Windows:
Linux:
“Ignore the cat pic”
How???I’m not exactly playing anything new but I’ve been playing Grounded (the first one) on Window for like 2 months. My computer was so hot it was warming up my entire room.
I switched to Linux due to other Microsoft issues and decided to give it another shot. Man, my computer doesn’t really get warm at all. Like yeah I can see the temp monitor change a little bit but not much. There’s no hot air pouring out of my PC. I’m not sweating sitting next to it.
I’ve made no changes to any game settings (other than using proton) or hardware changes. It’s an insane difference.
I love Vulkan so much. Having everything precompiled ahead of time is probably a big contributing factor on why your machine is running cooler. It’s just pulling from the shader cache instead of doing on the fly computation for shaders.
That makes sense. I’m still new to all this so I’m kinda learning as I go.
The long and short of it is that Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs are extremely explicit. As the game developer, you tell the GPU exactly what resources are being used, when they’re available, and how work is synchronized. Once you’ve built those command buffers, the driver mostly just submits them to the hardware “fire and forget” style basically.
Older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11 were much higher level. You described what you wanted to draw, and the graphics driver figured out resource transitions, synchronization, and a lot of the scheduling behind the scenes. That made them easier to use but also added CPU overhead and made performance less predictable.
Oh wow, wonder why that is! Microslop is only here to slowly but surely make your computer a slave to their system, Linux along with pretty much all FOSS are here to keep your computer yours (some exceptions sadly exist)
Ignores the post, read the cat
I will ignore everything but the cat. I demand more pics of the cat.
:3
How much did you do to optimize on both systems beyond the in-game settings?
Most Linux benchmarks I see have a completely stripped down version of Linux and a bloated version of Windows with tons of running background services just to get similar performance.
And those stutters are a much bigger problem than the 6fps gain.
bloated version of Windows
So Windows
I will not ignore the cat pic, in fact I enjoyed it, tyvm.
Same. This is now a cat thread.
In many games it does, but I’m not sure this comparison is a good example of that, as it shows persistent CPU stutter on Linux. With those spikes, Windows would be the smoother experience even if the average frametimes are slightly better on Linux.
As I… think has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you can run Gamescope + Proton + Wayland, and force the refresh rate.
You can do this with xrandr or sometimes some games actually expose it as a thing you can directly configure.
Presumably, you could set this to, for this example, 90, and probably help out the frame timing variance a bit.
Yeah I’m not sure what’s up with that, maybe OP needs to try a different scheduler?
I will not ignore the cat.
Does the cat use Arch, BTW?
Fun fact: cats use arch all the time, btw
How is there not an Arch-derived distro that uses a cat in the shape of the Arch logo for their logo?
ignore cat pic
How does it handle ray tracing?
how does anything handle raytracing? I watched a friend with a 5090 show off his bullshit money rig and maybe it was a 4k monitor or something, I didn’t check, but it wasn’t performant enough to impress me at that price range. Its probably also lack of optimization and nobody ever leaving the default unreal engine visuals.
Just living in an alternate reality here.
My 4090 handles cyberpunk 4k with path tracing at 120+ FPS.
Linux is objectively inferior when it comes to high fidelity gaming and it very clearly triggers linux nerds.
ITT: OP learns why reviewers take days to provide benchmarks for games. If you don’t come with receipts, it’s death by a thousand buts.
I once posted on /r/MacGaming how pleased I was that I could run Horizon Zero Dawn on my M2 Air using Crossover, and how it seemed (to me) to run better than on my massive, old, water-cooled PC with an Nvidia GTX1060. I wasn’t getting 120fps or anything, in fact, it was closer to 20fps at times. But I was running HZD on a fanless laptop, on an architecture on which it was never designed to run.
Foolishly, I was expecting a chorus of folks saying “yeah, cool, nice!”, but what I actually got were a bunch of folks demanding proof.
So I closed Reddit, because it wasn’t worth the arsehole.
Cool cool. Now if only linux worked on my PC. Tried like 6 distros and each had their own issues preventing me from playing games.
Kind of curious about the hardware, because this seems kind of unlikely.
Ryzen 7 5800x with 32GB ram and a rtx3070.
Some systems failed to install or failed to complete the setup after installing. While others did technically work but the experience was just bad. Most games I tried ran like shit conpared to win11.
Hows your hardware?
Memtest your RAM?
HDD or SSD? How old are they, they got any problems?
If you keep hitting problems on connecting to timezone, it might be your wifi chip / card, could be that its an odd duck that still has driver quirks on linux, + is maybe physically damaged… could lead to a lot of nonsense if you are actually grabbing malformed core files from a not fully offline install.
