Technology

Gonna fire the first bullet:

(I also use Arch btw)

Crazy how far Linux gaming has come in the past 5 years. From practically non-existent, to now often running games better than the actual OS and graphics API they were designed to run on.

The only major roadblock is some anticheat software requiring highly invasive Windows rootkits to function, which Linux doesn't really work with.

(btw has anybody noticed how people on Reddit/Lemmy are pissed off about Philips, with the financial backing of Sony, doing this on CDs in the late 90s, yet they'll happily install half a dozen other rootkits and data harvesting programs when they install a video game? What's up with that?)

I don't understand why new Linux folks immediately go for Arch-based distros and insist on using Nvidia GPUs. Like, are you guys into suffering or something?

Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmarks

Arch is a gaming-focused Linux OS now lmao

Are we not talking about the author spelling it "Vavle"?

No mention of important metrics like frame times, and 1-0,1% fps lows. You can feel these in game, even if you have 200+ fps.

Makes you wonder how much faster these games could go if Proton wasn't needed.

I'd like to see more configurations tested though. I have a 7950X3D CPU and I'm interested how well Linux handles assigning the "correct" cores (3D cache vs. higher frequency) depending on the game. Would also love to see whether games under Linux further profit from the large cache.

Nice article!

I know it's hearsay but I'll throw in that on my mint rig with a ryzen CPU and nvidia GPU I haven't had any problem with any game I've run through steam in the past 3-4 years. I just buy what I want and fire it up.

I don't play comp games but haven't had issues with the few multiplayer games i be tried

Amazing what happens when you don't use your overhead to run bullshit ads for your Xbox controllers and games.

I recently made the switch to Manjaro.

I feel like these are all kinks that I’ll eventually be able to work out, but these are the issues I’ve faced so far:

Extreme stuttering in Yuzu. It reads 60fps but it is absolutely not. Using the AUR version, since the Flatpak can’t load my roms folder from my NAS. (Before you assume the network drive is the issue, know that it is over a 10g SFP+ on an NVMe on the NAS. No problems in Windows.)

Input issues in AUR Cemu. Cannot get my DS5 controller to work. I think it doesn’t have permissions to write to my config file for some reason so I can’t save my controller settings. Flatpak version works fine though.

Wayland does not support my dual screens on Nvidia. Was hoping that could help with my stuttering issues… shot in the dark.

BeamNG needs to render shaders for about 5mins before loading. Skipping leads to extreme stuttering. That is way too long for startup. Even big Yuzu games don’t take that long.

As an aside I’m pulling my hair out trying to get Google Drive to work properly. rclone is not behaving with Codium - I can’t reliably compile in the mounted drive like I could with Google Drive stream on Windows. Sometimes it compiles and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know why it works sometimes and doesn’t work other times. I need this functionality for work so that’s a bummer.

Also wake from sleep does not work.

I’m not complaining per se, if you have any tips I’m desperate to hear some. But my experience with desktop Linux has been far from smooth and my non scientific experience so far is that performance is much much better on Windows.

But I will stick it out this time. I think this is my fourth time trying to daily drive Linux.

Similar to the overall results, the frame rate difference between each OS was very small, with most titles having an fps delta of less than eight between the fastest and slowest operating systems.

Not enough for me ditch Windows and face Linux adversities.

There's a few things I wonder about with this. They tested an AMD GPU, which is great as it shows off how awesome ACO and the RADV projects are. The Mesa devs alongside the AMD folks contributing to the RADV driver, along with all of Valve's work, showcases how awesome FOSS can be at optimizing. I watched RADV go from underdog to top dog in performance, and it's no longer arguable that AMD hardware works better under Linux than Windows thanks to the stellar work done on those projects.

Meanwhile we have nVidia who clings selfishly to their proprietary blobs, and I can't help but wonder how great it could be if they opened that up and let the community in. Is it already hyper optimized to the point that the community wouldn't be able to improve on it? Idk, but from an infrastructure standpoint, nVidia users would benefit from it immensely, if not from performance.

I recall when vkd3d-proton performance was severely impacted under nVidia, to the tune of a 40% delta, and that's improved significantly, but I still wonder how this would look on an nVidia GPU to compare Windows vs Linux performance.