Most stuff works outside of system anti-cheatl level multiplayer and some visual novels that can be tough to setup sometimes.
Okay, real talk.
I know there’s probably 100 videos on this, but I don’t have time to watch any of them right now…
How much performance is lost/gained from using Linux to play games via proton?
I’m certain any game with a native Linux version will work great, I’m mostly concerned with the ones that need some kind of emulation layer.
colloquially, I hear “5-10% overhead depending on the game and if you’re running mods”
On the other hand, some testing has found that running games on Linux with Proton is actually faster than with Windows on the same hardware, because Windows is such a resource hog.
The hardware in in this test being the Legion Go steamdeck rival.
As I had an older pc this was true most of the time
See, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll have to do more research, but I would think all the overhead from Windows being Windows, would kind of diminish the gap between running it natively on Windows, and using proton or something so you can run it on Linux.
The overhead on both should be fairly similar, though with how Windows is, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was slower.
I guess the beefier your system is the less you will notice the impact of a greedy OS (because thats a fixed/absolute overhead) while the performance hit of having to translate directx through Proton will always be there (because that’s a percent-based overhead for each rendered frame)
So for the most top-end rigs, probably still Windows will squeeze a few more FPS. But it’s close.
At the end of the day Linux and Windows are both pretty comparable for gaming performance, so we shouldn’t worry about that as a deciding factor in which OS to choose, and can decide based on other merits.
Even if there is a slight performance loss, I feel like for the vast majority of games it’s basically irrelevant, especially since most of the examples I see are like maybe 5-15% worse if it’s worse at all.
If you are still over 60FPS then I don’t really see why it’s that much of an issue. Even having 165hz monitors I don’t really notice much difference above 100, as long as the frame rate is consistent.
And as far as I’ve seen for AMD performance will be equal to if not better than Windows. The only issues I’ve seen with performance are Nvidia, but it’s been improving and seems to be “good enough” from what I hear. Also, the more people who switch the more likely that will improve even more.
Yup. I agree. I was just checking to see if that was the case.
I was certainly hoping it was, but I wanted to see what other people’s experiences have been.
Thanks for the conversation.
Even Starcraft???
The only game I couldn’t get to run on Wine was NOLF 1. Everything works except the music, which relies on DirectPlay / DirectMusic.
I would love to swap to Linux if we could get games with kernel level anti cheat to be compatible.
I’ve never seen a harder hard-on than the hard-on Lemmy has for Linux.
More power to you guys, I’m just saying, Linux circlejerking represents like a third of the posts I see when browsing All.
I reckon a result of its reputation as an alternative to “mainstream” sites like Reddit, which is also a STEM-oriented gamer-nerd site disproportionately represented by men. So, tons of dudes on here use Linux professionally and are also of a libertarian mindset that is conducive to Linux evangelism on the basis of an ever-encroaching capitalist authoritarianism. edit: Also adding that I’m sure age is a factor in both the decision to leave other social media sites and a particular intolerance for the surveillant, bloated state of consumer PC’s at this point.
They’re not wrong, Linux is honestly the best route to a decent desktop experience now that Windows is caught in an AI deathloop and the Linux community is expansive enough to support casual users (I don’t care about Apple stuff, but the cost would detract from the experience certainly). I made the switch when it got to the point that Windows literally took more work to use on a daily basis because of how hostile it has become to the user.
There are women who are also pro Linux.
I’ve used it off and on since the early 2000s, but switched full time last year when they were threatening to put the AI stuff in windows.
Also, being queer and the fear of how many companies are bending the knee to fascism I am concerned with privacy.
Yes, I know there are queer people and women on Linux, it wouldn’t exist otherwise. Their use of it doesn’t explain why it’s so prominent on Lemmy though. Most evangelists are STEM men and I used the word “libertarian” very intentionally as most also would not consider the surveillance bad because of its danger to vulnerable groups but rather because of a discomfort with any challenge to private ownership. I do agree with them that the user experience is significantly better on Linux and that alone is a good reason to switch.
