Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games - Linux 17% faster on Average

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Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games - Linux 17% faster on Average::Computers, hardware, software and gaming in Spanish and English

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Windows has so much garbage overhead via telemetry, etc. Glad to see someone quantifying how detrimental it is.

AVs on windows also do impact disk latency a lot.

Not to also mention the outdated filesytem

We should rename NTFS to OTFS now.

For real - it would be AWESOME if you could install windows on ZFS or btrfs or whatever

You'd still be running Windows though so why bother

While I agree that Linux is generally better, there are some use cases outside of gaming that work better in (or are required to use for one reason or another) Windows.

Oh I definitely agree. But still; when I'm running Windows the filesystem is very low on my list of annoyances.

They knew it’s not going to stay new forever, but they went ahead with that name anyway. I guess that’s what happens when the marketing team wins the company raffle.

NTFS isn't the issue, at least in my experience, and not even Microsoft's implementation of it (though ntfs-3g seems faster). The issue is the File Explorer: Things like reading mtimes of gigantic directories takes maybe a second under linux, nushell under windows (native, not WSL) is just a tiny bit slower, while File Explorer takes minutes to sort by mtime. Coming to think of it I should try Dolphin.

Generally speaking the problem with Windows is not so much NT but everything on top of it.

Steam Deck and Proton have done wonders for Linux compatibility efforts.

However looking at NEW releases I actually want to play, many launch barely working on windows let a lone via proton / emulation. My back catalog has great support but we need more titles launching with official support.

The worst thing has to be all of the "launchers / game stores" JUST GIVE US GAMES!

Even "good" companies like BG3 makers. Are making it harder to play without signing into their launcher.

There's an extra screen now, which is extremely unintuitive to get to, to skip their launcher sign in :(

Limited to amd though, yea? Nvidia still holding back their drivers?

Nvidia is their own worst enemy as regards Linux. When everyone realizes games work better under Linux and AMD, nVidia will be crying outside the gate. We're 5 years into Proton, in another 5 years there won't be a game that doesn't run better on Linux.

When everyone realizes games work better under Linux and AMD, nVidia will be crying outside the gate.

So you think Microsoft spends 8 billion dollars acquiring Bethesda Game Studios, Arkane Studios, id Software, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, ZeniMax Online Studios in 2020 and then proceeds to spend 68 billion dollars on acquiring Activision Blizzard...

... just to stand on the sidelines watching everyone drop Windows as a gaming platform?

They do lock you to Windows to use GamePass, but as long as the games are available on other marketplaces they'll be playable on Linux. The Xbox app, which is what you have to use for GamePass for some stupid reason, installs games in a special encrypted format that can't (easily) be executed from outside of it.

So that’s why I never got into gamepass!

I knew there had to be a reason, couldn’t be that I’m just lazy.

Do you realize that it doesn't matter to them if gamers use Windows or not, right? Windows is big on the enterprise side, consumer OS is the least of their worries, and their gaming division doesn't lose anything if gamers run their games on Linux, thanks to steam actually. So no, I don't think that maters...

Not to mention that we're talking about Nvidia and having a shitty ass driver being a bad thing long term for them, not Microsoft.

Oh... The home users matters to Microsoft. A lot.

MS have been standing by the sidelines watching Google raking home all that sweet money made from all that personal data Android and Chrome users happily hand over.

Why do you think you're able to install Windows and use it without activating it? Because Microsoft are nice guys doing charity?

No. Microsoft aren't dropping the home market. They've just been repositioning themselves the last couple of years.1

nVidia will be crying outside the gate

Yeeeeaaah I really doubt it sorry

Linux performance with proton has increased so drastically in recent years, your statement can be taken as wishful thinking at first, but there is a definite trend and I agree that Linux will probably be the powerhouse of gaming in coming years.

We’re 5 years into Proton, in another 5 years there won’t be a game that doesn’t run better on Linux.

Insh'allah :D (* I'm an atheist, but the phrase is kind of fitting)

Fully usable with NVidia. I can play all the games I want at the same graphical settings as Windows. (Nvidia 1080)

That's because you're using fairly old hardware, anything in the 2000-series and up doesn't work very well.

My 3070 runs better than on windows🤷‍♀️ (in most of my favourite games)

I’m rolling an RTX 2060 mobile in a Lenovo gaming laptop and everything is hunky dory. I’ve been saying for a couple years now that everything feels faster on linux, and that includes games. Proton is truely an impressive tool.

