- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Nobara OS, Arch Linux and Pop!_OS beat Windows 11 by a slim margin in fps (delta 8) in Windows native games - Cyberpunk 2077, Forspoken, Starfield and The Talos Principle II. Windows 11 wins in Rachet & Clank.
ComputerBase’s testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.
Update: Windows 11 wins in one game.
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Soooo when did Arch become a gaming focused OS?
Since Valve decided that.
Pretty much this.
I upvoted but it sounds hostile. Since valve started using and contributing to arch appears to be more reasonable.
No arch btw.
it sounds hostile.
I like my Steam Deck. Why would I be hostile? You’re reading too much into a concise statement.
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Many readers are overly sensitive these days. If you use things like a period on the end of your sentences, and don’t include emojis, then anything you say will be called out as “hostile” by some people.
Also, I’ve noticed many people ignore qualifiers in speech. If you use qualifiers thoughtfully, having them ignored by the reader can lead to miscommunication. I think the fact that so many people have used them without thought has led to a blindness for qualifiers. OTH, not including qualifiers can make us sound authoritative and even arrogant to some people.
For instance, in my first sentence, above, I said “Many readers…”, and “…things like…”, and “…by some people.” If you ignore those qualifiers, what I said takes on a very different tone.
Can’t win for losing.
Manjaro is/used to be a good choice for gaming purpose
I assume doog is the opposite of good, in which case I agree
fixed
Is arch really gaming focused though?
Arch is focused on being cutting-edge and lightweight which happens to be perfect for gaming performance in most cases but that’s all.
Arch is focused on however you put it together
Arch is focused like the same way a beach is a camera lens.
Exactly. The only thing Arch focuses on is not focusing on anything. They ship packages as vanilla as possible, have pretty much no default configuration, etc. In short, they try to make as few assumptions as possible.
It ends up being pretty good for gaming because Linux is pretty good for gaming. They’re explicitly not doing anything special here.
SteamOS is based on Arch, likely why they picked it.
That’s like saying PlayStation 5 and Switch are based on FreeBSD, so you should game on FreeBSD (well, not quite, but hopefully the point is clear). FreeBSD isn’t good for gaming, it’s just liberally licensed and easy to build on top of, hence why it’s used.
Valve has reasons to use an Arch base, and none of them have anything to do with any specific benefit regarding gaming. It’s easy to fork and maintain customized build files for since it makes so few assumptions (packages are as vanilla as possible in Arch, so it’s easier to maintain a patch set).
Valve likely has patches in SteamOS that haven’t made it to upstream Arch, and there’s likely a number of packages that are quite outdated vs upstream Arch, so installing upstream Arch will give you quite a different experience vs SteamOS.
shrug, I’ve been using arch and Manjaro for years and gaming in them. They are what you make them, and AUR is massive and solves a lot of problems I have in other distros so that’s why I use it.
Computerbase is very solid and well known in Germany and have been covering Linux quite a bit for a while now.
Performance of course can fluctuate heavily between games but the amount of progress that Linux made over the past decade is nothing but astonishing.that’s kind of my take on it too. Linux has come so far from what it used to be like. it’s not quite ready to see mass-adoption, but it’s making some amazing strides. so many different parties have been contributing to a massive effort to iron out some of the issues with Linux. once performance improves significantly over Windows, and compatibility gets a little more wide-spread, you’ll start to see people willing to put up with the teething problems, in the name of superior performance.
THAT is when Linux will see more mainstream success.
some year, i don’t know when, really will be the year of Linux… maybe.
I don’t think we’ll see like some definitive year of Linux, instead we will just have slowly rising user numbers. The only exception would be if Microsoft fucks up so badly that it will completely drive people away from Windows.
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Always count on a corporation to make something worse.
You mean worse than the train wreck of Vista, then 8, then 11? Yes they will continue to do worse for most people but it wont matters as long as it is the default choice.
Apparently so. At least that’s what the numbers suggest.
Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don’t run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.
Its like people miss the good old days of “This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don’t work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don’t”. Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn’t still work to be done serves no benefit.
Yup. Just use the same benchmarks major sites use and note any interesting differences. They usually pick games for specific technical reasons, so most of the work figuring out where Linux is weak is done for you.
I personally play on Linux because I use Linux, but because I think it has better performance than Windows or whatever. That should be the selling point, not slight differences in performance. Show that Linux is largely on par with Windows, and then go through all of the other benefits to using Linux, like privacy, package management, and user choice.
