Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

xda-developers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 694 posts

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

#211

Post by 9x39 »

Finding a way to get the multiplayer studios to get Linux support for their competitive games like Valve does could crack a wedge in the market for mainstream users to get in, particularly in those who don't want to pay the Windows tax (not everyone is willing to experiment or go unlicensed).

I can't prove it, but the Steam Deck has probably torn down a lot of barriers for mainstream use among the crowd that care about the game more than the OS. Getting some of the other games (League, Vanguard, Warzone, BF6, etc.) or whatever is popular in those segments onboard might be the critical mass that justifies fixing all the rough edges that get fixed when a big pile of users are represented.

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

#212

Post by Mariajaved906 »

9x39 wrote: post #211

Finding a way to get the multiplayer studios to get Linux support for their competitive games like Valve does could crack a wedge in the market for mainstream users to get in, particularly in those who don't want to pay the Windows tax (not everyone is willing to experiment or go unlicensed). I can't prove it, but the Steam Deck has probably torn down a lot of barriers for mainstream use among the crowd that care abo…

Yeah, anti-cheat support is probably the biggest barrier right now. The Steam Deck already showed that many gamers do not really care about the OS as long as their favorite games work smoothly.

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

#213

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dullcrisp wrote: post #170
rtkwe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar but traps are triggered automatically on attempts to execute a protected instruction. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-sy...

Why/when are traps used rather than explicit system calls? Is it just historical coevolution? Or is the idea that the user mode program doesn’t need to know that it’s unprivileged? Or is it just repurposing the error handler path to perform privileged operations?

Traps were/are the mechanism for doing syscalls.

I don't know OG x86 (cuz, ewww) but on 68k this was generally the way. On my Atari ST a syscall was performed by filling your registers and stack as expected, then executing one of the TRAP opcodes and that would get the CPU To save PC etc & jump to the handler but in supervisor mode, where your syscall could then read state perform accordingly, and then return back to you.

I think x86_64 has just formalized this into a specific SYSCALL instruction?

ARM variants call it SVC (supervisor call).

Same difference.

Some older operating systems just implemented their syscalls as ordinary subroutine jumps, though, and everything ran in supervisor etc. I believe AmigaOS was like this, you just went through a jump table. Which, I think, shaves some cycles but also means compromises in terms of building for memory protection, etc.

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

#214

Post by Fogest »

bsimpson wrote: post #38

I remember when XDA was the home of Android homebrew hackers working on things like CyanogenMod. It's so strange to see it repurposed as the brand for the same quasi-correct tech article slop that gets parroted between all the big blogs. Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates…

I get a lot of XDA articles appearing in my Google News feeds and a good chunk of the ones I read definitely have the slop half baked vibe to them. Where they barely provide much substance in the article and sometimes barely even address what the article headline said. They also pump out so many articles about the same topics. I swear I've seen like 100 articles from them just on Obsidian Notes alone and so many of them are barebones and lackluster.

There is the odd decent nugget in there, but it is a shame seeing them fall like this. Unfortunately the same sentiment is true about most news sites now.

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

#215

Post by cwel »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #184
cwel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Orly? I hadn't gotten that far yet but interesting data point. I'd only tried Infinite and the game just wouldn't even really launch, I didn't even get to the main menu, didn't open XBox authentication at all and I just assumed I had to have something installed. When I did some googling I'd heard of something called... my memory fails me, Heroic I think? I hadn't actually gotten around to trying yet though so I've no…

I can't speak to Halo Infinite, but for SoT that's what worked for me. Another commenter is saying they were able to auth with a passkey (for infinite), which I never tried (for SoT), but id imagine it would work.

Heroic is a launcher aggregate/wrapper I think? for 'Epic, GOG and Amazon Prime Games' It's either Steam, native/standalone or arr for me. for non-steam stuff I use umu.

* I should add that I am launching a steam purchased copy of SoT, not the one from Xbox store/gamepass or what have you, so the process is likely different, but maybe not cus you are likely going to see the same auth popup served via wine/proton.

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

#217

Post by hamdingers »

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.

Unfortunately we're the weird ones for wanting to stream >100mbps content.

My 2020 LG CX has a USB 2.0 port and I get ~300mbps with a gigabit adapter, if the TV you ended up with has a USB port it's worth a try.

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

#218

Post by yourapostasy »

kakacik wrote: post #180
BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Which brings up a point I've been wondering over the years.

Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.

A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.

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

#219

Post by adrianmonk »

las_balas_tres wrote: post #15

I developed for windows before moving to linux. I was surprised to find that was no system call similar to windows WaitForMultipleObjects. Sure you can implement something similar using poll() or using condition variables. but WaitForMultipleObjects seems so much simpler and more versatile

The article mentions this: "A few years back, Linux added a way for software to wait on several events at once, which is something Windows had built in for decades, but Linux didn't."

This is not really my area, but from a quick web search, I think they mean io_uring. Here's a blog post about it: https://mazzo.li/posts/uring-multiplex.html

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

#220

Post by bisby »

anonymousab wrote: post #161
jmalicki wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows! If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.

One problem is that having better FPS stops mattering if the frame pacing and timing is bad, making the game feel like a juddery mess. Or if there is significant input delay differences. That's why all the data matters for all of these dimensions; game performance is much more than FPS per watt over time. When people see "linux gaming is great now, look at the fps" it comes across as potentially disengenuous because…

Another problem is that having better frame pacing, or better timing stops mattering if the OS decides to reboot for updates mid game. Game experience is much more than just game performance.

Part of the issue is that a large part of linux gamers are saying "linux gaming is great" and meaning "linux gaming is good enough now that it is better than putting up with microsoft and windows 11"

Some people would rather put up with slightly worse frame pacing if it means no microsoft. Some linux folks are super gung-ho pro privacy, some are just super anti-microsoft but can't game on mac. There's a whole lot of reasons to wind up on linux, so the importance of specific performance details may vary depending on WHY you would be swapping.

And some people are playing games on good enough hardware that there arent noticeable frame pacing issues, so good raw FPS numbers just reinforce their views, and they just genuinely mean they are having a good experience themselves.

Post reply on HN