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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

#381

Post by hedora »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #279
zuzululu wrote: post #254

I support linux gaming btw but I can't help but feel every narrative glosses over that certain games are going to require uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheating systems. I'm just realizing that I can't play Battlefield 6 and I do wonder what the path is. I don't think it's ever going to be supported on Linux or Mac.

Unfortunately, the alternative to uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheat is more cheaters, because cheaters don't care about how intrusive their cheats have to be in order to evade anti-cheat. They will happily run hypervisor-level cheats. There's certainly room for improvement on the netcode sometimes (Client-side hit registration is an absolute bone-headed design), but those won't prevent aim bots. Server-side anti-che…

I get that people want to play games with randos and 13-30 yr old basement dwellers on the internet, but the idea never appealed to me.

If the vendors said: Disable anticheat and we’ll block you from tournaments / matchmaking, I’d consider that a feature, not a bug.

If some IRL friend of mine wants to be an asshole and use auto aimers / see through walls to screw with me, then I have ways to deal with it outside the game.

On the other hand, if we both want to run some bullet hell mode + cheats with physics mods and a debugger attached, then what’s the problem?

It’s none of the game developer’s business.

I’m not sure if I am in the minority or majority, but I’m not the only one with this attitude. I suspect the set of people in this boat dwarfs the 5% market share Linux currently has.

They might even get some of us to buy their games if they added support for such a mode. How hard could it be?

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

#382

Post by marcus_holmes »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #357
theshackleford wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of my games run flawlessly on Linux with great performance. Your definition of great performance is not mine, but it’s fantastic to watch Linux users continue to hand wave away real issues whilst continually claiming the same or better performance across the board, which is provably false. > but has no real gains in how fun games are. It absolutely does for me. Modern displays are absolutely dogshit. I won’t pl…

This is exactly the mentality I'm talking about. People have entertained themselves for all of human history without anything nearly as sophisticated as modern displays. At some point this unchecked desire will suck all of the fun out of a hobby and leave you constantly buying the latest thing and dissatisfied at anything that isn't the highests specs possible to acquire. The game story, gameplay elements, and such h…

I think this is similar to how buying books is a related but different hobby to reading books, or buying board games is a related but different hobby to playing board games. I know people who have hundreds of board games, thousands of dollars worth, but rarely get to actually play them (for various reasons but mostly involving children).

The hobby of optimising your gaming desktop is a related but different hobby to actually playing games.

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

#383

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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.

With what feels like weekly posts about someone being shocked their smart TV is showing them ads, I'm surprised you looked for gigabit for your TV.

I've had a smart TV for over 5 years and never connected it to the Internet.

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

#384

Post by Dylan16807 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #380
Dylan16807 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that goes back to "how often". Not how many games use it, but how many times per second they use it. You might touch your voice process lock once per frame? That's negligible in terms of CPU time. Any half-reasonable overhead makes no difference in that lock, but might have a big impact in a more common lock.

It absolutely can make a difference because if you have locks that are supposed to sync or wake up other processes you care about latency not cpu usage.

What specifically are you saying can make a difference?

I'm saying that extra overhead from making your lock work across processes should be very tiny. That overhead shouldn't add much more than a microsecond in either latency or CPU usage, compared to an in-process lock.

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

#386

Post by r14c »

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…

Yeah some hardware combinations are just broken. IF ur lucky everything will just work, if not you can likely fix it with enough skill. That's better than nothing, but understandably frustrating if you accidentally pick a bad combination of devices.

Unfortunately the install process is always going to be at least a little bit technical. I wish it wasn't, but idk how you'd do that without making the os like an emmu chip that you can swap out, instead of a thing you write on your drive.

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

#388

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

jaxefayo wrote: post #54
cute_boi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any reason why we are using hdmi over display port?

For one, DisplayPort doesn’t support HDR output

Confidently incorrect.

My main monitor is 4K 240 hz HDR and it works great on my DisplayPort cable, especially the HDR.

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

#389

Post by zamalek »

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…

Windows and Linux trade punches in terms of overall experience. What I've seen around is that if Linux has worse FPS, it tends to have more consistent pacing (it generally has better pacing - but not always, I had to abandon Once Human).

Gamer's Nexus has a pretty extensive benchmark video: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Cx5Q1a-lMMm14H4i . They refuse to compare to Windows, and it kinda makes sense: if it's satisfactory on Linux for your demands then who cares what Windows can do?

Here's a less professional, but direct comparison https://youtu.be/Giois6VtLPM?si=XFaVUMbea3u0AmP. An extremely important thing to note: AMD GPU. I personally have no idea what NVIDIA is like, but it sounds like their drivers are still all over the place.

And kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't work, though some (e.g. EAC) run in user mode if the developer allows it. Make sure to check ProtonDB for the games you care about. I have personally never had a good experience with Linux builds of games, so I just always use Proton now - but maybe I'm cursed because others have passionately disagreed with my experience. Either way, if a Linux game is broken/bad, try forcing it into Proton.

I don't want to say, "switch now" because it still has rough edges in terms of gaming. Better for you to have a great experience and stick around, than hate it and leave for good. Only you can figure out if it needs more time to cook based on some very light (ProtonDB) research.

I last used a Windows machine about a year ago, and I can say with confidence that the average desktop experience is significantly superior to the barrage of bullshit that Windows puts you through.

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