I don’t get it. Aren’t there supposed to be standards for this? I would expect any random headset to plug into the headset and microphone ports and Just Work, and ditto for USB or Bluetooth headsets that report themselves as the appropriate device class.
@ObviouslyNotBanana@grue it's much better now than when people were using jack incantations and trying to figure a whole host of stuff out, which in most cases was hardware specific and very esoteric, needless to speak of people chasing lowlatency setups, in so many weird directions that afew people actually came up with kernel patches to apparently make the whole thing have 0 xruns. Yeah, absolutely weird, better that this doesn't happen anymore hopefully
True, but even still the weirdness is more about getting audio routed to and from the right devices, not about getting the devices themselves to work correctly in terms of drivers.
I would expect any random headset to plug into the headset and microphone ports and Just Work, and ditto for USB
For the most part these days, they do. But OP asked about wireless.
or Bluetooth headsets that report themselves as the appropriate device class.
The problem with Bluetooth is not the operating system or drivers, but Bluetooth itself. The spec famously lacks provisions for good quality stereo output with good quality input at the same time. This is why many wireless headsets use a (non-Bluetooth) dongle.
I use the “barracuda X” it’s black no RGB. It has both Bluetooth and low latency wireless.
I use it mainly in Windows (work/gaming) and PS5 (gaming).
In Linux I used it for gaming too. The only difference is that sometimes the gain in the drivers is very high. But I think it could be my problem (for messing with the drivers in the past months) maybe I need a clean install.
I can’t remember well. But: price in the X was good enough for me like 100€ maybe a bit less.
And secondly. The detachable microphone that can be located close to the mouth. That was a deal breaker for me because I use the headset to work (Microsoft teams) and play with friends (Warzone). And I like my voice to be as clear as possible. Especially if I have the windows open and some background noise.
So in short. I prefer unidirectional microphones that point to your mouth and if they are closer (so the gain doesn’t need to be high), better.
Sennheiser audio quality, with a bit meh but still above average mic, (wireless bandwidth limit I assume).
What really makes these my favorite wireless pair ever, is the truly insane battery life. 100 hours, enough that by the time you get the low battery warning, you can still finish gaming for the day, and the next, and then plug them in to charge. They go into standby on their own, I’ve only ever touched the power button to turn them on the couple times I completely drained the battery.
What do you mean by surround? Headsets either have good stereo or they don’t. Are you referring to virtual 7.1 surround that basically all cheap gaming headsets advertise? (it doesn’t work, there’s a reason Sennheiser, an actual audio company, doesn’t bother) I have never once used the feature on a headset that supports it. You have two ears, the headset has two speakers. Either the game has good positional audio or it doesn’t, some extra processing in the middle has never been able to fix that imo. The GSP 670 seal well and positioning footsteps or gunshots has been easier than on any previous set I’ve had.
And they work perfect on linux, they use a usb dongle and are detected like any other usb audio device.
Maybe “Spatial audio” fits my description better than “surround sound”. I wasn’t quite sure whether additional processing is mandatory for realistic ingame sound. Back in the day (long long ago), EAX 4.0 was a huge improvement above direct sound. I guess that has changed, luckily!
Long story short: What I’m looking for is an immersive sound simulation for ingame environments, and I don’t like to lack behind proprietary solutions.
A really good stereo pair is ideal, something that gets the audio into your ear as clean as possible. I like closed because it’s easier to hear the quiet sounds as well as the loud ones, I’m often the first to pick up an approaching squad in apex with my friends.
In modern games all the advanced spatial processing is done by the game engine.
That was always going to be the best way to do it, as the game engine can account for not just the position in space of a sound source, but the geometry around it.
“Surround” only makes sense when dealing with a physical set of speakers. While with a stereo headset feeding audio into each ear, modern games are able to positionally process and place audio at any point around you.
Virtual 7.1 surround is just a worse way to do the same thing, and often in a way that ruins the audio quality. Not to mention it’s a standard for 7 discrete points of audio, not truly 360 degree spatial placement. But it can be done for cheap in software, no matter how crappy the hardware, so gaming peripheral manufacturers keep slapping it on as a marketing gimmick.
TLDR: Good clean stereo is worth way more than support for some BS “processing”, modern games already process audio positionally and turn that into the appropriate stereo signal for your two ears.
Bluetooth protocol. Many Bluetooth headsets switch to a low-bandwidth but full-duplex mode when used as a headset. As a result you can hear and be heard at the same time, but at abysmal quality. Think old phone. You want a headset that supports at least AptX, which supports full-duplex communication at reasonable bandwidth and thus quality.
Spatial audio. Don’t bother! It’s a non-issue that you can replicate in software, with the help of pipewire. I wouldn’t spend money on it.
I’d stay away from proprietary 2.4GHz connectors and stick with plain Bluetooth, as that doesn’t require a specialised driver that possibly requires support from the vendor.
@Chais@n3cr0 how do you replicate that with pipewire anyway? Sure, you can rig up the nodes and all, but are games actually outputting surround nowadays, or how do you benefit from all that work?
Since pipewire is the default in Nobara (I recently started with it), I hope I don’t need to care too much about it (fingers crossed!). What I want to achieve is a realistic feeling of the room accoustics in games. I recently noticed that in Cyberpunk 2077 (windows, with the xbox headset): I could close my eyes and still tell where I am in the game.
Exactly. You set up the virtual sink for 5.1 output and make pipewire convolute the signal with a suitable impulse response to turn it into a stereo signal that sounds like it’s coming from the correct direction. And yes, most games will output surround sound, given the option.