I have a 1660 and every game ive played on linux does run better and getting the nvidia drivers wasnt that hard

Well, that's what happens when you don't have crazy spyware services running in the background. Also Windows, just like any Microsoft product, is very inefficient and wastes lots of resources.

Man, I am really looking forward to fully ditching Windows.

There's no time better than the present 😀 Windows free since April!

Nice! What distro did you go with? I've been really enjoying Zorin.

Zorin OS became my favorite distro, tried a lot over the years. Consistent, clean design and pretty easy to customize, compatibility is good because it's based on ubuntu. Zorin connect is pretty neat too.

I finally pulled the trigger (again, hopefully for good this time) after a nonconsensual Windows update corrupted my disk and my bitlocker recovery key was not accepted.

That was a couple months ago now and I'm happy to report that not only is game compatibility on Linux loads better than last time I tried this but I can corroborate that many of my games also perform better on Linux than they did on the same system in Windows

Been dual-booting for about 4 years. It might be time to remove the Windows partition and use a VM though because I only use Windows a few times a year (just once this year for installing it).

Same, except I have two OS drives I swap between. Photoshop and Launchbox are all that's really keeping me anymore.

I also use 2 drives to avoid Windows "repairing" my Linux install away.

It must be very hard to exactly compare games between Windows and Linux because it's possible that emulation in Proton, WINE or the driver means some settings or extensions might not be enabled even if they appear to be. DirectX emulation is also bound to slow things down so a game probably has to be use OpenGL or Vulkan directly.

So while I can well believe that Linux can keep up and possibly exceed Windows, it needs a careful technical eye to ensure a true comparison is happening.

Wine is not an emulator

Wine is an emulator. It might not have started as such when it was winelib but it is now, especially when running binaries. If in doubt read their own FAQ where they take pains to describe it depends what you're doing and what is meant by emulation.

Go read the code. It's a reimplementation of core Windows DLLs. Quite a clean one. There is also a daemon that fakes a NT kernel. It's worth a read.

I know what it is thanks. I even contributed code a long time back to it.

Then why are you saying it's going to pay any kind of emulation cost? It's not really much different to what MS do. NT has it's own sys calls that MS call in their Win32 implementation. WINE calls POSIX calls in their's.

Well done contributing anyway. I haven't, but I crawled all over the source when I developed on Windows as it was better than MSDN for the semi-documented stuff (that was only documented at all because EU forced them).

I didn't and I don't know where you got the idea I did.

Cool, well happy it was just a miss understanding, but I'm clearly not the only one who thought you were saying that. Might be worth clarifying in you earlier posts.

but the E literally stands for emulator

(I'm kidding)

Just in case someone sees this and doesn't understand all this, WINE is an acronym that literally means "WINE Is Not an Emulator."

And it is an emulator these days. Their own website says it and it's obviously one just thinking about it for a second. The reason it started with that acronym was because originally you could take Windows source code, compile it against winelib and run it natively. It is an emulator when actual Windows binaries are executed against it.

It is an emulator when actual Windows binaries are executed against it.

I suppose I am not sure entirely what constitutes an emulator and what doesn't, but I always thought an emulator mimics (emulates) a certain systems architecture, i.e. has to be slower by design than the real thing. In wine, however, windows system calls are replaced / re-routed to the underlying linux system calls which are often much faster, which is why wine often exceeds windows in performance executing windows binaries (assuming you can get them to run at all :)

An emulator simulates hardware with software. That's why it's slower than running on the original hardware, unless you're running on a hardware significantly faster than the original.

But Wine is not an emulator because it mimics software with different software. You still run on the same hardware, that's why wine/proton only runs on x86.

So the whole "wine is not an emulator" might sounds like pedantry but it's not. It's an important distinction. Because it's not an emulator there is no inherent perf cost.

thanks, this is exactly my understanding, just worded better because I was apparently linguistically challenged on my previous post... :D

I suppose I am not sure entirely what constitutes an emulator and what doesn’t, but I always thought an emulator mimics (emulates) a certain systems architecture, i.e. has to be slower by design than the real thing. In wine, however, windows system calls are replaced / re-routed to the underlying linux system calls which are often much faster, which is why wine often exceeds windows in performance executing windows binaries (assuming you can get them to run at all :)

WINE has a FAQ on the matter - https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_Wine_an_emulator.3F_There_seems_to_be_disagreement

Short story, it depends what you use WINE for and the perspective you're looking from. I think from a binary's POV that thinks it is calling Windows OS it is emulation.

