Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

Used to be a staff member working on an x86 OS called CTOS. I realized if I implemented a couple of traps, we could run command-line DOS programs. So I did. And it worked. Dev tools, text processing, piped commands all worked.

It helped that the DOS executable format was the same as the CTOS format - because we had traded Bill Gates our linker (which produces executables) for his BASIC compiler.

Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old). The laptop actually has plenty of power for the games I play, but I underclock to keep the heat/fan speeds down (been doing the same on the win10 install on the same system), still getting acceptable framerate in proton for most of the things I do in game, non intense stuff.

Decades ago I ported some games to linux but I do think proton is the correct approach now. One underappreciated advantage is you get most of the mod environment too. In ESO for instance, there is an addon (tamriel trade center) which lets you download item prices, but it requires a windows client exe to do that. That client works on proton.

I also do some modding myself and can cross compile my rust code to windows with cargo xwin, and run it right away in proton, which is fairly amusing to behold.

I actually don't mind windows generally (been a MS user since DOS 5), but Win11 is a game changer, pun intended, and not in a good way.

Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.

This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.

I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.

Finding a way to get the multiplayer studios to get Linux support for their competitive games like Valve does could crack a wedge in the market for mainstream users to get in, particularly in those who don't want to pay the Windows tax (not everyone is willing to experiment or go unlicensed).

I can't prove it, but the Steam Deck has probably torn down a lot of barriers for mainstream use among the crowd that care about the game more than the OS. Getting some of the other games (League, Vanguard, Warzone, BF6, etc.) or whatever is popular in those segments onboard might be the critical mass that justifies fixing all the rough edges that get fixed when a big pile of users are represented.

I use Bazzite for all my gaming (Returnal at the minute) and it works unbelievably well. I don’t tinker with any of the proton version. I just press play.

I recently completed Stellar Blade with zero issues.

I don’t even shutdown the machine, I just hit the power to sleep it. Instantly resumes where I left off.

Incredible to see just how far it’s come.

There's been real progress. Wine's memory allocator had an architecture with three nested locks. "Realloc" held a futex lock on the memory allocator while recopying the buffer. Multiple threads doing allocation could go into futex congestion, with many threads looping on the futex. This made Vec::push in Rust insanely inefficient. Some of my programs dropped from 60FPS to about 0.5 FPS.

Fixed in Wine 11.0. Thanks to the Wine team.

Not sure if this was related to NTSYNC, but Wine's locking infrastructure definitely got an overhaul.

I developed for windows before moving to linux. I was surprised to find that was no system call similar to windows WaitForMultipleObjects. Sure you can implement something similar using poll() or using condition variables. but WaitForMultipleObjects seems so much simpler and more versatile

I predict that ntsync will eventually evolve into full blown ntoskrnl.ko and there would be virtually no overhead on calling Windows API. You can almost call it a Linux Subsystem for Windows.

I wonder what spanners Windows can throw into the works to slow them down at this point, or if they're so checked out of the Desktop market as they suckle down hard on that Azure teat, that they're more than happy to let Linux eat their lunch

Linux gaming is fine unless you want to play something with anti-cheat, which is basically any non-Valve competitive multiplayer title.

It's actually been a couple of years since I ran across a game that didn't work well on Linux. At most, I have had to bump the default Proton version.

It may finally be the year of the linx desktop. Microsoft actively being hostile to towards Windows users can't last forever.

If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

How do I actually see the graph?

All I see is stats for April:

- Windows 93.47% +1.14%

- Linux 4.52% -0.81%

- OSX 2.01% -0.34%

I remember when XDA was the home of Android homebrew hackers working on things like CyanogenMod. It's so strange to see it repurposed as the brand for the same quasi-correct tech article slop that gets parroted between all the big blogs.

Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.

I found the computer in the article more interesting than the fact, that gaming is getting faster under Linux.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-wo...

Interesting, but I wish it was half the size folded...

my son, and his friends all seem to have switched to https://garudalinux.org/ recently for gaming. Seems to be working out well for them.

Anyone move completely over to Linux for gaming? What is the experience like and what are you using?

I only hope this eventually reaches enough coverage to support media production. It’s the last commercial area I care about. I’m entirely willing to pay for good work here (and have) but both major commercial desktop OSs are exhibiting significant warning signs of contempt for the users.

ntsync was out already for a while. And it's not necessarily faster than previously available esync and fsync, but it's more correct and clean.

Crazy to think that it took over 35 years for the superior technical fundamentals to matter.

It's true what Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. So does the tech industry as a whole.

I stopped using Windows all together two years ago, and since then Linux gaming has made huge strides. Almost everything is playable now with the exception of Kernel AC games - which I don’t play anyways. The success of the Steam Deck has been an integral part, and Vulkan performance is similar if not equal to DX.

Headline says "Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features", but only provides two actual examples? It lists NTSYNC, and waiting on multiple events at once.

This is good to hear, but I get 120FPS on Windows in Cyberpunk 2077 and ~70 on Ubuntu. Horizon Zero Dawn is much worse, and quite often drops to seconds-per-frame instead of frames-per-second, if I turn on dynamic scaling. I just have an ssd with windows on it for gaming and boot to that from the bios. Also means my headphones UI works too. But, to be fair, the fact that I _can_ run Cyberpunk and HZD if I want to is pretty impressive.

This page really does not like playing nice with reader mode, making it near impossible to read unfortunately.

What about macos?

[dead]

Linux does not dragged down in performance by the thousands of virus and malware scanners.

“He who fights with Windows should see to it that he himself does not become Windows. And when you gaze long into ntoskrnl, ntoskrnl also gazes into you.”

Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?