Yeah. More or less the same. Pretty much the entirety of my work day is in a terminal and I have increasingly liked “linux” as a desktop since Mint (and now Plasma) are “more windows than windows” in terms of UI/UX. WSL gets Windows a lot of the way toward the OS I want (a good nix-ish terminal with a strong GUI for day to day), but MS also add more and more spyware and stupidity with every update so…
But holy crap do the evangelists go out of their way to undermine widespread linux adoption. Whether it is pretending that opencad is at all a replacement for fusion 360 or that gimp is comparable to photoshop or it is inflating performance or compatibility numbers.
Like, I’ve tried to switch over a few times over the years. And it has always been a shitshow. ProtonDB goes a long way, but it is also prone to outdated information (since the one person still playing Tribes 2 has no need to try newer versions of wine/proton and so forth). And if you check message boards you get the same skewed bullshit. Which mostly boils down to “Okay, well. I figured out that game X won’t work. And I now assume that these fifty other games I care about won’t either”
These days? it is a lot easier because Valve have put in the work to the point that I can more or less just check games in steam. There is still the risk of a new patch breaking something, but it is a lot closer to the good parts of protondb where the steps to recover to a good build are pretty easy (Armored Core 6 was basically a case of just rolling back a major revision of proton) rather than the shitshow. Which then makes it “Well, game X won’t work. But I am reasonably confident that every other game I care about will run performantly so…”
This is exactly why I don’t recommend my distro, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It works well for me, but online help is more limited vs Fedora and the various Debian derivatives. I’ve been Linux only for something like 15 years, and I’d hate for someone to take my advice and have a bad experience.
So I recommend Linux Mint Debian, because I know Debian is solid and Linux Mint has a ton of support. I also tell people to not expect crazy performance and for some games to just not work, that way they’ll be pleasantly surprised when things work better than they expect. As they say, under promise, over deliver.
Of the two main games I play, one doesn’t work on Linux due to the anti-cheat they use, and the other has horrific stuttering while loading game assets.
But Linux works better for the curated selection for this article.
Description is false. Windows won in R&C. This was not an across the board win for Linux. Good news doesn’t need to be sensationalized.
Updated the summary about Windows winning.
Ok, but what about Nvidia GPUs? Those are what the the vast majority of gamers use.
Nvidia has been kind of a mess for me on Wayland, especially the lastest 545 drivers. I just switched to AMD and literally all my issues disappeared, including one I thought was a KDE plasma bug
Looks like KDE Plasma 6 is going to default to Wayland, so I’ll probably give it another shot when it comes out (in Feb I think?). I’m currently on GNOME because of weird KDE Wayland issues on my AMD card (maybe it’s no longer a thing, IDK). I don’t have a strong preference between them, but my kids use my computer and I think KDE is probably easier for them.
From my experience default KDE is more windows-like so it can help with transition for Windows users
My kids don’t have any experience with Windows, they’ve only used ChromeOS (at school) and Linux (my computers, one has Plasma 5, and the other has GNOME).
But yeah, it feels kinda Windows like with the start menu and whatnot.
93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
It’s anecdotal but I saw a significant improvement in multiple games on an Nvidia 1050 running Nobara. Had no issues installing drivers and getting things set up.
Nvidia 1070 here. Haven’t run into problems using Mint or Endevour. Had to choose propriety drivers on Mint, but that was it.
Might buy an AMD card next, but that’s more to see if there are any features I’m missing out on. I’m also excited to see whether AMD has grown better hardware, as it was a constant hassle when I last used one 10+ years ago.
For now I will probably keep buying used Nvidia cards, but I’ve considered going AMD for graphics at some point. Love my Ryzen CPU.
Yea, Ryzen Is awesome! No plans on going back to Intel.
While Intel might have better IPC, AMD having twice as many cores easily makes up for this.
Might come with an argument in regard to single-threaded games, but that should not be relevant with pretty much everything having moved to multi-thread by now.
And if it’s still single threaded you’ll most likely have plenty of performance no matter the brand.
That’s just how it is, no matter if you like it
I use NVIDIA gpus and they have worked fine for me.
Does it really matter? The majority buy Nvidia due to mindshare, the same probably goes for why they use Windows.
Nvidia has been so far ahead of AMD cards for so long, and running AI stuff on them is a much better experience as well.
I love AMD and wished it weren’t so, but buying an AMD video card can only be justified by price or Linux compatibility.
Yeah I have been having so much trouble running AI stuff on my Rx 6700 XT that I use my media computer with a RTX 2060 to do most of my experimenting with though the VRAM is really limiting.
I’ve forgotten which generation but the last time AMD had the better card most people still bought Nvidia.
