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Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
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Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last I read, it really doesn't now. Less than 10% of Microsoft revenue is Windows with growth stagnant. It's all about subscriptions and recurring revenue now driving growth. They might as well bundle a Windows licence with all Game Pass subscriptions.
Their money all comes from Azure, Office, and now AI services. Windows is just a platform to sell their other stuff now. Which has been reflected in the state of windows over the last 10 years.
So the business model doesn't strictly rely on Windows Licenses, but they're still using it as an entry into their ecosystem
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
The progress is vast, but at the same time, it feels overstated. Linux still is not a great daily driver for video games in many circumstances, unless you're on a specialized device like the steam deck that gets extra attention to smooth out the rough bits. On my gaming PC I haven't found a single game that runs noticeably faster in Linux. Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes…
> Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes game-breaking). That's an interesting experience, I'd be interested to hear more. There certainly are games that do not work well, no question, but as far as I'm aware it's a pretty small minority. To my knowledge, the two biggest issues are anti-cheat and video codecs, both of which are business/legal problems, not technical issues. Are…
Re-reading that, "most" might be too strong a word - "many" would be more accurate. A few recent examples of games I've tried:
- Borderlands 4 was basically unplayable on my hardware (9800 X3D, 3080 TI) - though I didn't care enough to try and fix it.
- Dune Awakening was decent, but noticeably less performant, stuttery, etc. Probably fixable with some settings tweaks and other stuff, but the experience was markedly worse than windows out of the box.
- ARC Raiders runs fantastic - but even still, it had noticeable visual issues particularly with shadows
General issues:
- It seems to vary by desktop environment how confused steam and/or the games were as to which monitor to play the game on
- Steam itself required some futzing to get big picture to use hardware rendering (software rendering is very laggy)
- Multiple games seemed confused what my native resolution was
- Mouse issues with multi-monitor setup in several games (though sometimes this is an issue in windows too)
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this. If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that impo…
I gave it a try. Got a steam deck, tries steam os on my desktop. I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then…
I was in the same boat. You should try running an AI agent to solve your problems. Works like a charm. Most of the times. The times it doesn't, it wasn't worth it anyway.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It isn't complicated Getting reliable, consistent, meaningful performance numbers is in fact, extremely complicated: * You need a consistent way to reproduce the exact same outputs - accounting for things like the game's RNG. You can't just walk around and snap the FPS counter in the corner of the screen and call that good. * For Windows (and occasionally Linux) you need to ensure nothing is running that will taint…
You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games. >nothing is running that…
> You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games.
Benchmarking is uncomplicated in the sense that you can press a button and watch the pretty things on-screen and get it to spit out a number; but is your room a little hotter than usual today? Was something downloading in the background? Did you have a transient network issue that caused some process to stall and eat some CPU time? Is one of your fans running a little slower than usual? Did you wait for the precomputed shaders to fully compile? What about the ones Steam supplies?
It's not about fun, it's tedious work. But without proper controls in place, data is just noise.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You act like cheating is new to video games?? No, I think the point is that with AI the existing anti-cheat measures can simply be avoided by letting the AI play through the same interface as a human. Therefore anti-cheat kernel modules will no longer be useful, and will no longer be a reason to stay on Windows.
Chess anti-cheat now relies on looking at your moves and spotting mistakes. Not even grandmasters play tactically perfect games so this works pretty well for finding cheaters. In theory FPS games could do the same to detect aimbotting.
So now we're using an AI cheat snoop to detect the behaviours of AIs, which means the cheat AI will need to learn to avoid the tell-tale patterns the AI cheat snoop looks for and avoid them, which mean the AI cheat snoop will need to....
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes game-breaking). That's an interesting experience, I'd be interested to hear more. There certainly are games that do not work well, no question, but as far as I'm aware it's a pretty small minority. To my knowledge, the two biggest issues are anti-cheat and video codecs, both of which are business/legal problems, not technical issues. Are…
Re-reading that, "most" might be too strong a word - "many" would be more accurate. A few recent examples of games I've tried: - Borderlands 4 was basically unplayable on my hardware (9800 X3D, 3080 TI) - though I didn't care enough to try and fix it. - Dune Awakening was decent, but noticeably less performant, stuttery, etc. Probably fixable with some settings tweaks and other stuff, but the experience was markedly…
"Many" is definitely more in line with what I'd expect, yeah :) Sounds like most of your issues are multi-monitor & windowing related, which isn't surprising.
Games make a lot of assumptions based on how Windows's one-and-only window manager operates, stuff like windowing message and focus event sequences, effects of various windowing states on window sizes and chrome and mouse cursor behavior, and so on. Linux WMs don't match Windows's behavior or even other WM behaviors, so it's a nightmare trying to get every WM to align to how every game expects Windows's WM to behave. Then multi-monitor adds another layer on top of that, for things like reporting resolutions, cursor behavior, window focus, etc.
We focused on the big 2 (Gnome & KDE) on X11, and personally I use multi-monitor XFCE on X11 so I was quite motivated to get games working well there, too. Plus SteamOS's compositor/manager on Wayland, obviously. But there's so many combinations affected by so many things (I didn't even mention graphics driver behaviors on any of the above...) it's just really hard to get right as you add more little edge cases. And as you said, many games get it wrong on Windows, too. We'd often reproduce bugs on Windows just as they were reported against Proton.
All that is to say, yeah, I believe that has been your experience now that you've explained a bit more :)
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#558The only reason I have a dual-boot Windows setup now is for MSFS2024 and DCS. They will probably be the last to ever get full-Linux support (if ever).
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
the minute linux solves kernel level anti-cheat is the minute it wins the OS war, tons of friends have only windows on their PCs because of valorant or other multiplayer online game that uses anticheat.
"Linux" doesn't need to do anything here. What's missing is for anticheat vendors to develop kernel modules for Linux in addition to their Windows drivers. I personally hope they never do, because present day anticheat systems are literally closed-source rootkits. You should not let that software onto any computer you own. But then I don't really have a horse in the race, because I don't find competitive gaming with…
You let the people run their own servers and kick cheaters. That's one solution which has actively been taken away over the years.
Re: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
#560Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old). The laptop actually has plenty of power for the games I play, but I underclock to keep the heat/fan speeds down (been doing the same on the win10 install on the same system), still getting acceptable framer…
This is exactly why Proton feels like the pragmatic path. Native ports are nice in theory, but PC games are rarely just one clean executable anymore
I'd argue that "native" is much more of a state of mind than a clear delineation anyways.
Among many game developer studios, the Steamdeck is increasingly becoming the defacto low-spec hardware target. Running their game on a Steamdeck becomes a core part of the QA process, because there's a few million Steamdecks out there actively playing games, and if your game runs on a Steamdeck you basically know it'll also run on a very wide range of hardware configs.
So while the game might be targeting a different API than the standard ones exposed on Linux machines, a lot of games now are directly designing their software to make sure they run well on a Linux handheld. Meanwhile, Linux is adopting more and more features to better support this non-standard API set.
At a certain point I think we can just call Proton/WINE a 'native' API for gaming on Linux, and say that games developed with Proton/WINE in mind are native games.
Perhaps we're not at that point yet, but we might be there soon.