Hardware’s fine I think. Using a 4th gen m.2 no real issues and most pf the stuff is about 6 years old. The only distro I had timezone issues with was Fedora
Ok so ‘I think’ is not the same as ‘yes I tested it and I know’.
But anyway… yeah you’d have to give a more detailed description of… well, pick one particular attempt at an OS install, and specifically describe what did or did not work, with that one.
I’m not trying to be an ass, but its basically impossible to troubleshoot when the info you have is ‘i tried a bunch of things and they all didn’t work in different ways’.
Gotta be able to go through an actual diagnosis of a defined scenario.
I know. Well I never tested stuff because apart from shit nvidia drivers I never had issues on windows. What would you like me to test anyway? Memtest or give some suggestions.
The only real tangible issue was the one I mentioned on fedora with the timezone selection issue. All the other distros either did nowlt want to install or just had general performance issues either in the DE or just in games. Especially the 2 games I really only care about. Squad 44 and War thunder (the only ones I actually play) both ran like shit on all the distros I tried (bazzite, nobara, debian, cachyOS)
Well… ok, let me try to respond broadly, first, then more narrowly, second.
Nvidia drivers are also shit on Linux.
To install Nvidia drivers on Linux, you actually have to install an entire custom kernel, much of which is propietary, not open source, other people cannot see the actual code.
This means that you basically have to pick a particular Nvidia driver/kernel, and build a Linux OS around it… with the added difficulty of… if Nvidia updates its drivers, well now the OS has to check literally every possible thing they could have changed, while not being able to directly see those things that may or may not have changed.
This… is significantly harder to do to a 100% OS stability/functionality assured level… than with AMD, who open sources their entire Linux drivers.
(I am not sure what the status is here for Intel GPUs)
So, yeah, basically, a shitty broken Nvidia driver update, on Linux, in comparison to Windows, has the additional capacity to potentially break literally all of your OS.
There is an open source version of Nvidia drivers, the Nouveau drivers, that are much more broadly compatible with various Linux distros… but its basically unofficial, a bunch of people trying to reverse engineer the official, blackbox, propietary Nvidia drivers.
So… it usually significantly lags behind the propietary drivers in terms of up to date features and optimization and newer game support.
There’s a good write up on this here, if you eant more details:
https://machaddr.substack.com/p/nouveau-vs-nvidia-the-battle-between
So, IMO, a more sane approach than just going bleeding edge with your Nvidia driver/kernel, is to use an OS that semi-regularly rebases itself around the latest stable Nvidia driver/kernel.
Of the OSs you listed, Bazzite is the most straight forward and also reliable, in that way.
Debian is exceedingly stable, but, requires you to learn learn how to use it properly… you have to find an Nvidia driver/kernel that is basically compatible with your version of Debian, then stick with that untill Debian does a full new version of itself, about once a year I think.
Nobara and Cachy are basically bleeding edge; more frequent updates to latest Nvidia versions, but also this means greater chance something breaks and doesn’t get noticed or fixed for a bit.
Now to try to be more specific:
When you say you only ran into timezone issues on ‘fedora’, do you mean standard mainline fedora?
Or does that include Nobara and Bazzite? They are both based on Fedora, basically customized versions of Fedora.
You also say your main use case concern here is WarThunder and Squad 44, the latter I think meaning the WW2 submod of Squad? Or is it actuslly a fully distinct game at this point… I haven’t kept up.
(Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)
So anyway… both of those use kernel level anticheat.
Kernel level anticheat tends to not play super well with Linux. Because… well now we have another thing fucking with the kernel, in addition to Nvidia!
Another thing that is not open source, that is a black box, that works in ways other people don’t know about, and can again change something rather important, which can potentially break a lot of other things.
It is hard to build an OS around kernel cores when the kernel itself is a mystery to those designing the OS.
While Squad proper implements EAC in a way that does work on Linux, Squad 44 doesn’t appear to. So, Offworld would have to… do that.
WarThunder on the other hand implements BattleEye in a way that works on Linux, but my guess would be they have not prioritized optimizing it much.
I dunno, what uh… what kinds of frame rate and such differences were you getting on which OS and which gfx settings vs … same gfx settings on Win10 or Win11?
It’s unlikely to be a hardware issue if Windows works fine for them.
Didn’t valve test this sort of thing over a decade ago and found Linux to easily get better performance?
Yes.
Kind of.
Its… why they spent that decade making Proton, and now basically have an OS based off of it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200504112412/http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
with the caveat that that was opengl vs directx9 accross operating systems and not necessarily “easy”. but it did make an important point that linux could run workloads like games in a very viable fashion.
