of a hassle with wine

things I didn't expect to work but do:

- Game streaming with Sunlight works fine to Samsung TV via the TizenOS Moonlight app

- Nvidia had suspend issues for a year but those have all been sorted out the last few months

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#173

Post by mfinelli »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #128
trashface wrote: post #109

Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old). The laptop actually has plenty of power for the games I play, but I underclock to keep the heat/fan speeds down (been doing the same on the win10 install on the same system), still getting acceptable framer…

I'm looking to finally get off Windows for good. My experience with the SteamDeck started me, later I upgraded to a ROG Ally X for beefier performance but found Windows insufferable on a handheld, and installed SteamOS. I was blown away by the performance gains. A few months later I installed Kubuntu for the first time since 2013 or so, Steam shortly after, and while the desktop linux route is definitely more taxing…

Re: modding with MO2/vortex I had a similar problem in that installing them on linux isn't super straightforward, and then once I did get them installed when I launched the game through them like I used to do on windows the performance was abysmal. I decided to tackle the problem myself and so I wrote this: https://github.com/mfinelli/modctl. It's a mod manager that I wrote specifically for linux. It's not really ready for primetime yet, but if you're willing to experiment depending on your needs it might work for you. The repo might look like work has slowed down, which I guess is true but that's mostly because I implemented all of the main stuff that I wanted to and now I've just been using it instead of building it for the past few weeks though there are still a few rough edges and a couple of bugs that I need to sort out (but nothing game breaking that I've found yet).

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#174

Post by notnullorvoid »

bee_rider wrote: post #151
hx8 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of people that use Nvidia and Linux, and it's something I've done in the past. You just suck it up and install the closed-source black box drivers and get on with your life.

Although, eventually NVIDIA will drop support for your card and you’ll have an annoying situation. This happened for Pascal on Arch Linux a while ago. The 10X0 series are pretty old at this point, but then Linux shines on older systems too.

You can still use the old drivers they work fine. This also isn't unique to Linux, Nvidia's latest Windows drivers also don't support 10 series cards anymore.

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#175

Post by cogman10 »

cobar wrote: post #159
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #157

Anyone move completely over to Linux for gaming? What is the experience like and what are you using?

Overall experience is very good with AMD graphics. Most games run on Steam out of the box. There are also emulators for all the systems I've wanted to use. I use Faugus Launcher for other stores like BattleNet and Epic Games (Magic Arena). For the most part the games just work, it's more system issues that I've run into where Linux suspend mode and the audio stack can be a little flaky and required Claude to diagnose…

Nvidia has gotten a lot better over the last 2 years as well. There are still driver bugs that are somewhat annoying. It's also annoying that the driver is out of kernel. But otherwise, the open source nvidia by nvivia works just fine.

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#176

Post by kouteiheika »

bee_rider wrote: post #151
hx8 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of people that use Nvidia and Linux, and it's something I've done in the past. You just suck it up and install the closed-source black box drivers and get on with your life.

Although, eventually NVIDIA will drop support for your card and you’ll have an annoying situation. This happened for Pascal on Arch Linux a while ago. The 10X0 series are pretty old at this point, but then Linux shines on older systems too.

NVidia supports their GPUs for a really long time (unlike AMD, which paradoxically drops official support really fast; e.g. see their ROCm support). Anyway, by the time NVidia drops support for their current newer GPUs there's a high chance that NVK[1] will be ready for general use.

[1] -- https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/nvk.html

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#177

Post by notnullorvoid »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #49
anschl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.

Nvidia on desktop has been mostly fine, if not rock solid, on the happy path they provide. But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time. Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here

Nvidia on laptops is fine. There was a time that it was really difficult and the easiest route to success was to disable the Intel iGPU, and force Nvidia GPU to handle everything in BIOS. That hasn't been the case for a while, and you can even get nice desktop environment integration to let you choose which GPU to run a program with.

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#178

Post by izacus »

bayesnet wrote: post #107
saidinesh5 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the TVs only come with HDMI .. not even good enough analog inputs anymore..

What really drives me nuts is smart TVs with 100mbps Ethernet connections. When I bought a tv we looked in vain for gigabit Ethernet.

TVs are made with BOM of like 10$ for the SoC, so it's the cheapest crap available.

Then again - none of the streaming services are streaming at anything remotely close to 100Mbps so I doubt they consider it necessary to upgrade to GbE.

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#179

Post by progforlyfe »

caycep wrote: post #25

If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?

yes absolutely -- although I did use Nvidia GTX 1070 for a bunch of years without much of an issue, and I still believe Nvidia gets you more "bang for your buck", I would only buy AMD cards now due to the more integral support with Linux gaming.

Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

#180

Post by kakacik »

BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #168
BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave it a try. Got a steam deck, tries steam os on my desktop. I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then…

And I'll try again when I have more time.

Most folks are in this category. But most, including me, wont try anytime soon unless some very positive news come up. We have lives to live, kids to raise, work to do and so on.

Gaming moved for a lot of us from 'now I have 5 hours or whole weekend to gaming if I want to' to mere blips here and there, which need to be as frictionless as poasible.

Which is great - it means we are doing something actually meaningful and more worthy in our lives. But it also means I will never have enough time for such fiddling. I am fine with it, as much as I can be, but lets be honest to ourselves here.

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