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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

#631

Post by freakynit »

KolibriFly wrote: post #436
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…

This is exactly why Proton feels like the pragmatic path. Native ports are nice in theory, but PC games are rarely just one clean executable anymore

[dead]

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

#632

Post by harry8 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #512
harry8 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The status quo's days are numbered. Online chess shows how. An AI will play these games like a human but better. The AI can be totally separate from the windows box wearing anti-cheat ankle bracelets just as your brain a separate thing to the windows box when when you play. It can interact with the box via keyboard, mouse or controller. No windows kernel module is useful in detecting and deterring chess cheating no m…

Your argument appears to be nihilistic in nature: "don't bother fighting the cheating because it's inevitable." Forgive me, but I won't be giving up that easily. No anti-cheat is perfect, and we're not aiming for perfect. We're aiming for a reduction, and the harder we make cheating, the fewer cheaters there are. If cheating requires special hardware to mimic mouse and keyboard input, that significantly cuts down how…

Comprehension issue.

"Quotes" of something not said directly that you are quoting is always bad. Quotes containing a summary that is entirely false are even worse. Don't do that.

You can try to deal with cheating as chess.com and others _do_, or you can do something you know will not work. Kernel mods for chess.com would be stupid. Their anti-cheat strategy involves zero windows kernel mods. That is how it will go for all online gaming if it hasn't already. So use something else.

Windows kernel modules won't work much longer if they even still do. Pretending they will, doing nothing to stop cheating is a a nihilistic, give up, faintly ridiculous attitude.

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

#633

Post by kelseydh »

simonh wrote: post #556
kelseydh wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess anti-cheat now relies on looking at your moves and spotting mistakes. Not even grandmasters play tactically perfect games so this works pretty well for finding cheaters. In theory FPS games could do the same to detect aimbotting.

So now we're using an AI cheat snoop to detect the behaviours of AIs, which means the cheat AI will need to learn to avoid the tell-tale patterns the AI cheat snoop looks for and avoid them, which mean the AI cheat snoop will need to....

It won't close the skill gap bump, but the more an AI aimbot degrades itself to mimic a human to beat cheat detection the less advantage it will give to the players using it.

It is scary how nuanced the cheating tools already here. Here is a video promoting cheat software explaining how nuanced their aimbot system can be made to mimic real play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrBohlkHMjU

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

#634

Post by babypuncher »

somat wrote: post #621
tombert wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the ones built into laptops, all my "monitors" for the last decade have been TVs, just because they tend to be cheaper at a "price to size" level. None of them ever seem to have DisplayPort.

There is supposed to be some sort of conspiracy where the HDMI consortium actively tries to keep display port off of TV's. Not sure if I buy it, how would that even work? lower licensing fees when no display port? I suspect the real answer is that HDMI managed to capture the market for digital video links and while display port is better it is not enough better for people to want to make the incompatibility jump. But…

DisplayPort is missing a lot of features that are meaningless in a desktop setup but important in a home theater setup. That's the only reason.

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

#635

Post by jimmydorry »

Gareth321 wrote: post #532
doikor wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve doesn’t do kernel level anti cheat on Windows either. Those are the actual roadblocks. Userland anti cheats can work (and do) on Linux if the developers want to. Most of the third party ones the developer buys/licenses already do. But reality is that only the kernel level ones seem to work to some extent. Difference in the amount cheating between counter strike and valorant is just massive (both free to play ga…

Yeah, user-space anti-cheats just aren't as effective. We need kernel-level anti-cheats on Linux, and more. I understand these are considered invasive, but people care FAR more about cheaters than they do the extremely remote possibility of a zero-day exploit.

Looking at someone cheating in a replay, it's pretty obvious the majority of the time. To me, this signals that this could be a problem that can be solved by a combination of analytics to filter out statisticaly outliers + AI. This is something Valve dabbled with before (and since) the boom in AI [0], dubbed as VACNET and VAC-LIVE. Kernel access becoming the norm is not something we should be cheering for imo.