It's getting hard to do just between AMD and Nvidia on Windows.

I'm old enough to remember the days when reviewers showed macro shots of the wires in half life 2 to test AA between different cards.

Does anyone even test that enabling "Ultra" settings results in the same configuration across vendors/generations? I'm pretty sure LTT Labs found cases where it wasn't.

ltt labs, good one

To be fair if anyone is motivated to discover flaws in testing methodology and publicly disclose them right now it's Labs.

My next gaming PC is gonna be Linux. There, I said it.

Virtually any computer that isn't Apple Silicon can install Linux on it and it'll run smoother and faster than Win or Mac.

People who are anti-Linux either don't understand computers or are traumatized from the early 2000s

Can't Apple Silicon run some program called Parallel Desktops or something? Is there a Linux distro that has an ARM version?

Parallels is good for running Windows. It's heavily optimized for Windows. I have both Fedora & Windows on my MacBook Pro through Parallels.

But it's nowhere nead native speed and you're still using an ARM version of Win / Linux which comes with its own set of issues.

Having said that, Parallels is good for when you need to run a specific Windows program. I haven't run into anything that runs on Linux that I can't set up on MacOS so I haven't really needed the Fedora.

On my desktop I use Fedora and it's my favorite OS / Linux distro. But MacOS works. The M2 is worth it

Even Apple silicone has a version of Fedora that works pretty well. Give it 10 years and I bet old Apple silicone machines will be faster on linux just like a lot of the older x86 macbooks are now.

You know it's super easy to change your operating system right? Lol

It's not.

it really is. creating a bootable USB drive takes all of five minutes, and if you pick a beginner-friendly distro, it guides guides you through the process from then on

The actual installation is easy, the finding equivalents for your years of accumulated workflow is the part that isn't.

I just spent 4 hours trying various window managers and shell extensions to replicate what I had with fancy zones in Windows. Finally came close with the gTile gnome shell extension, but it's still not quite what I had.

It's not even a Linux deficiency or anything, but let's not pretend that switching operating systems is a trivial endeavour.

Even creating the boatable USB is already too complicated for 80-90% of users, but considering that we are on lemmy, most people here should be able to do it.

Choosing a beginnen friendly distribution means reading and comparing distros for hours if you are a complete newby. Just googling "easy Linux distro" or something like this will net you 15 different results.

Switching itself is easy if you define it as booting up Linux, but then what? You need drivers for all your hardware, a replacement for the MS office suit, alternatives for lots of programms, to relearn even the most basic commands and shortcuts and you have to manually transfer a lot of savefiles.

And that is ignoring the general pain that setting up your pc again is, especially if you have slow Internet.

yeah, you're mostly right (although driver support is a lot simpler on Linux in my experience, since drivers are part of the kernel), but most of the pain of switching to Linux is true for any switch of OS, since you have to get used to the new software and tools it comes with.

That's no different when you switch your phone from an android to an iphone, or if you switch to windows from a mac, and really not Linux' fault. It takes commitment to switch your daily OS and deal with all that entails, but that's why it's great how easy it is to dual boot Linux, while getting used to it

This is why I said it wasn't easy to switch.

Oh well, the downvotes were worth it.

It's not gonna. Game support is bad.

Another illiterate lemming, tsk tsk

This is impressive and interesting, but what about hardware ray tracing support? Proton has been very impressive but I thought that RT on DX12 was basically non-existent on Linux.

Hardware raytracing works even on newer Radeon cards. I played Control recently with raytracing on Linux and it works pretty well, though the average frame rate drops to around 40 FPS. I had to use FSR to get higher framerates.

Raytracing is basically non-existing anywhere, it isn't a priority.

GN came to a weaker conclusion when they were looking at one of the handhelds (I want to say the asus ROG?), although they just attributed that to the device rather than claim it was the OS.

But most of this reminds me of how Elden Ring was significantly more performant "on steam deck" at launch. And that was mostly because all shaders had to be precached which had implications on how From were streaming content. Which is likely why stuff like mortal kombat 1 apparently forces players to wait for shaders before they can play.