I only dislike AMD significantly less than Nvidia. Give me friendly company with non-proprietary drivers and I’d consider that even if it wasn’t “the best”.
The majority buys NVIDIA, because NVIDIA cards are just better.
At least in terms of the latest features, like RTX. If you’re only interested in raster performance, AMD works quite well and provides excellent value.
Not just the latest features. NVENC is better for both streaming and untethered VR, CUDA is usually better supported by photo/video/3D/CAD software, etc. AMD is only good if you’re only playing games and can’t afford an NVIDIA card.
Or you’re like me and use Linux and value better drivers (e.g. Wayland support, no update bugs on rolling release distros, etc) over those other features.
And on Windows as well, if you’re buying mid-range, you’re probably not going to have a good experience with those other features, so you should go with AMD. The premium for buying Nvidia at the mid-range often isn’t worth it.
Well, I don’t buy midrange, personally. As I tend to use my GPU for hobbies and work, I tend to buy the best thing available on the market.
And even when I play games, I play in 4K exclusively, for the past seven years :)
Then I guess you and I are very different people.
I also use my GPU for hobbies and work. My hobbies are game dev (nothing hardcore GPU-wise, just some mid-poly modeling), gaming (mostly indie, though occasionally SP AAA), and random SW-dev projects (e.g. I’m building a Lemmy/Reddit clone). For work, I’m a full-stack web dev and don’t do CUDA work (and I have a separate work-provided laptop), just occasionally run renders of things (mostly web-based three.js stuff). So for me personally, I’d only really see a benefit for running some of the latest games, which is incredibly rare since I honestly don’t have a ton of time to keep up with things (e.g. I’m finally starting RDR2 after owning it for years). I game in 1440p, and most games don’t tax my GPU (RX 6650XT). If I need CUDA, I’ll just rent space on AWS or something instead of running it locally.
So I care a lot more about Wayland support (I have monitors with different refresh rates) and driver stability (I run a rolling release, and Nvidia causes issues at least a few times/year) than top tier performance or latest features. I’ve been on Linux longer than Steam has, and I’ve honestly only been playing more games because Valve has made it so easy. For me, Linux comes first, gaming second, and AMD provides a high quality product for my use case. I used to use Nvidia because ATI used to be worse on Linux, if you can believe that, but I upgraded after COVID because Wayland got quite stable.
These tech YouTubers should do Linux comparisons. These are not small differences when comparing, let’s say, Nvidia 4060 and the RX 7600. It could make the AMD GPU edge out the more expensive Nvidia offering
Every comment should be “But what about in Linux?”
I’d like this. At first I stuck with Nvidia because they had drivers for Linux. But I’ve been on that train so long. Only reason I’m still on it is cuda cores for video editing with davinci resolve.
And with the popularity of the Steam Deck, it’s actually a pretty reasonable thing to do now. I want three sets of numbers: Windows and Linux on the same hardware, and Steam Deck. Maybe do a fourth for Windows handheld PCs like ROG Ally.
I’ve been using arch and manjaro for the past 3 years with awesomewm and gnome (can’t get awesomewm to behave with second monitor while gaming so I switch to gnome when using the second monitor, using laptop) and this has pretty much been my experience. Windows is bloated and it never"just works".
Windows never works so much that you have to switch between distros to do different stuff, ahahaha! Oh my, the delusion…
Gnome and awesomewm are apps
Anyone tried crysis?
That’s when we know it’s:
The year of the Linux desktop
When we all can finally run crysis.
You already can run Crysis.
Hasn’t this been happening for years?
Intel’s clear Linux had similar articles published about it years ago.
slim margin isn’t significant enough.
I want bigger margins.
Still very impressive considering this is all run by translating the same Windows API calls into Linux ones, and then running them. There’s definitely some overhead in doing this, and yet they still beat Windows native.
Feel free to contribute. Most the stack from driver to software is FOSS
Install Gentoo
And still … it would not matter.
Kinda like this comment?
I switched to Mint this month and have only run into issues with anti-cheat. I’ve tried about 8 different games. Halo Infinite had some odd textures the first time I ran it, but not since.
All in all I’m very happy with my OS switch.
Doesn’t matter. Easy of use + compatibility trumps all.
Some people already using Linux as daily driver and booting to windows is not ease for them.
People doesn’t need every games to be compatible. They only need the games they want to play compatible.
For me, I no longer need to boot into windows to play game.
Yes. That is the status quo.
I agree to an extent, but most games just work in Linux with no slowdowns or glitches. And I’ve had to mess with many games in Windows over the years to get them to run.
That’s true, but also a W for Linux.
