That's great news! Linux gaming is increasingly taken more seriously.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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I remember back in the day, running Quake3 on linux provided better FPS than on windows. I haven't compared the two since then on any game.
Is it still the case? And is this difference (mostly) there in other games too?
On AMD, it’s not uncommon for games to perform better than on Windows.
For Nvidia, games almost always perform worse than on Windows.
Well, no surprise, AMD's cooperation with Linux/Mesa/etc. devs is longer and deeper than Nvidia's. In fact, when Linus Torvalds was asked about how cooperative Nvidia are, he gave them the finger.
For all the flak they (rightfully!) get, a 1st party open source nvidia driver is in the works.
Altough it's only the userspace part and it's not compliant (yet?) to be upstreamed into the kernel. It is still something.
Your nvidia information might be outdated since driver version 560.x. And I'm getting tired of the anti nvidia circlejerk in the Linux communities on lemmy.
At least Shadow of the Tomb Raider (+20fps) and Cyberpunk (+5fps) run better than they did on windows with the same settings, for me. And those are the only games I tested, because they are the only AAA titles I own that come with a performance test.
I'm not defending nvidia here, there are still issues like missing multi monitor vrr or a few (!) titles that are too broken to play. And it's not as much of an out of the box experience as it is with AMD.
But for most people that own an nvidia card it's probably already a good idea to make the switch from windows.
So, to anyone owning a nvidia card having doubts: feel free to try things out!
You're pretty brave to call us "circlejerk" and then agree that there are flaws in drivers.
For you this can work. For my wife the nvidia works also. I mean, almost. Wayland buggy, poor VRAM management, from time to time fights with drivers. Compared to that my AMD journey is "set and forget".
I mean, yes, make a switch and test things out. But once you settle down on Linux OS, Nvidia is the worst choice you can make for purchase. World's shifting towards Wayland and it's not even worth your time to go and run Steam in Gamescope on Nvidia. And did you notice the push from distros to switch to wayland? Right now NV is same experience as was anything 10 years ago - hit or miss.
Just don't call anybody jerk when you don't share their experience. You are very low statistical sample and there are lots of us in the wild having real troubles with green team
I'm not calling anyone jerk. I just don't like that every discussion involves 'nvidia bad' on here. That, to me, is a circlejerk. And repeatedly summing up the situation as 'nvidia is so bad, don't use it' puts people off from making the jump and consequently doesn't help the growth of linux in general, which doesn't help you, me or anyone else.
If I had feared about nvidia drivers, I wouldn't have been using Linux for 4 years straight now. Mint supported my 1060 and 2060 before now, PopOS was fantastic aside from a quirk with waking the screens with the 2060, and honestly those issues have worsened with AMD now. Admittedly I haven't tried much to remedy it as it's as simple as turning off my monitors.
But if you never try, you can never know 🤷♂️
Borderlands 3 performed better on Linux for me with a 1650
To provide some additional anecdotes to support jul's comment. I've personally been experiencing better performance than windows even with nvidia. Though it does vary per game, with the occasional workaround especially when going outside the realm of plug and play to mod games.
I'd say most games are great, the "10% low" games are still good, and the "1% lows" where things just don't work are pretty rare but sometimes there is a fix. Proton.db is a good resource for those instances.
And being honest... windows has those moments too, people just ignore them because windows is the ubiquitous gaming OS.
It's a lot better than when I had last "tried" and it may be more impactful to bring up that this time I haven't gone back even once, and I actually went ahead and pulled the plug on my windows partition.
Linux is just better now, there's one thing windows had but I gave it up. Linux is just better for most things now and to make that win even better.. windows has increasingly been becoming worse than itself.
there are edge cases where linux performa better, especially with older apis because dx9/dx11 to vulkan allows for more draw calls than thr native language can do.
then you have rare situations like elden rings launch ehere shader caching was broken on windows and vulkans shader caching on linux worked making elden ring play better on linux
Do you think most games might perform better on linux in the future? When game makers put more effort towards optimising for linux considering linux has less bloatware etc?
Do you think most games might perform better on linux in the future?
maybe, depends on steamOS hardware adoption rate. You're far more likely going to see windows regress in performance rather than linux get better upper tier performance on average (imo)
When game makers put more effort towards optimising for linux considering linux has less bloatware etc?
theyll optimize for linux whent he market grows enough for it, which I personalyl believe will only happen when Linux gets at least ~30% of the steam hardware survey OS market.
not many devs will spend time to cater to 2% of the steam market.