That’s great and all, but can I still pirate games on Linux? (Don’t judge me)

It's better I fact. There's a lot less worry about installing a virus.

(Not so) fun fact, a lot of Windows viruses work under Wine on Linux. If you have ransomware bundled with your pirated media, it will likely also encrypt your Linux files.

Use Bottles as a Flatpak, isolate all your applications from each other and from your host system.

Actually, no. Windows viruses can work well in wine. You still have to be careful in that regard.

But the virus will be stuck in its wine prefix, right?

No, not necessarily. Wine programs usually have access to your home directory as a Windows drive (X: or Z: or similar). So do be careful

I mean it's probably possible to craft a Windows virus that targets Linux through Wine, but I don't think a generic Windows malware would do any damage on Linux.

It's also like saying that bloating an OS with spyware and useles eyecandy it makes it use hardware resources ineficiently. But of course that's not the case with Micro$oft.

I remember when I used to run games via Wine over 15 years ago and they performed better than on similar hardware running Windows.

I don’t really think that’s a fair comparison when you’re emulating things and not running them natively.

Wine is not an emulator. It's a full implementation of the Windows API, which is why it's possible to get really good performance out of it in a way that pure software emulation can't match.

Wine is not an emulator

This is what Wine stands for! It's a recursive acronym.

Not only in games, I switched from Windows 10 to LXQT and I can finally open more than 3 programs at the same time without the pc hanging for 10 seconds every time I switched between programs

AMD only and not Nvidia? That’s what I was seeing based on a quick search. Unfortunately, I don’t have an AMD GPU.

I’ve got an RTX 2060 mobile that I’ve been linux-gaming on for a few years now, it’s been great. I was getting consistent blue screen crashes with windows, even after multiple reinstalls. Ubuntu had some minor issues out of the box, like I had to find a program to control screen brightness, but PopOS has been literally flawless.

I’ve been saying for years now that gaming on linux feels faster. Most games get better framerates than they did natively on windows, but I’ve never known if that was unique to my setup. Really neat to have more data!

I'll switch to Linux when I can play any game I choose to without any stuffing around, or when/if M$ start charging BS subscription.

The first point is 90%v available already with proton

The fact you have to mention Proton is his point.

How is proton stuffing around? It's click and play at this point

Wow, it's so complicated - you have to click install, and then click play! This is bad UX! Obviously Steam should just read my mind so that I don't have to click at all.

I mean they basically do charge you since your data is being sold as the product.

why aren't game producers releasing versions of the game compiled for debian ubuntu and other lInux distros?

Too much effort for too little market share. But since the Steam Deck is popular, it's harder to ignore Linux.

Microsoft created directx and its been an integral part of game dev since, not the only reason as I'm sure if Linux had a large market share we'd see devs jumping over

Doesn't really surprise me, I've had a Steam deck since launch and the performance on Windows titles has always been impressive, even considering its relatively low-end hardware.

The only thing preventing me from dual-booting my desktop is lack of software RAID support in most distributions (by this I mean RAID configured in the BIOS but not using a dedicated hardware controller).

To be fair, that bios-managed RAID is still using a hardware controller. It's embedded in the motherboard.

Anyway, hardware RAID is discouraged in home/workstation environments as you don't have control over how the controller implements it. So if the board breaks, it's harder to retrieve your data.

Linux has support for real software RAID, for example using LVM or filesystems that have that feature. It's easier to setup than it may sound. Most distributions can enable that during installation of the OS.

Okay, so say I did switch to Linux. I would have to transfer all of my files that I have saved from Windows and try to make them compatible with being on Linux. It's also very excruciating and mentally painful that I would just have to start from scratch. I like all the various things I have saved on my PC i would not want to lose them

I mean transferring files isn't so difficult. Linux supports NTFS so it's as easy as opening the files in the file browser and moving them to your linux partition.

But yes in my experience it does take a few months to transition and in that time I did move back to Windows a few times, but eventually I stuck with Linux since it had a lot more features and benefits over Windows

Can you be more specific?

I may be reading this wrong, but it sounds like you think Linux requires all your files to be converted to some other format before you can use them. There is no such thing as a Windows-JPEG and a Linux-JPEG, it's just a JPEG. All your files will still work. It's the software that opens the files that might need to change (e.g. MS Word or Photoshop).