More like, “doesn’t matter – not being tracked > all.” :^)
Even so, Linux is easier to use than Windows (yes, I went there.) because of a single and only fact:
Configuration files.
Does the average Windows user can configure EVERYTHING through a SINGLE configuration/text file, that explicitly says “what does what”? Video, sound, window size, hotkeys…?
No? So there you have it.
Linux is easier if you’re already comfortable with a computer. A lot of users wouldn’t understand how to edit a config file / would be uncomfortable doing so, especially those who grew up with modern phones and apps. Even if a 30 second edit took 30 minutes in a GUI, lots of people will prefer the GUI.
Unfortunately most people find Windows / MacOS “just works”. If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher. I love my Arch setup but the average user would probably find it unusable LOL
If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher
People use what comes on the computer. OS usage on the Steam Deck is overwhelmingly Linux because that’s what comes on it. This indicates that Linux is perfectly fine for the average person, it just needs to come pre-installed. Very few people install their own OS either way, Linux or Windows.
Linux is easier if you’re already comfortable with a computer.
This is completely false. Linux is just as approachable as Windows and is simpler and easier to use in many ways.
You’re confusing “already learned Windows” with “easier”.
I think 5 or 6 years ago, I would agree with this. But I’m not talking about being comfortable with Windows, I’m talking about computers as a whole - a lot of younger people have grown up on app-based devices like iPads, deeply entrenched in “ecosystems”. I’ve found myself in situations where when working with people younger than myself, I regularly find myself having to explain things as mundane as how files work since they’re used to things like Google Drive. Sure, if you took someone with no computer experience and put a Linux and a Windows machine in front of them? I’m sure both have a similar learning curve, and maybe an arguably easier one for Linux. But realistically, when growing up surrounded by devices is now the norm, we can’t really ignore the prior experience.
This is true, and frankly a huge issue. It’s ironic that right now “older generations” (like myself) know more about computers than younger ones. When I was growing up the widely accepted concept was that the younger generation was always going to do circles around the older ones when it comes to technical and computer concepts. You have no idea how many younger ones know nothing about computing. Like asking if a laptop with “8GB of memory is enough to store all their music”. It’s kind of alarming.
That’s an incredibly wrong assessment. People don’t use Linux because it’s not pushed like drugs by hardware manufacturers. It’s that simple. Linux is at a point where it’s actually way easier to install, use and maintain than the 2 other major players out there. Add to this the diversity of DEs, ways to make things work, customization, etc.
No it’s not. That’s a flat out typical year of the Linux desktop mentality.
I have commits to TF and cncf. I ran lfs like 6 years ago. I use Windows DE because it’s a far better experience now that WSL does 99% of what I need. Not because I’m uncomfortable in Linux.
Windows has a configuration file, it’s called a registry. Always has been.
When first switching to Linux I tried Pop!_os and it was awful was a headache to get anything to work … switched to Ubuntu and all my problems went away , I don’t recommend using pop .
For me it was the reverse. Pop was the clear winner for several reasons. Plus I like System76 overall. I vigorously recommend Pop as a beginner/gaming choice.
But honestly, Ubuntu vs PopOS should not have been that different for you - they are extremely similar. Pop is cleaner with less bloat, and not beholden to Canonical.
To each their own of course, and having options is what makes switching great.
My wife’s laptop crapped out so I threw pop os (previously had arch on it) and made profiles for both of us. Lets her play the few games that she likes, and Firefox is the same. It’s made for an easy transition from windows to Linux for her. Ubuntu would probably be just as easy overall, but she likes the tiling too since it’s very helpful on a small screen (arch + bspwm is my main driver so I wasn’t going to give up tiling)
This may be a YMMV situation. I’m not a huge gamer, but Pop has worked great for me for nearly all games I’ve tried. The one glaring exception has been the Civilization series (specifically 3 and 6)… Anyone know if that’s a Linux problem, a Pop problem, or a just me problem?
(Also, sorry you’re getting downvoted for sharing your honest opinion/personal experience)
I had a bunch of issues and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got to the point that steam wouldn’t even work anymore and couldn’t get any games to launch. I’m not worried about upvotes so it’s all good lol .
I’ve played civIV on fedora and had no problems (I was using a jc141 release, though).
For me it was the other way around. I did notice performance issues then I tried fedora and they went away so I’ve been sticking with fedora
I haven’t tried fedora myself and at this point I don’t want to mess with what is working great for me . I did have some issues with it freezing when idle but that was fixed with a kernel update.
Been using Nobara for the last 2 years. Haven’t noticed much of a dip in performance coming from Windows, if anything.
