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Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
301–310 of 694 posts
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
which would be the right use of the term. WSL was originally called LXSS = linux subsystem. As I understand, lawyers stepped in soon after.
They already did the same thing 25 years ago with "Windows Services for UNIX": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
Which is also backwards.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this gets overblown a bit. AMD is better, but Nvidia can work. There's plenty of valid reasons to put in the extra effort and go with Nvidia.
I hope this is right, because "you have to use AMD GPU" is not what people want to hear when building a PC.
From people who have been using Linux since the 90s, the long term view is that nvidia has always been mostly fine since the early 2000s for hw acceleration if you didn't mind a binary blob. Yes, there have always been driver bugs - but that was never unique to a specific platform, i.e. nvidia on macos had opengl driver bugs that went unfixed for eternity until support was dropped, then the bug reports could be closed.
Comparatively the leading alternative was a dumpster fire of a broken mess for the longest time on Linux. All through the 2000s, ATi provided a binary blob driver known as fglrx which some people joked was a half-baked codebase from somemthing that started on HP-UX, passable enough for running sales demos and then was thrown at an intern to port it to Linux. If you went with ATi and tried to do much with foss opengl programs, you could expect daily or weekly kernel panics and performance that was Nothing has really changed for Nvidia on Linux, it still continues to perform adequetly. Plenty of people, including myself have used the binary blob for games and other 3D software with wine through the late 2000s, 2010s and proton in the 2020s without much comment because it works fine. The exception being that if you buy a used card, coming up on 10+ years old because your requirements are minimal - don't expect current driver support. Nvidia drop support for old cards on Windows too.
AMD is definitely night and day in terms of meeting the free software ecosystem properly, and so arguably the reason to go with a new AMD card is voting for that kind of support with your wallet.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#304Show 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…
Just produce your own numbers. Install whatever flavour of Linux you like (all distrohopping leads to Debian) on a separate partition and benchmark it yourself. It isn't complicated. In the case of my machine, I haven't observed any difference. And by observe I mean with my eyes, I haven't bothered with actual benchmarks because it seems to work about the same, which is good enough for me. I haven't booted my Windows…
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Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#305Given the current momentum, it feels like (to me) the adage of “Windows is for Games” is going by the wayside. If you look at Steam, and OSs like Bazzite it’s clear the consumer-side is finally shoring up. But that aside, from an economic incentive, game providers (for example Amazon Luna), don’t want to be paying the licenses for running Windows machines for Video Game Streaming on Demand. In fact, at my time there…
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Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple doesn't care about gaming.
Apple has never really cared about games unless it's on the iPhone or iPad. It's worked out well for them though. Mobile gaming is a $100 billion dollar market, PC gaming and console gaming are each about half that.
They don’t care about iPhone/iPad gaming either.
They stumbled into the perfect spot with the iPhone, then IAP sweetened it.
Since they found money they support it. But in the process they’ve really destroyed gaming on the platform unless you want casino games or candy crush/clash of clans things designed to extract money and show another ad every 12 seconds.
Yeah they show Resident Evil VIII and Assassins Creed Whatever but they don’t sell much. And the race to free IAPs created mean good games can’t sell even at a single $2 purchase.
Apple Arcade is the only sanctuary. I haven’t heard good things from the dev side, and it’s 80%+ old games from before things were destroyed or IAP riddled games with the IAPs removed, at times not even rebalanced.
I use it because it’s about all that’s left. But iPhone gaming is a shadow of what we had in the early years.
And at this point there is no competition left. The smart phone ate everything. And as far as I know Android games are in the same mess.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#307Show 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 have not seen the numbers, but even a game running 10% faster does not replace the fact that many games wont even start in Linux (League of Legends for example).
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#308>NTSYNC isn't the first time Linux has gained a new feature specifically because Windows games needed it. A few years back, Linux added a way for software to wait on several events at once, which is something Windows had built in for decades, but Linux didn't.
Lol.
Post doesn't sound explicitly vibewritten, so probably just a non-technical person.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your initial baseline was arbitrary. If the game had been 10% slower on Windows, would you have never enjoyed it? If not, how could switching with a 10% penalty be a deal-breaking downside? Just do it. Swap and let go of objectivity. Let your subjective experience guide you. For me, the subjective joy of not having to fuck around with Microsoft's bullshit was worth multiples of having to mess around with technical cr…
I mean, there are costs to swapping though. Going by just feels seems to be the wrong way to think about it.
We're talking about gaming here.
What other goal is there than maximizing your subjective enjoyment of the game?
Sure if you're a professional streamer, your feels are maybe less important than engagement metrics but if you're just a casual?
Dude just play what feels good. It's literally the best and only metric.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#310“ He who fights with Windows should see to it that he himself does not become Windows. And when you gaze long into ntoskrnl, ntoskrnl also gazes into you. ” Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?
Microsoft and Windows were never the enemy. To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
The goal was to be able to patch and fix the systems I was using, and swap out bits and pieces as I wanted. And that seems to be less and less possible on Linux these days, as you have these tightly vertically-integrated stacks where everything depends on the latest version of everything else.