Unless you're talking about filesystems like NTFS and ext4, in which case there is no argument to be made as Linux supports NTFS already. In my experience, it "just works".

What kind of files are you talking about? The vast majority of files will just work once you install an application to handle them. Images, video, audio, etc should all work out of the box on most distro.

"Try to make them compatible" isn't something you should ever have to worry about for files. Files are files, and you don't have to convert them to some other format in order to use them. Rather, you'll just need to install the relevant apps from your distribution's package manager. GIMP handles Photoshop files no problem for instance. No conversion or such, just... Open them like you would on Windows by double clicking.

As long as you have your files backed up properly it shouldn't be too difficult. If you don't, I'd be more worried about what happens if one of your drives failed and how you'd retrieve that data.

I like all the various things I have saved on my PC i would not want to lose them

Then make sure you’re taking backups and follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy at minimum. Backblaze is a great option for Windows users to help with that, since it can back up your whole PC for a fixed cost each month.

There’s no reason to rush to start using Linux. If you’re interested, you can always dip your toes in with something like the Steam Deck or booting from a USB drive

I can understand. Don't need to switch. It's normal to enjoy what you're used to.

I've not run windows for years, but I straight up refuse to believe there's a seventeen percent performance uplift. Magic does not exist. Linux must be skipping some rendering.

They’re a bunch of cherry-picked games that have a decent amount of Linux work run on pretty solid Linux hardware that performs well. The tests are legit. They just don’t generalize.

You'll be surprised to learn how much overhead Windows has and how much system resources they take up to keep all their trackers and bloat running in the background. It really makes a startling difference when you switch to a Linux OS. It can even make your hardware feel more powerful, because it only needs to deal with the game's performance, and not also running a shitton of unneeded services in the background all the time.

Not to sound sarcastic, but only 17% faster than the operating system known for being an appallingly bloated stack of adware garbage that most people cant get away from because of compatibility? Thats surprisingly low, honestly.

But Windows is usally the system the games are optimized for. Its impressiv how well proton/wine work these days :)

Usually yes, but i thought we were talking about linux gaming, as in games made for both platforms

I didnt watch the full Video, but all games i saw in the clip are native Windows games with no offical port for linux

I don’t think you understand. This is windows games running on Linux through proton. If the games were built and optimized for Linux they’d perform even better

I absolutely understand that, and nothing in my comment suggests otherwise?

Considering for most games it’s 100% slower, I’m not cheering just yet.

The issue is support not performance.

Every game I’ve bought this year has ran perfectly in Linux. And I don’t check the Linux status before I buy them. Yolo has paid off

Same here, the only games that don’t work are the ones that’s ship with anti cheats the behave like root kits (a really nasty type of malware).

In my experience, most games either don't work at all (very rare), or work 99% as well as on Windows. For instance, I'm playing Hitman WoA right now, and opening the Steam overlay makes the game run in slow motion until I restart it, and it goes in the single-digit FPS if my laptop is charging. Very rarely does a game run better on Linux than Windows. Alt- tabbing in particular is broken in a lot of games, some of them outright crashing.

Never encountered this issue you have, by any chance on Linux you are using a old version of proton or nvidia GPU?

I'm on an Intel/nVidia dual-GPU laptop.

Could be crashing on alt tab if PC tries to switch to iGpu for DE?

Nvidia is likely the problem, also you mentioned dual gpu, make sure your not on your iGPU

Edit: details.

I'm not on the iGPU. I use prime-run to run Steam, and all games properly detect the nVidia card. Also, I doubt the iGPU could run Hitman at max settings at 60FPS@1440p.

Same. I think 80% of my pre existing library already worked and then every game ive bought since the switch runs perfect. I used to check protondb first, now I just yolo and add my report later.

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Uuuh, the compatibility percentage is way past 50%, can't use the word "most" anymore.

I can count the number of games I had to give up from my several hundred game library when I switched, on one hand.

Exactly. I don’t care much for Windows bloat, but if 100% of games run on Windows and even 99% of games run on Linux, I’m sticking with Windows for gaming. It’s just that simple. If that ever reverses, then I’ll switch to Linux for gaming.

I just don't buy games that don't run on Linux.

There are already too many games I want to play for the time I have so the very few games that don't run on Linux are not worth my time.

I'm ok with not having access to the 1% of games out there that want to act like rootkits

Probably not most anymore but still plenty of them.

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