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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

arstechnica.com

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Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#181

Post by akimbostrawman »

jekwoooooe wrote: post #39

The last missing piece for full Linux gaming is anticheat. Last I looked into it, the major vendors don’t want to support it due to lack of kernel security and the ones that do, game devs refuse to allow it (destiny for example) One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming

>the major vendors don’t want to support it

The two most popular ACs by far are Easy anti cheat and Battle eye which have natively supported Linux for years, but it is entirely up to the game devs to enable it.

About 40% of all games with AC are working areweanticheatyet.com

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#182

Post by vanderZwan »

AbuAssar wrote: post #165
userbinator wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cache. Disk cache, to be precise.

please elaborate

I am guessing that they're implying that a VM effectively loaded the "hard drive" that Windows uses into a RAM-disk, so one would be comparing loading dlls and whatnot from RAM vs loading it from spinning rust.

I'm not sure how true that is, because in the Windows XP days most of us wouldn't have had enough RAM to spare to do that.

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#183

Post by bbkane »

mrcsharp wrote: post #107
bbkane wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's loss is gamers' gain in this area I think. Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right.

> Microsoft's loss is gamers' gain in this area I think. Care to expand on this? Or did you just want to make a random statement? > Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right This very reductive way of thinking is exactly why everything is getting enshitified to the max.

By Microsoft's loss and gamers' gain I mean that Linux used to be nonviable to play games, but Valve put a lot of effort into making games work on Linux (and continues to do so). They saw (and maybe still see?) Microsoft as a threat to Valve's future.

So now gamers have gained another platform to play games!

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#184

Post by akimbostrawman »

lenerdenator wrote: post #75

When SteamOS and Ganoo/L00nockz become first-class gaming citizens, that's when I'm building a gaming PC for the first time since 2012. I'm a Mac guy now mainly because of my job and I like UNIX-y stuff now, but of course, gaming is even more lacking than Linux. We're so close. Once AAA releases and GPU drivers get there, it's over the cliff, and I could see that being in the next five years.

AAA releases have worked for years with the exception being about 60% of online games with anti cheat. Linux has been a first class gaming citizen for years if you use steam client and AMD gpus.

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#185

Post by JeremyNT »

jekwoooooe wrote: post #39

The last missing piece for full Linux gaming is anticheat. Last I looked into it, the major vendors don’t want to support it due to lack of kernel security and the ones that do, game devs refuse to allow it (destiny for example) One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming

Don't discount peripheral support. I've got some pieces of hardware that are only kinda-sorta supported in Linux.

Not a big issue if you're just using kb/mouse/controller but you can get into the weeds with VR, flight sticks, wheels, etc.

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#186

Post by Zardoz84 »

umbra07 wrote: post #27
thewebguyd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, I've had games that had both a native Linux port and Windows version, and the Windows version through Proton ran better than the native Linux version. This ended up being true for Civ5, Civ6 and Cities Skylines (1). With those admittedly limited examples though, I don't experience the same ranking in performance, but I attribute that to my non-gaming hardware vs. any problem with Linux or Proton…

> Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately. On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.

I have Debian with KDE Plasma 6 and I have enabled HDR

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#187

Post by runako »

vanderZwan wrote: post #182
AbuAssar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please elaborate

I am guessing that they're implying that a VM effectively loaded the "hard drive" that Windows uses into a RAM-disk, so one would be comparing loading dlls and whatnot from RAM vs loading it from spinning rust. I'm not sure how true that is, because in the Windows XP days most of us wouldn't have had enough RAM to spare to do that.

More to the point, if the VM could do that caching, why wouldn't Windows be able to do the same level of caching on bare metal?

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#188

Post by 4oo4 »

jcgl wrote: post #156
chillfox wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been a Linux gamer for years now and I think you are correct on your frame rate observations in general. If you use ZFS (single nvme) then you can beat windows load times by a fairly large margin. My husband and I have identical hardware for our gaming computers (he uses Windows and I run Linux), it's not uncommon for my computer to load games 10 seconds faster than his.

Why do you think ZFS helps? I’m guessing you have compression turned on? IME, ZFS is rarely better in terms of raw performance, compared to e.g. XFS.

From experience having an L2ARC SSD, especially if it's nvme, can really help with zfs performance. I'm curious if they have that in their setup.

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#189

Post by andy12_ »

haswell wrote: post #13

In my purely anecdotal experience over the last few years, performance ranking is as follows: 1. Steam on Linux via Proton + Wayland (Niri) 2. Steam on Linux via Proton + X11 (Xfce) 3. Steam on Windows 4. Games on Linux launched via other means (it's possible I was missing out on certain flags/optimizations, but this is just about the average experience) The biggest thing I noticed when switching to Linux was an impr…

Is there a way of making wayland actually usable with Nvidia GPUs? I never manage to make it work, and it makes the whole system feel slow and sluggish compared to X11

Re: Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

#190

Post by bsimpson »

jekwoooooe wrote: post #39

The last missing piece for full Linux gaming is anticheat. Last I looked into it, the major vendors don’t want to support it due to lack of kernel security and the ones that do, game devs refuse to allow it (destiny for example) One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming

It's also an anticompetitive red herring, at least for Epic.

They say they don't support Linux because it's too complicated to be worth the ROI. Really, it's that they don't want to boost a platform where Steam is far and away the default store.

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