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

241–250 of 694 posts

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

#241

Post by ClikeX »

yourapostasy wrote: post #218
kakacik wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remem…

I've seen the sentiment come up a lot, and I've talked about it with a buddy a lot.

For all the issues people claim to have with iOS or Android, they really "just work" compared to the shit we had to deal with back in the day. And I don't even mean bugs, but UX just wasn't as sleek.

I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight an typing the approximate name. And the same works on my iPhone. Apps that create documents for me hide their file structure, because it's all abstracted away from me. It works, and I don't have to think about it as much.

You still have kids that start fiddling with tech, but only out of clear interest. Not as a necessity.

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

#242

Post by mfinelli »

HiPhish wrote: post #203
mfinelli wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Have you considered using OverlayFS[1] instead of installing all files into the game directory and tracking them with a database? Or maybe what GNU Stow is doing where it installs each package into its own directory and then uses symlinks which it tracks to "install" the files into the global file hierarchy? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverlayFS [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

Ooh overlayfs is quite interesting. I'll have to take a closer look at that. I imagine it's similar to what MO2 was doing on windows with the virtual filesytem to keep the game directory clean.

The stow approach is something that I considered but ultimately rejected for a couple of reasons around handling conflicts of game-installed files as well as how to ultimately handle the symlink lifecycle (eg wrapper to make the "non-running" state always clean or to let it always persist and then need to run manual cleanup/update steps). But if you're interested in that approach when I was applying for Nexus Mods approval I discovered https://github.com/Marc1326/Anvil-Organizer in the overall list of mod tools which I believe uses that strategy (though I haven't really looked too closely)

But basically my original idea to just install the files directly into the game directory stems from the fact that when I switched to linux for gaming and not having success with MO2 that's literally what I was doing. I would download the mod from nexus and unzip/tar it into the game directory manually. When I wanted to uninstall or update I'd find the original archive list the files in it and then delete them from my game directory. After doing this too much I realized that I was basically missing the functionality of a standard linux package manager (eg apt, pacman, etc)

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

#243

Post by simoncion »

funimpoded wrote: post #78
jaxefayo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, DisplayPort doesn’t support HDR output

The cable length limitations are also a pain in the ass for not-uncommon A/V system configurations. 6' recommended max, and the best you might get working stably if the device and cable gods smile on you is 15'. 6' is the lower edge of acceptable for just about any A/V system setup (in practice it means your devices need to be within about a meter of the screen's port[s], which is pretty close) and even 15' is still…

> HDMI goes 25'+, no problem.

Yep. That's likely because that's an active cable. Active DisplayPort cables exist, too. Here is one vendor selling active UHBR10 cables [0]. If you don't NEED UHBR, then you'll find your selection to be much, much larger. I've been using some Monoprice-branded 50 and 100 ft active fiber-optic HBR3 DisplayPort cables for years with no problem.

[0] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/displayport-cables/c...>

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

#244

Post by h4x0rr »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #225
Night_Thastus wrote: post #140

Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc. This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not…

Unless you're playing CS competitively and really need 720fps for your 360Hz monitor, is 5-30% fewer frames (all else equal) really a deal breaker? Is this hardware thats barly good enough or something else? I ask because I feel like I can frequently play games at, say, 150fps, and losing 30% would mean almost nothing to me to switch to Linux. I worry more about general capatibility and anticheat.

5-30% is what a sizable amount of people upgrade their hardware for

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

#246

Post by nopurpose »

anonymousab wrote: post #169
worble wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this. If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that impo…

5% would already be well within the margin of difference for separate identical clean installations of windows on the same hardware. But the issue is that it is many multiples of that, especially on the most common PC gaming hardware (Nvidia GPUs), often more than a 25% difference in framerates. Not so important at 144fps, but very important at a 60fps baseline and for genres like fighting games. A lot of people don'…

> 5% would already be well within the margin of difference for separate identical clean installations of windows on the same hardware.

what is the source of this non-determinism?

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

#247

Post by smackeyacky »

pjsmith404 wrote: post #228
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…

I can recommend CachyOS as a linux distribution for gaming that has worked for me across multiple computers without any fiddling. It's the one that's led to me ditching windows entirely after a few failed attempts over the years. Although, everyone probably says that about whatever distro they happen to use lol.

I think I’d avoid the Cosmic version of POP!OS for a while for gaming. I mean it works but you do have to get fiddling again unlike the previous not cosmic version.

Most egregious problem is that steam games start in a strange window rather than full screen and you have to press a weird key combo to fix it.

Nvidia based Acer nitro FWIW your mileage may vary

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

#248

Post by cwel »

BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #167
worble wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this. If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that impo…

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…

> I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game

I know you framed this as a negative, but this is something I yearn for; It's the one of the best games, imo. I often wish I ran into more issues, but for the most part, things _just work_^TM.

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

#249

Post by ActorNightly »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #140

Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc. This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not…

Its never going to happen. Because console players by far dominate the gaming scene. Microsoft is going to push Xbox first, which will drive all development of the games, which is going to be windows focused. As such, all major release studios are going to target that.

Until we get something like CoD titles being Steam Console first, linux is allways going to lag behind.

That being said, I think we are on a precipice of AI being able to simply just rewrite games from concepts. Start with generic source code for an FPS or 3PS, then people can contribute changes in english language to tailor the game. So it won't be even copying source code, it would be copying concepts and then making a new game with it. There have been a lot of games that have very rudimentary graphics that people played in large numbers because the complexity and gameplay was quite good.

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

#250

Post by Quekid5 »

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…

Yeah, I've been playing BG3 on Linux[0] for about 2 years at this point (using a Lutris "recipe" or whatever they call it). Ironically, the biggest issues have been with some of the modding tools needing specific versions of DotNet and whatnot. The game itself runs flawlessly.

[0] Arch Linux, btw, because that must be mentioned.

Post reply on HN