I agree, the ability to better control my visibility to an increasingly fascist state is a major benefit of Linux. With that in mind, I think it is very important for antifascists to practice internet sovereignty and build infrastructure that exists independently from the interests of capital.
Well, as far as Lemmy goes most of the people who came over first are people who are technically and privacy oriented. Issues with Reddit causing several exoduses (I think I spelled that right).
What has historically pushed people to use Linux is the same driver for pretty much anything fediverse/activity pub. It’s the early adopters that are going to shape the discourse for a while. I think Reddit was the same way at the start as was Digg.
Your average non-techie is less likely to want to figure out how to use Lemmy over just dealing with the other things the corporate sites are doing. Not that there aren’t non-techies on Lemmy, but it will take time for them to overtake the techies by a significant degree, if it happens at all.
Totally.
I’ve been using Windows a long time. I’m actually in IT. Microsoft is definitely going the wrong direction with it. It doesn’t bother me too much because I know how to change what I need to change to make it work the way I want.
It does get old though seeing so many Linux posts all the time. Like, I get it. But over-exposure and fanboying could end up driving people away. I just scroll past. It’s not a big deal. Just felt like pointing it out.
That was a major motivator behind my switch. If I had to fiddle anyway, might as well use something where the fiddling has more payoff. Also don’t want to whack-a-mole AI surveillance from a company close with the fascist regime.
I’m honestly more concerned with them misrepresenting its ease of use than anything else. I ran into a lot of guides and videos that wanted to make it seem more aporoachable so as to not discourage potential users that significantly downplayed the amount of extra work it would take to use Linux. Bash is typically sidelined if they’re promoting Mint or Zorin for example. I study humanities, but I have a good amount of experience with terminals and so learning a new CLI wasn’t s big deal, but I know that’d be a deal breaker for a lot of new users who would likely feel bamboozled by the insistance that it’s “just like Windows.”
So you are saying that we should do it harder? Acknowledged boss!
Meh. Lemmy is a fairly small community of people who know at least enough about computer and software that they’re willing to push away from main-stream sites like Reddit. It seems kind of obvious that those same people would also be inclined to push away from Windows.
I wouldn’t call it a ‘hard-on’. It’s just a kind of obvious correlation of people’s interests. And no, it’s nothing like 1/3 of the posts. It’s just that you only think about linux when you’re reading one of those posts, and so you only think to mentally tally the posts when you’re actually reading one. It’s a kind of cognitive bias. You could easily check this by just looking at the first few pages of ‘all’ right now. There’s almost no posts about linux there at all.
Which I’m sure is much higher than windows games working on windows. Proton is awesome for old games.
Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
Funniest thing.: the Mac client also doesn’t support Kernel anti cheat, but it still works. Fuck riot, I’m glad I ditched it.
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Same for me but I switched to dota; im not healthier
Dota 2 took 2k+ hours from my life. Loved every minute lol. Welcome aboard, it’s not healthier but I’d argue it’s better :D
10.000 in lol, 1.000 in dota, currently. I feel you. On the other hand, haven’t watched tv in 12 years
Honestly not missing much lol. There’s like 1000 hours of good TV content in total out there IMHO.
The stereotype is of the haughty Linux user, but fuck me all I ever see in these discussions is Windows users being belittling assholes.
We tend to come off as haughty when Windows users show up demanding help and being insulting while having put in zero work on understanding their own problem.
I’ve seen so many Windows users come out of nowhere to shit on Linux when gaming comes up. There was the whole thing where a bunch of alpha testers got banned on Ashes of Creation a few weeks ago and the discord just had like half of people in their discord throwing hate around.
Also accusing Linux users of being cheaters… as if game cheats are made for Linux.
Good, but native would be better. At least they can’t kill Linux the way they did os/2
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
Ummmm sure?
I don’t want to start that extremely old flame war of native VS jit code but…
Proton is not an emulation, it is a translation to native code, and while it has some drawbacks (more memory usage, more time at start up to compile things) it can unlocks a lot of potential when the hw support new capabilities, this is the reason that some dx10 games run faster on Linux…
I might be wrong, but I don’t think proton is either? It’s running x86 instructions either way, wine just provides a way to load it from the windows executable and library formats, and together with proton they provide implementations of windows libraries for those executables to use.
