alt Hacker NewsShow 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.
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If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this.
If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that important to you? I switched 10 years ago when things were a lot rougher than this, and in the end everything still worked well enough that I never cared to swap back.
I think the actual answer you are looking for is this paragraph:
> These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.
That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.
1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...
2: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/confi...
3: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/maste...
If memory serves, Linux typically outperforms Windows with AMD and Intel graphics. Some of the gotchas are things like running games through Proton or anti-cheat/DRM stuff not getting the same attention that Windows does, but the raw performance is there. I wouldn't recommend using Nvidia on Linux though.
Unless you're playing CS competitively and really need 720fps for your 360Hz monitor, is 5-30% fewer frames (all else equal) really a deal breaker? Is this hardware thats barly good enough or something else?
I ask because I feel like I can frequently play games at, say, 150fps, and losing 30% would mean almost nothing to me to switch to Linux. I worry more about general capatibility and anticheat.
Depending on storage constraints, you could always dualboot. That would give you the exact same hardware to compare, and it's not a full commitment.
Anecdotally, I find that getting Linux on somewhat older or underpowered hardware is always a massive positive. Better performance as well as battery life. I'm not as familiar with modern hardware's relationship to either OS ("OS vs. some flavor of OS based on a similar or same kernel" - I know) with modern hardware. Worth a shot though!
Every supercomputer seems to do quite well with Linux kernels. Probably good enough for Crysis :)
It isn't saying it's faster than Windows. Just faster.
A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows!
If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
Its never going to happen. Because console players by far dominate the gaming scene. Microsoft is going to push Xbox first, which will drive all development of the games, which is going to be windows focused. As such, all major release studios are going to target that.
Until we get something like CoD titles being Steam Console first, linux is allways going to lag behind.
That being said, I think we are on a precipice of AI being able to simply just rewrite games from concepts. Start with generic source code for an FPS or 3PS, then people can contribute changes in english language to tailor the game. So it won't be even copying source code, it would be copying concepts and then making a new game with it. There have been a lot of games that have very rudimentary graphics that people played in large numbers because the complexity and gameplay was quite good.
Your initial baseline was arbitrary. If the game had been 10% slower on Windows, would you have never enjoyed it? If not, how could switching with a 10% penalty be a deal-breaking downside?
Just do it. Swap and let go of objectivity. Let your subjective experience guide you.
For me, the subjective joy of not having to fuck around with Microsoft's bullshit was worth multiples of having to mess around with technical crap to get a game working (spoiler: I nearly never have to do that because I play single player games, Dota and CS). I couldn't give less of a damn if my FPS in some random title is 10% slower than it would be in Windows. So long as it's playable, I benefit in spades from the trade-off.