@Chais do games actually output 5.1 nowadays? Most of those I know use libraries like steamaudio, which simulates it using in-app hrtf, mixing the signal on its own
What I usually do is set the headset to act as speaker only and use either my laptop microphone or webcam mic as input. That way I get the higher quality for the output at least. Still annoying and not optimal though.
a headset that supports at least AptX, which supports full-duplex communication at reasonable bandwidth and thus quality
Specifically, I think you mean AptX Low Latency. FastStream can reportedly do this as well. Both are nonstandard extensions to Bluetooth, so we have to look for them as features rather than assuming they’ll be present.
I’d rather go with proprietary 2.4 GHz than only Bluetooth. Especially because many 2.4 GHz devices have Bluetooth additionally.
To me, Bluetooth has too many latency and quality problems if used for a long time or gaming. It’s one reason I’m still sticking to headphones with external DAC on my pc.
I have a pair of Sony WH-H900N and they work fine over bluetooth. I use it for Hunt Showdown, in which hearing your enemy is very important. I can tell pretty easily which way another player is, what they’re stepping on, if they’re running or walking, if they’re above or below, etc.
The build quality however is not very good, it always starts in noise canceling mode which I don’t want, and recently it has started to try to deafen me by playing a loud buzzing noise at max volume. I’m careful now not to put them on before turning them on.
I’ve been looking at a pair of SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless to replace them but I can’t justify the purchase right now.
Steelseries Arctis 1 for sure. Hits all the right spots and is reasonably priced.
The connection is made through a usb c dongle but I prefer it that way because it lets me be use bluetooth for controllers instead. Also has a detachable mic and a headset jack.
When I pulled the trigger on moving my old gaming laptop to Nobara Linux I was able to get ME1/2LE running at 60 FPS stable with an i7-7000 series and a 1050 GPU (1920x1080.)
That machine never got me stable performance running windows, ever. Even when those specs were reasonable 8 years ago.
I doubt there are any. It’s not like it involved stolen code or anything like that, it’s just an open source driver developed by a third party, of which there are many. And Nvidia have if anything been less hostile to OSS drivers in recent years, including some of their own OSS work for the kernel side (they aren’t remotely close to AMD or Intel in this respect, however).
In Linux Mint MATE 20.3, I’m getting errors basically saying I need GCC 2.32 or higher. I have GCC 2.31, and actually did find, download and compile GCC 2.32, but online tutorials say to only run GCC 2.32+ from the home directory, otherwise it’ll likely break other packages short of an OS upgrade.
I’m not in any rush to upgrade past this LTS version, nor can I get TR1X to recognize whatever it needs from GCC 2.32 from the home directory.
Any advice, that hopefully doesn’t involve upgrading Linux itself? I don’t quite have enough free space to even consider an OS upgrade right now…
Ah, no I haven’t tried that yet, but it sure sounds like a plan. I’m not at my computer right now, but I’ll definitely try that this evening or as soon as I can.
If this is a gaming only computer and you don’t want to go off fussing with installing packages from other sources and maintaining a hybrid system, just install Nobara Linux.
Doesn’t look…very user-friendly? As a lazy ubuntu/deb user, I’m a bit concerned about jumping to rpm/arch…Isn’t there any other alternatives that are ubuntu/debian-based with KDE?
That’s kinda why I said “if it’s a gaming-only computer”. Nobara is the best and simplest out-of-the-box experience for gaming. Do everything through the GUI, treat it like an appliance-ish. Updates, packages, it’s all got its own GUI.
My gaming PC runs a mix of Debian testing with some stuff pulled in from sid and some stuff from experimental (just Mesa, really), plus a Xanmod kernel which updates frequently (I’m not convinced the patches make much difference).
I did all this because I’m a long time Debian user (going almost 3 decades) and I wanted the computer for a bit more than gaming. It’s not without its issues though, and I find myself frequently tinkering and troubleshooting.
I still have a Nobara partition that I can boot into, update and trust that it will be game-ready without fuss.
So…how did you get that damn partition working?? I’ve just tried it. Which required me an EFI partition of at least 600MB. I already had it at 500MB but apparently it didn’t think that was enough…So I had to reinstall all of windows in order to resize the EFI. Then Nobara installer was happy when I chose the EFI partition as “/boot/efi”, and 500GB at the end of the same SSD as “/”. After a reinstall, reboot…and it goes to Windows. Ugh. Manually choosing from the BIOS the new “Fedora” entry I get a grub crash. start_image returned “not found”…Wtf? For a “simplified” installation, this is resulting quite the PITA.
EDIT: OMG…figured it out, but holy cow. The installer is rather borked. It demands 600MB for /boot/efi, which at least this, it warns you of. BUT. It will install without warnings a full system and then crap out, if you ignore a very specific requisite not mentioned anywhere during the install! You need at least a 1GB ext4 partition somewhere for /boot. Ignore this, and you’re crapped.
Oh wow, that sounds fucked up. I don’t remember the ext4 requirement for /boot but after reading your comment the EFI stuff came back to me. I also thought it was weird and painful.
Anyway, glad you sorted it out. It should (hopefully) be smooth sailing from here.
Sigh…Thanks. I wish it was. I just ran the same Alan Wake install on the provided Lutris and well…the Textures are indeed fixed, I can see the FBI jackets and the faces look better…but now performance is abysmal, with frame drops to 10-15fps (1080p all max)…and RT is not even enabled (still grayed out), checked both in Wayland and X11. I think for a 7800XT I should be getting much better as long as RT or Path Tracing is not running.
EDIT: Seems this happens only with AW2. Cyberpunk and Starfield seem to have similar performance as before. So there’s something going on with AW2 in Nobara.
It…took some adapting on my case. Quite a few bits and bobs don’t quite work the way I intended at boot…but it’s starting to settle after a week of fiddling with it.
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