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

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 285 posts

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

#191

Post by lenerdenator »

akimbostrawman wrote: post #184
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.

And that online part is the part that really matters. That's where the games make their money.

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

#192

Post by preisschild »

cassianoleal wrote: post #133
preisschild wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > HDR Already supported > Nvidia GPUs You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue. > VR SteamVR works though?

> > HDR > Already supported Is it though? I confess I haven’t tried in a few weeks but until last time I did, to get HDR in games you had to start a session with `gamescope` rather than a DE, and still had to set a bunch of flags - and in some ways have a very subpar experience with problems with mouse movements and other issues I can’t recall. I exclusively game on Linux and I find the experience far superior than d…

GNOME and KDE support HDR now too, so if you use those DEs you dont need gamescope anymore.

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

#193

Post by mystified5016 »

Sammi wrote: post #160
armada651 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct Memory Access cheats will always perform better as they can reveal the location of an opponent before they're even visible on the screen.

Why are players who aren't on screen even in the client memory? The server shouldn't be sharing sensitive information.

Game servers are complicated and have a lot to manage.

It's infeasible for the server to keep track of each player and do frustum and raycasting to every other player to check who can see who every frame.

Culling out of view entities also has the problematic effect of when a player spins around you now have to stream in several big chunks of world state in the few milliseconds before the user clicks to get that 180 no-scope.

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

#194

Post by mystified5016 »

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

Missing anti-cheat is a feature, not a bug. Linux not allowing games to install kernel malware is a good thing.

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

#195

Post by mystified5016 »

I don't think this is because Steam, Proton, or Linux are particularly good on their own (they are, extremely so) but more that windows is just so awful.

My observation is that windows is slow at everything. I think because of Defender, but I'm not certain. If you set up a Linux VM on a Windows machine, most tasks run much faster than an identical task on the host OS. It's insane.

I run my C++ compiler in a linux VM because running it on windows is, no exaggeration, twice as slow.

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

zrobotics wrote: post #106
bloqs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so consoles are better

How would consoles be any more immune to computer vision based cheating? Instead of feeding the output to a spoofed keyboard & mouse, you'd just be feeding it to a controller input. I'm not really seeing any difference in technical challenge here, and you wouldn't even need esoteric hardware since console controllers are USB devices anyways.

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by p_ing »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #35
umbra07 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

To the extent that Linux doesn’t support nvidia gpu it is actually Nvidia not supporting Linux and keeping their drivers proprietary.

But that doesn't matter. If the feature isn't there, Linux is non-viable if you want/rely on said feature. It doesn't matter whose 'fault' it is.

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

#198

Post by p_ing »

sitkack wrote: post #22

Given that Windows games run faster via Proton on SteamOS, developers should prioritize targeting SteamOS APIs—not Windows. This ensures compatibility with Windows while maximizing performance. Game engines like Unity and Unreal must adopt SteamOS as the primary target, with CI systems rigorously testing both platforms. SteamOS, not Windows, should be the baseline for optimization. Does Valve run a SteamOS CI/CD farm…

The only stable ABI on SteamOS is Win32. Targeting anything else is asking for it to break over time.

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

#199

Post by p_ing »

windward wrote: post #148
arvinsim wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always wanted Windows to move to Unix so that I can have the best of both worlds(software development and video games). Glad that we are close to that reality.

You'd also need a sane filesystem.

Windows has NTFS and ReFS. Both are quite sane and performant.
Post reply on HN