“One thing that I think is clear at this point, is that the […] traditional Wine to X11 server is becoming less and less relevant as time goes by, and I don’t think it’s going to be an important consideration in the long term.”
I’m sure it’ll still work for the next 20 years, but RIP DEs and other Unix OSes that don’t move to Wayland by then. Wine was originally made to target X11, so the fact its willing to shift its base ideology so much shows that it’s still a nimble project.
It turns out Google has been sponsoring some of this work for the Wine Wayland driver.
Some people are against it, but I always love seeing companies being the sponsors of upstream projects (who knew Valve was secretly sponsoring KDE devs for so long?)
Combination, and it depends on the game. Dxvk will add latency, but depending on the renderer and how the game runs the reduction in CPU overhead by using dxvk instead of native can provide performance gains, especially on certain CPU’s.
On games with a native vulkan renderer, Linux will most often just be faster since you have less system overhead burden. This has been fascinating to see though.
First the games started to become playable, but framerates weren’t so great.
Framerates started to improve
Framerates started to become a wash between Windows vs Linux
We are progressing into this step: it either runs comparably or better.
The results are mixed right now, and it’s going to be real hard to nail down predictability as far as performance goes. More often than not, so long as DRM isn’t involved, games run really well on day one. Older games are starting to see a performance uplift and reliability improvements through proton/dxvk/vkd3d.
I’m very happy though that what we’re talking about is comparable performance metrics. We use to be content if the shit ran at all.
One comment to add to your post, Linux is better on performances not just because of the less overhead, but because manages resources much effectively. You could have a bloated linux, it still would perform better because resources are properly managed
That’s an absolutely correct and very relevant point. On any equivalent computational loads, Linux comes out ontop. Better scheduler, better I/O, better stack.
Yes but it’s very much an afterthought. Their notion of using containers and the Job Objects is largely a bolted on approach. If you look into the Job Objects, that would be what I can think of as the closest equivalent.
Could be both. Who knows. For high performance computing Linux is the de facto standard because it has better performances than windows, and Linux distros are usually better, stabler OSes overall when one needs raw performances. In this case, who knows, someone should investigate further
Tbf, on Linux performances for hpc are better even on standard desktop distros, no need to clean it up. It manages resources and jobs much better. For performances that is the critical part, once the code is optimized.
I think it has more to do with Linux being easier to tweak, not some inherent performance difference. You can tweak the scheduler, page sizes, and all manner of other things to get a bit more performance if you know what your workload looks like. So it being open source and ubiquitous is a bigger contributor imo than anything inherent to the design of the kernel.
Regular users aren’t going to go through that level of tweaking, so the difference should be a lot smaller and will benefit more from general code-level optimizations than system tweaks. General purpose, high performance computing works just fine on Windows, it’s just easier to tweak Linux for production compute use cases.
No no, it is better. Take a real hpc library, install debian and test it yourself. No tweak needed. Linux as kernel and the overall OS manages resources much better. Linux is a better kernel than windows kernel.
I’ve been doing hpc for over 15 years now. People install standard distros on their workstations and clusters. No tweak needed
How big are we talking? I looked and couldn’t find benchmarks, but then again I’m not familiar enough with HPC to know what benchmarks to look for.
I’ve been Linux exclusive for something like 15 years now (before Steam even came to Linux), so I’m not exactly familiar with Windows performance on the stuff I use. I casually look at larger projects and benchmarks they run (for example, I remember async on Linux vs Windows was a significant issue in the early days of node.js).
I do dabble a bit in hpc, but only on Windows and macOS. I’ve done signal processing and some high thread count number crunching, but I haven’t needed to run benchmarks, just get things running well enough (as in, minutes vs hours, not 10-20% difference).
When I talk about hpc, I don’t talk about a script in Matlab. I talk about the work you do on supercomputers, real computing intensive jobs that takes weeks or months on hundreds or thousands of processors. I guess you don’t find benchmarks simply because no one uses windows, same reason you probably don’t find a fiat panda in the Nürburgring rankings.
K. Everything I’ve done is basically translating a Matlab script to Python using numpy or tensorflow or something. So we’d go from Matlab taking hours to Python taking minutes. The biggest project was a Monte Carlo simulation of signals produced from explosions (looking for seismographic impact) that takes something like 45 min per run when run on our cloud infra.
So something a little more interesting than plotting an FFT if overlaid signals, but still on the simpler end of the spectrum.
We’re nowhere near the point where tuning the OS is interesting, we just use Linux because it’s convenient. I wonder how much of the HPC crowd has a similar perspective, at least until you get to the higher end where tuning the OS becomes important.
You don’t really need to tune the operating system, you just need a good one. The hpc crowd has a pretty unique perspective. You won’t find anyone doing any real hpc on windows, not even Microsoft
I just have to comment here about the “like getting a new GPU”, because do people really upgrade that frequently? I generally see a much bigger jump in performance when upgrading.
Then why isn’t there a single one of them that picks an AMD OEM device to rebrand? Why sell a Linux gaming laptop at all if the key piece of hardware that makes it a gaming laptop is one with infamously bad Linux driver support?