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

#636

Post by Dylan16807 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #630
Dylan16807 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not actually using it between processes, the overhead could be as small as an extra conditional. For an upper bound I think a couple wasted syscalls makes sense. Why would it be significantly slower than that? But whatever, let's focus on the actual point: > They were saying it's rare to need IPC lock for video games and I don't think that's true, then I gave a scenario where you would use one. And I was po…

how often we're using the lock matters. No, latency is what matters. And I was pointing out that a voice IPC lock is still "rare" when we use the most appropriate definition of "rare" This isn't really a point with explanation, it's just you saying 'nu uh', even though that was just a single example.

The post you originally responded to was comparing the general idea of locks that can work between processes and ones that can't. And it was criticizing the efficiency of the former, which is a measure of throughput.

There's no reason for an upgraded lock to significantly change in latency. That's not what they were worried about when criticizing the idea of using the former lock as the main lock type in a game. Your most used locks need throughput.

So no, latency is not what matters. And I've explained why I say that in multiple ways, while you haven't given any explanation for why you're focusing on latency.

When they asked "how often" in the middle of that criticism, they're not looking for an example that sprinkles in a couple calls, they're looking for something that puts serious load onto the lock. Any answer that is once per frame or less is not properly addressing the question.

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

#637

Post by avadodin »

shdh wrote: post #585
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…

I actually got better FPS in CS2 using Linux

I don't even know that FPS helps in that game, to be honest.

In my experience, CS2 plays better at 150ms ping than 19ms ping. It's not even K/D ratio bias as the far away server has better players than the matches.

19ms and everyone else is just janky-warping around. 150ms and maybe there is a rollback where yeah that whole thing 5s ago didn't happen but otherwise it is very smooth.

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

#638

Post by fxtentacle »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #157

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

The last 2 LAN parties we didn’t play anything that didn’t work extremely well on my AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU Pop!OS Linux workstation.

And I didn’t expect: VR streaming works flawless, too. I just had to buy a WiFi 6 usb dongle.

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

#639

Post by rpigab »

I have been a gamer for all my life, I have many PCs, until early 2024 one of them had to run Windows for gaming. I quit Windows, and didn't have to quit gaming, thanks to Steam's Proton + WINE + everything else. Now, because I have Steam compat activated by default, when I download and launch a new game, most of the time I do not know if I'm running a native version or if I'm running it through Proton.

I also can run Windows games from the 2000s or 90s that didn't not work in Windows 7's basic compatibility options because of old video drivers and whatnot. They run just fine on Ubuntu through Steam, just add the exe or installer as non-Steam game, add Proton and voilà, also sometimes there's some headache around making it work when the exe requires the CD inserted to play, even though I have mounted the CD files in a drive in the wine/proton prefix. I wish there were scripts to do that easily, even adding the exe as non-steam game, changing the name, etc. is not very convenient, I wish there were scripts (Lutris does some of that but not the CD part).

I should also mention that I do not play competitive multiplayer games that have kernel-level anticheat anymore. Check out https://areweanticheatyet.com/

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

#640

Post by Gareth321 »

jimmydorry wrote: post #635
Gareth321 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, user-space anti-cheats just aren't as effective. We need kernel-level anti-cheats on Linux, and more. I understand these are considered invasive, but people care FAR more about cheaters than they do the extremely remote possibility of a zero-day exploit.

Looking at someone cheating in a replay, it's pretty obvious the majority of the time. To me, this signals that this could be a problem that can be solved by a combination of analytics to filter out statisticaly outliers + AI. This is something Valve dabbled with before (and since) the boom in AI [0], dubbed as VACNET and VAC-LIVE. Kernel access becoming the norm is not something we should be cheering for imo.

I'm more sceptical about inference based detection methods because as they improve (using AI), so too will the cheater's ability to fake human movement. It will be trained on real humans and mimic how real humans play - just at the very high end of the range of skill and ability. Developers will be loathe to ban "good" players just because they're good.
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