Linux Gaming Across 9 Distros [Review in Progress]

ThatITGuy said:
All but one of the machines I moved to Linux were previously running Windows 10, the other being a Windows 7 install whose license had been "upgraded" to 10, but that I wiped and reinstalled Win7 on.
I do maintain one machine with Windows 10 for gaming, just for those titles that are problematic in Linux. Honestly, that has become fewer and fewer of late.
I do not yet have any machine running arch, so that will be my next thing to play with, but my installs of Ubuntu LTS and Manjaro are both stable and working fine. Plus, with Linux, I have less worry about the kids installing random "crap", and i have yet to see the "20 toolbars" in the browser they could get in Windows.
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I have had Linux machines around for years... and I have 3 boys that are all adults now. Whenever they had windows machines they where dead in weeks. They used to hate me for a few days when I would kill their borked windows and replace them with Linux.... they would wine about loosing MS messenger and other BS, but they figured out how to use the replacements and I rarely had to fix their machines after. lol

My daughter is younger shes 15 now and still at home. The biggest advantage of being a Linux only home... she actually knows how a computer works, and has some basic Linux fu. When she runs into windows at school she has zero issues using it, when she runs into ChromeOS she recognizes its Linux... and actually understand what the machines are doing. My daughter isn't hacker level coding or anything... but it makes me proud every time I see her pop into a terminal to do something. This weekend I mentioned that I didn't see her update notifier, and she told me she disabled it. "I just use pacman command line DAD" Made me proud, even if she is starting to sound a little neck beardy. 3 boys and one girl and she ends up the geek.
 
BloodyIron said:
Pop looks like a rather good option, I'm probably gonna try it out soon.

If you want a hot tip for a tool to help with non-native gaming on Linux, check out the tool Lutris.

I built my new rig about a week ago, and switched from XFCE4 + Compiz to the Ubuntu's default Gnome GUI, and it's actually very good for gaming! No drop in FPS compared to previous DE.

Anyone have any questions about Linux gaming?
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I don't know if it was the cause of your problem but there is a known bug with fullscreen v-sync with Compiz enabled that causes stuttering that's annoying as hell when watching videos.
 
ChadD said:
Those are the same drivers the distros are installing. I think what it comes down to.... and I could be wrong, but lets be honest in the past (not the ancient past either) Nvidia HAS been caught cheating things like anisotropic filtering of transparent textures. Of course their windows game looks for the .exe of games they know they can get away with it in. I'm sure there are all sorts of things NV decides games don't need so they shut it off.... and in some cases hey perhaps that new NV driver that gives you 20% more performance in X or Y game specifically is cutting out things that can be, but I believe in a lot of cases they are just out right reducing quality in places they feel they can get away with it in. lol

We all know the Vega cards as much as they got shit on.... where still insanely good compute cards and in many cases out performed the NV cards. When it comes to games... I think they suffer from not having the money to throw at developers. (if a developer decides an "optimization" makes sense that is probably better then NV "driver optimizations" after the game is on the market). IMO I think its a good thing that AMD doesn't "Optimize" their drivers as hard. Of course in Linux none of that is happening AMD side as the drivers 99% of people use to game with in Linux are open source. To be completely fair to NV.... even on the same AMD hardware I swear games look better in Linux then they do in windows. FPS is a bit lower under proton still but in most games its nothing I can see, but things do look a lot sharper, and FX are much nicer.

A small example of a smaller game where I have noticed this. Star Trek online hardly the most popular game around. In windows with FX cranked it seems like the game or driver culls all effects on the screen after a specific point. If 20 things go off at once it seems under windows only half of them render on the screen. In Linux they all render completely... granted this can seriously impact FPS if it gets silly. Still I have no idea if its something about STO (which seems unlikely as the game doesn't know its not in windows) or if its something to do with the driver. I tend to think its the drivers... the Linux open source drivers have Zero cheats, the windows drivers; well no way of knowing for sure but I bet they are responsible for the FX culling. So I imagine if they are doing it in a low popularity game like STO its happening in all the big AAA titles to some degree.
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This could be a side-effect of Wine's ability to force the render thread on another core (CSMT, which is enabled on default on latest builds).
 
Well, I don't like running with v-sync, namely because it messes with gaming FPS and causes input lag like bananas. So keen insight here, but I don't think it was impacting me, as I believe I told nVidia to turn v-sync off (full screen blanking).

Curious detail though, thanks for sharing! :D


Todd Walter said:
I don't know if it was the cause of your problem but there is a known bug with fullscreen v-sync with Compiz enabled that causes stuttering that's annoying as hell when watching videos.
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Todd Walter said:
This could be a side-effect of Wine's ability to force the render thread on another core (CSMT, which is enabled on default on latest builds).
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This is possible I'm sure its enabled under proton as well. In any event game looks better under Linux. Even my lowly 570 can handle the extra VFX just fine mostly. Perhaps it would be nice to turn the culling on for PvP but if I was actually serious about that I would just turn the FX down to medium... which would be better anyway as it would give you the visual ques for buffs ect. (anyway good thought you may well be correct)
 
I've been running a Windows-free home shop for about 6 months now. I am a power user but not a power gamer (impending decrepitude does that).

The only Windows game I am interested in playing is Supreme Commander Forged Alliance and the community client for it, FAF.

Twelve years on, it is still capable of bringing a really fast CPU to its knees although the graphics have not kept pace. It runs like a champ under Proton and my online multiplayer itch is handily scratched.

I run things like LibreOffice, Blender, Inkscape etc and all the free software you can shake a stick at, my collection of windows software is bit rotting away on a storage drive and I dont miss any of it.

Windows has become a tool for graft only and that association is welcome to stay, although even that is changing as I switch my workstation setup to Ubuntu there too.
 
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