AFAIK there are no OEMs that build AMD dGPU-equipped laptops. Most “small brand” and Linux-first laptop manufacturers actually sell rebadged Tongfang or Clevo laptops, and 99% of their products are Intel anyway. AMD CPUs are often only found in “gaming” laptops with nVidia dGPUs.
That’s why I’ve put a deposit on a Framework 16. Zen 4 CPU, optional RDNA3 dGPU module, upgradable and repairable. They’re not preinstalling Linux like Tuxedo or Slimbook, but they’re at least Linux-friendly.
Yeah depends on where you are but they’re slowly expanding their operations. I think they should ship at least to the whole EU instead of focusing only on the richest markets, and this might be easier since they opened their new fulfillment center in the Netherlands, but having followed closely the SteamDeck’s launch, I also know that logistics are a pain even for a huge company like Valve. It probably doesn’t make sense yet for suck a “small” operation to spread itself too thin too soon.
My RX6700 based 2022 is a beast. I think Valve did an amazing job with the AMD based Steam deck leveraging Linux as well! You can hook up the little handheld to a monitor or a TV and still have a blast with nearly all of your existing Steam library for not much money.
Honestly I would prefer Linux even if I lost 25% of the performance in games and that’s like the main thing I use a computer for. Windows 10 was such a hassle to set up so it wouldn’t annoy me that I don’t ever want to do it again.
There are like 30 GPO setting needing to be set on a fresh install plus 3th party software to fix issues. I can’t 100% remember what all of it was since I used Windows years ago last but these were some of the issues needing fixing with those:
Setting updates to manual. Once it rebooted to update when I was hosting a server during a lan party, never again.
Disabling driver updates via Windows update. It installed wrong drivers for my sound card so whenever it tried to play a sound I got a BSOD. It also unistalled the correct drivers just to install the wrong ones.
Fixing the start menu search. After Windows 7 that search has been very buggy and it commonly finds a folder or a Web page instead of a locally installed application. In Windows 8 a software named Classic Shell fixed that issue along with making the start menu normal but I can’t remember if I used that in Windows 10 or something else.
Printer compadibility. May be reversed now but one update for Windows 10 broke old printer compadibility intentionally and you needed to add 2 registry settings for my printer to be usable.
One bug windows 10 had that I never did fully solve was my ethernet connection would hang if I tried to transfer a lot of data over local network and the only way to get the connection back was rebooting so the only solution was to limit transfer speed via 3th party software. This issue did not exist in any Linux install or Windows 7 and 8.
In the absence of a gamersnexus video or phoronix article, I’m going to take this with a large grain of salt. Especially when a video like this one is showing much higher performance in windows. The different cpu shouldn’t account for much of a difference when playing at higher resolutions and the benchmarks shows the game being gpu limited.
PSA you can download a savegame with a city pop of 100k to check how well the game will run in later stages. By doing this you can check it and refund it if necessary.
This proves that AC Oddysey runs faster on Linux than on Windows with your specific hardware. What this doesn’t mean is that “Linux gaming is faster and smoother than Windows gaming”.
Counter examples are Overwatch, CS:2, GTA V and many more.
Nobody reasonable doubts that Linux can perform as good or better than Windows, but claiming that this is true for all games is simply misinformation.
Wrong general claims like these lead to posts asking why their specific games run worse on Linux since they switched because they want more fps.
Don’t get me started on older GPU’s like 1000 series Nvidia that have problems with any vkd3d games so the performance is abysmal.
Why is it not enough that almost all games work on Linux with ±15% performance difference?
Not really. Games almost always have some bottleneck and maybe on proton a specific system call is faster. A translation layer doesn’t have much of an performance impact if the individual translations are as fast as native.
The great performance speaks more to the quality of wine, dxvk, vkd3d and other tools developed by very skilled individuals.
I never said ALL games run better on Linux. But on AMD most games do. I cannot fit ALL games in a video. You’re talking in generalities that cannot be proven. I did say more videos will come. Apart from Ray Tracing, gaming on Linux on AMD is both faster and smoother. Can you prove me wrong? Do it. :)
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, as a graphics programmer AMD’s proprietary drivers are unquestionably the buggiest which I have to work with on a regular basis. Seemingly innocent stuff which works perfectly fine on every other vendor (and on the same GPU using the open-source drivers) will cause the proprietary drivers to break horribly or run slower by multiple orders of magnitude.
Yes, it’s great that you actually test Windows and Linux on the same system.
I’m just going off the title since it implies that Linux generally runs Windows games better, which isn’t the norm.
According to the german tech magazin ComputerBase, Linux generally performs much worse on the 1% low fps. Those largely determine how smooth the game actually feels.
This is very interesting. Keep in mind these are all DX12 games and VKD3D is still under heavy dev. Still nice to have it as information. Thank you very much! :)
The reason I chose those games was because I played those popular games for dozens of hours or more on Linux and can confidently say they work great. Additonally they are running on different engines and were released over the course of many years.
I was guessing but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work And yes I know Debain is easy nowadays but regardless I will try Debain or even better MX Linux and Linux mint Debain edition
Delving into the realm of non-rolling distros, yes MX is quite good (sits on top of Debian). I’ve used the latest version on a laptop seeing almost daily use for 1.5 years or so and zero issues. And thread originator is correct, Debian is the gold standard for a stable linux experience.
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