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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

#241

Post by p_ing »

windward wrote: post #209
p_ing wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the NT Design Workbook, oplocks.

> Because the NT OS/2 I/O system is asynchronous by nature, the ability to make a request and then have it completed at a later time makes it natural for implementing oplocks. Further, because synchronization is required by the file system to determine when the caller has completed its oplock update transfers, the file system can use this feature to block open requests to a file by queueing the I/O Request Packet (IRP) to its internal file control structure until the oplock owner lets it know that it is finished.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

ndriscoll wrote: post #238
thfuran wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an issue except for any of the couple hundred million people who subscribe to Netflix at any rate.

Not an ecosystem issue at all. There's no "yet". Linux computers even on the very low end are already perfectly capable of playing 4k Netflix videos. You can easily prove this to yourself by downloading one via torrent (you can generally get exact stream rips with DRM removed if you want). Netflix just won't send UHD streams to Linux users. That's a political choice, not a technology problem, and it's easy enough to…

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by jekwoooooe »

Cloudef wrote: post #49
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

Multiplayer games without dedicated servers is dead end anyways. I dont need a "anti-cheat" daemon hooking into kernel scanning files and other memory while playing a game. Communities in dedicated servers are much more efficient at moderating the player base than centralized match making ever will be.

They really aren’t. I used to think that but I actually enjoy skill based matchmaking. It makes game availability better and faster and I don’t have to deal with 1 outlier absolutely stomping or overzealous admins or whatever. I like both approaches though for something like battlefield I think dedicated servers are better but for things like cod, siege, etc we need sbmm

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

#244

Post by happymellon »

baobun wrote: post #136
komali2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia support across the desktop ecosystem is poor, for example practically nonfunctional in Sway. And just buggy in other Wayland based desktop environments (kde seems to be the best in my experience).

I'm doing PCI passthrough of a 1080 to an archaic tiling X11 window manager and so far it Just Works with noeveau. XFCE also worked fine before I decided I don't want a full DE. Rock stable. I will move dists before I move to Wayland by the looks of it. i3 should be pretty easy switch from sway if you haven't tried.

> noeveau

Hasn't Nvidia locked most functionality away from the open source drivers?

You either have the choice of using drivers that work well with Linux, or drivers that are fully featured.

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

#245

Post by badsectoracula »

haswell wrote: post #205
badsectoracula wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. T…

Hm, i tried it and i could set up the higher refresh rate but Niri was forcing vsync on the game that capped the framerate to my monitor's refresh rate (165Hz) even though in the game i have vsync disabled. This seems to be an issue with Niri as KDE Plasma Wayland disabling vsync works fine.

At "ultra" settings i got around 115fps which is ~5 fps lower than 117-120fps i got from Xorg/Window Maker and KDE/Wayland, though i'm pretty sure that was just the forced vsync, so in practice it seems that the window system doesn't matter much.

Did you use XFCE's desktop compositor? AFAIK XFCE's compositor isn't particularly great, some years ago when i was working on a custom game engine i had to add an explicit option to use the X11 "override redirect" flag instead of the window hint for fullscreen windows because XFCE's compositor wouldn't disable itself otherwise and the game would feel a bit laggy/inconsistent. Not sure if this has been fixed nowadays but in general it gave me a bad impression for XFCE's compositor as other compositors didn't seem to have the same issue.

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

#246

Post by Macha »

pxc wrote: post #223
nialv7 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux port if there is one is usually done by a third party porting studio, which is not necessarily at the same quality as the original codebase. Also the devs just don't have the manpower/bandwidth to spare for Linux users given how small this community is. It's better value for money for both the gamers and the devs if the devs just choose to engage with valve and get their game running perfectly under proton.

These ports are also not usually source ports, so they're not much "more native" than the Proton ports. They often use the same kind of API translation layer, probably also built on WINE. I think as Proton sees more investment and becomes more advanced, it's probably becoming difficult for competing compatibility layers to keep up. A source port that is optimized as lovingly as its Windows counterpart will probably b…

Factorio and Minecraft (Java edition) are two of the few games that come to mind where the Linux port got comparable effort to the Windows port, and I don't think people are in a rush to play either of them in Proton.

Your latest AAA open world RPG on the other hand? Yeah, you're probably going to have better luck in Proton even if it gets a native Linux port.

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

#247

Post by dwattttt »

cwillu wrote: post #235
dwattttt wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your IOMMU, you can do what you want with it. Maybe you need to write heaps of stuff to take advantage of it, but what's new there? The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".

Okay, but he's specifically brought it up in the context of a computer's owner doing something that the software vendor (and also myself as another gamer harmed by cheating) would prefer he did not.

And if they want complete control, they can choose not to use a vendor and do it themself, for all the control they could want.

Hooray, freedom!

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

#248

Post by mrcsharp »

bbkane wrote: post #183
mrcsharp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

> but Valve put a lot of effort into making games work on Linux

Yes! this is competition at its finest, right? It is also what I was talking about in my original comment.

> So now gamers have gained another platform to play games!

Yup, this is definitely a good thing. Yes gamers get another platform and hopefully gets MS to focus on Windows to make it better and less hostile to users.

Gamers are also quite vicious and they will tarnish the reputation of anything that doesn't work well for them. Let's see how Linux will fare in their hands.

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

#249

Post by NoPicklez »

fooqux wrote: post #40
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

Anti-cheat today is a stop-gap measure at best. For various reasons such as improved OS security and security concerns with this software, ring zero anti-cheat won't be around forever. Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse. We already have the technology now to do it better. A combination of only sending what info a client should have, and server-side checks. As soon as something like UT sh…

It might be a cat and mouse game, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying.

Any anti-malware software ends up ultimately being a cat and mouse game, but that doesn't mean we stop updating our signature updates.

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

#250

Post by NoPicklez »

pier25 wrote: post #200

I was expecting something like 20-30% of difference not 200-300%. Microsoft really needs to release a gaming version of Windows without the bloat. I only use Windows to launch Steam these days.

I want games to run optimally too, but I don't think they should release a gaming version of Windows. Ultimately gamers want to do more with their PC's than just game.

They should focus on optimizing the current OS to more optimally run games rather than segmenting the OS.

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