As far as I know for the new Vulkans layers and dx12 implementation there is a “translation layer” from the old dx implementation to the most updated one. This is the main reason why old games runs faster on Proton than in w7 for the same hw. Even if they were designed for w7 specifically.
Last time I checked this was done during the booting of the game, but i have to admit this was time ago and it could have been changed.
It is a translation layer, but the bit you added “to native code” sounds like you’re misunderstanding what translation layer means.
Games use a collection of APIs (DirectX is a set of APIs, but there’s others to handle offer operations like network access and such) to interact with OS functionality, and also receive communicarion back from the OS (the windows message loop). Proton and wine are implementations of those APIs that translate the API calls to their equivalent in linux, as well as setting up their own message loop that translates messages from the linux kernel and UI system into their windows equivalent before sending them to the registered windows messaging loop functions.
A simple example would be if a function header in windows looks like int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ), but looks like int32 SomeFuncLinux( std::string name, int64 index ), then the translation would be something like:
int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ) {
std:string TranslatedName( name );
return SomeFuncLinux( TranslatedName, index );
}So it doesn’t change/translate any of the code of the program itself, it just provides the environment that behaves exactly like a windows environment by translating the “hey could the OS do this for me?” requests from windows to linux. Note that not all translations are that simple, there might need to be more processing on the values, missing arguments might need to be filled in, irrelevant arguments ignored, sometimes data needs to be translated to another format, etc.
The speed ups can come from improved efficiency in the underlying implementations (which Vulkan has, as I understand even using a translation layer from DX to Vulkan in windows can result in better performance) or having fewer services running in the background.
You are partially right, I was fast and sloppy and I gave the impression all is jitted and it is not the reality.
The part of the translation is fine. However there are parts that are compiled beforehand (shaders for example and I can recall something about arm or other architectures, not sure now). And this is a crucial point of the extra performance, because some parts can be ported to more updated/efficient implementations, not because there are less services in the background.
I’ll take compatible.
Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.
Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.
End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.
Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.
Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.
The only games I’ve struggled with are those with codecs that are not distributed with Proton. Installing GE-Proton solved it.
99.99% of games on Linux unlocked.
GE-proton what add to proton? Beside codecs
I finally switched to Linux just a few days ago when upgrading my laptop’s SSD, and so far I have only opened minecraft to see how it runs - extremely smoothly, even though I could not figure out how to make use the Nvidia GPU. I’d say it runs noticeably better on Linux than it did on Windows.
Unless it has changed recently, I think most distros default to running on the Nvidia GPU all the time: Switching back and forth doesn’t always work. (Or at least, that’s how my laptop run with Manjaro)
Linux people responses will be like: “ive never seen that, works fine on my machine. i’m curious tho what version of Wine, Proton are you using? …. oh? what’s your desktop environment? … oh KDE…? ah must be a Bazzite thing? i’ve never seen that before on Mint with GNOME on my Intel Graphics Card”
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@SilbinaryWolf/115483449807384098
Interesting. I beat hollow knight on my Linux desktop years ago. And I’m currently playing through silksong on my steam deck. And you’re right. I’ve never seen this lol.
I played both HK and silksong on arch, and haven’t noticed any glaring problems like that.
I just installed bazzite and hk, no issues.
Really the thing that does not work for Linux gaming is when you have a high dpi display. So many games render the UI wrong.
I don’t know if they work correctly on Windows either.
What resolution is that?
4k?
I have a 5k monitor with 2x display scaling, so 5120x2880 scaled to 1440p
Wen vr?
The only game I am not able to make it work on Linux is “The Sims 4”. After installing it on Steam, when clicking on Play, it runs the EA app in the background and tries to start the game, but it doesn’t load. Any suggestion?
Try the GE version of Proton, it’s usually more curring edge.
Mayb this can help: https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
Thank you so much, it worked installing EA app on Lutris and using ProtonGE 10.25
Happy that it worked! GE Proton is usually more cutting edge, and it’s my default. I fall back to regular one if I have problems, but it’s rare.