Given that quite a few consoles use Linux or a variety of it, it's definitely coming around. Plus s lot of video game creation engines now have a Linux export option.
Quite a few games work better on Linux now than windows.
World of Warcraft was a big one, it was faster on wine than native windows
The Sims 2 performs better on Linux than it ever did on Windows.
Y'know, for what it's worth.
Mad Max too, my computer doesnt heat up and the framerate is smoother when I'm not running 6gb ram worth of bloatware before the game
I remember playing Neverwinter Nights and running it on Linux providing a more stable and clean experience than on Windows. Even modding it was easier.
Steve's so based.
That would be great.
Windows gamers and reviewers seemed to not realize AMD cpu performance was nerfed on Windows until the latest gen AMD release. From time to time there have also been issues with Windows scheduling for Intel cpus. Including a competing OS in comparisons allows reviewers to sanity check stuff like that. Wendell had the most balanced reviews because he was presenting cross platform and productivity along with Windows gaming performance. When Microsoft held a monopoly that sort of reviewing wasn't possible. You had no idea if Windows was nerfing particular platforms or why.
Overall Linux gaming might be worse or some titles really bad but lets get it out in the open. It will be good for all consumers because it will drive improvement.
Finally!
It's the right thing to do. Windows isn't nearly as stable or reproducible as a testing platform anymore and I imagine it's a PITA to handle for benchmarking dozens of not hundreds of hardware configs.
Of course they'll still do those Windows tests, not suggesting they won't, but Linux may become a more useful benchmarking platform for reviewers thanks to the control and automation it provides.
A whole host of configurations can be quickly booted and tested on a benchmark suite to confirm performance of older hardware and provide context, whilst newer products can get a bespoke review on all platforms. If a new benchmark game comes out, it'll be way easier to insert into the Linux setups than Windows.
SteamOS is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting. I reckon there are quite a few people who are waiting for its release before trying Linux.
Does SteamOS even have functional desktop, or is it just Steam big picture wrapper thing?
It uses KDE for that
Yep. What I was meaning, will SteamOS boot right into KDE and be a computer operating system first, or boot into big picture mode and be a gaming system first.
@PetulantBandicoot @bdonvr It's more advanced than a "Steam Big Picture Wrapper thing". When you're in gaming mode it runs it's own gamescope window manager, etc. In desktop mode it's full plasma with KWin. I'd expect it would boot into gaming mode first, with desktop as something you can switch to.
Yes, on the Steam Deck you can restart into KDE.
I reckon there are quite a few people who are waiting for its release before trying Linux.
I always recommend against it people wanting a gaming linux desktop
SteamOS being an immutable operating system works a bit different to most well known operating systems
albeit this also makes any breackage almost impossible
I am pretty sure even LTT Linus said he was waiting for a SteamOS release before trying again. I was thinking, like damn dude, if you can't use PopOS, how will this be any different for you.
albeit this also makes any breackage almost impossible
Maybe, just maybe, this will stop people like him from catastrophically uninstalling their entire desktop environment.
It boots into Game scope (as others said, it's not "big picture mode" it's a compositor stack tailored for high gaming performance) but it's nothing more than an immutable arch distribution (and immutability can be disabled for tweaking) so you could definitely swap the defaults if someone has documented how.
Would be a nice feature to have once SteamOS becomes independent of the deck.
Yes, but it is also set up as an OS image.
I think there is a process for persistence, but without some effort, changes are lost for OS updates.
Changes aren't lost on update. If you enable a sudo user/password, and make changes to the system that way, those changes can be lost when applying the new system image.
Its an immutable Arch-based distro and you have full readwrite to your home directory and all config, settings, and files within persist.
Even the stuff in the "immutable" section isn't necessarily wiped, it's more that there is a strong chance changes may be overwritten. I'd definitely make no guarantees to anything stored on the immutable sections of SteamOS.
Does SteamOS even have functional desktop
Unlike Windows, yes. It does.
Can't wait, bazzite is niffty but In my exp SteamOS worked best.
I think they should at least do an annual "Year of the Linux desktop!" episode!