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

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

#201

Post by jayd16 »

Sammi wrote: post #161
hypeatei wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as games are running on user hardware/OS, you'll always deal with cheating. Server-side checks and computation can only go so far. For example: in competitive shooters (where cheaters are most prevalent) you can't have things appearing out of thin air. The client needs to know about things ahead of time to play sounds and to give other environmental hints.

Surely the server can tell the client what sounds to play and what other environmental hints to do, just as well as the server can choose to tell the client where the other players are when they are in sight.

The storage read, memory bandwidth, load computation, and gamethred pause to add the object to the game world is far more expensive than sending a move.

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

#202

Post by cheald »

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.

We've been there since the release of the Steam deck. Really, the only things I can't run on my Linux machine are the games that intentionally break the game with anticheat mechanisms. And it's not all anticheat - there are plenty of titles with anticheat that run just fine.

Check whatever you want to play at https://www.protondb.com/ - chances are, if it isn't intentionally borked with anticheat, it runs just fine. Looking at the top 300 games by Steam player count, 17 don't work, and probably 5 of those are utilities (like Crosshair X and Lossless Scaling).

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

#203

Post by lotharcable »

runako wrote: post #187
vanderZwan wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sorta. The devil in the details here.

Depending on the VM technology they use they offer a variety of different caching mode and configurations, but the basic three approaches that most everybody offers are going to be something like;

"writeback" means that when the guest's storage data ends up in the host's cache it is reported back to the guest as 'written'. This means that from the guest's perspective the disk is written to, but in actuality the data is still floating around in memory. If the guest wants data to be 'safe' they need to issue additional flush commands.

"writethrough" means that the host is using its memory for caching file system, but that writes are reported as 'competed' only when they have been committed to actual disk.

and "none" means the cache is used as little as possible.

So if your guest's virtual disk is in 'writeback' mode it isn't actually writing to real disk. It is writing to memory. Which is going to be very fast up to the point were the cache on the host is exhausted.

Certainly Windows could lie to applications and not write information to disk and keep it in memory much longer then it normally would but that would defeat some of the assurances that file systems are supposed to offer to applications.

'writeback' would be closer to what Windows already implements on the OS level, but because Linux is just plain faster it should improve performance somewhat. Microsoft can only work in improving the performance of Windows to get the same results, but Linux is pretty hard to beat.

'none' is what I use when running Linux on Linux because having two layers of cache is just kinda wasteful and doesn't result in real improved performance.

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

#204

Post by lotharcable »

preisschild wrote: post #126
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.

> 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?

For gaming and general desktop on Linux AMD is best if you want a dedicated GPU.

If you want a laptop with good battery life Intel is generally the way to go.

A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of effort Valve put into improving the open source AMD drivers, which is what is used on their Steam platform.

Of course if you want CUDA you need Nvidia, but if you use Nvidia to drive your Linux desktop expect some suffering to go along with it.

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

#205

Post by haswell »

badsectoracula wrote: post #100
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…

> The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate. Was it with any specific game? I just tried the GOG version of The Witcher 3 "Complete Edition" (which is the remastered one) with the Direct3D 12 renderer under both Xorg/Window Maker and Wayland/KDE using umu-run (essentially proton without Steam) and it had identical performance in both cases (i al…

Some of the games I play often that saw improvements: The Finals, Overwatch, Rocket League, Helldivers.

> (i also tried to use Niri but it would launch in 60Hz mode and for some reason wouldn't allow the game to run at a higher framerate with vsync disabled regardless of any option i chose)

I had some issues early on related to refresh rate, and it turned out I didn't have an output defined for the correct display. The steps I took:

1. Run `niri msg outputs` to identify the Display ID and available modes. In my case: "DP-3" and "2560x1440@143.964"

2. Set up an output in niri's confid.kdl as follows:

  output "DP-3" {
    mode "2560x1440@143.964"
    variable-refresh-rate 
  }

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

#206

Post by ChocolateGod »

andy12_ wrote: post #189
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

Try avoiding the open source kernel modules, I had a similar issues.

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

#207

Post by WorldMaker »

bsimpson wrote: post #190
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.

This is especially relevant to note because Epic bought and owns Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) one of the currently most popular anti-cheats in AAA.

ETA: EAC still supports Linux gaming today, but the rumors remain that Epic could remove that at their whim.

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

#208

Post by WorldMaker »

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 funny because one of the OG draws to Steam back in the day was because Counter-Strike (et al) had the superior Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) in Steam copies than the myriad of raw CD installs of HL1 plus the mods to run Counter-Strike.

This missing piece is sort of a fun "whatever happened to VAC and why hasn't it kept up with the times?"

It seems like Linux would be a good excuse to reinvest in VAC and make it a bigger competitor to the current favorites like Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC).

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

#209

Post by windward »

p_ing wrote: post #199
windward wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd also need a sane filesystem.

Windows has NTFS and ReFS. Both are quite sane and performant.

I know. Neither are either. git is noticeably slower, the locking is untenable, the case-insensitivity is a source of bugs.

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

#210

Post by LocalH »

Sammi wrote: post #161
hypeatei wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as games are running on user hardware/OS, you'll always deal with cheating. Server-side checks and computation can only go so far. For example: in competitive shooters (where cheaters are most prevalent) you can't have things appearing out of thin air. The client needs to know about things ahead of time to play sounds and to give other environmental hints.

Surely the server can tell the client what sounds to play and what other environmental hints to do, just as well as the server can choose to tell the client where the other players are when they are in sight.

Due to latency, the client has to at least do a little prediction.
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