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

  • BombOmOm
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    928 months ago

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

  • @AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca
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    608 months ago

    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!

    • @ikidd@lemmy.world
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      458 months ago

      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.

      • @mindlight@lemm.ee
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        98 months ago

        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?

        • Cethin
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          78 months ago

          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.

          • @yuriy@lemmy.world
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            18 months ago

            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.

        • @Almamu@lemmy.world
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          48 months ago

          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.

          • @mindlight@lemm.ee
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            08 months ago

            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

      • rurutheguru
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        68 months ago

        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.

      • @raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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        08 months ago

        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)

    • @coolmule0@lemmy.world
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      58 months ago

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

      • @DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz
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        28 months ago

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

        • @yuriy@lemmy.world
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          28 months ago

          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.

        • Entropy
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          28 months ago

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

    • K0W4L5K1
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      38 months ago

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

  • Free Palestine 🇵🇸
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    398 months ago

    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.

  • Corgana
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    318 months ago

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

      • Corgana
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        28 months ago

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

        • @Nahdahar@lemmy.world
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          38 months ago

          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.

    • 𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙
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      8 months ago

      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

    • qaz
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      28 months ago

      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).

      • Corgana
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        28 months ago

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

        • qaz
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          38 months ago

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

    • @kava@lemmy.world
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      168 months ago

      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

        • @wahming
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          28 months ago

          Almost ready, but not quite yet AFAIK

      • Resol van Lemmy
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        28 months ago

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

        • @kava@lemmy.world
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          18 months ago

          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

      • @Thetimefarm@lemm.ee
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        18 months ago

        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.

        • @itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          38 months ago

          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

          • @ahal@lemmy.ca
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            48 months ago

            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.

          • @Jako301@feddit.de
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            18 months ago

            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.

            • @itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              18 months ago

              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

              • Resol van Lemmy
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                18 months ago

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

                Oh well, the downvotes were worth it.

  • @arc@lemm.ee
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    178 months ago

    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.

      • @arc@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • @jabjoe@feddit.uk
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          48 months ago

          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.

          • @arc@lemm.ee
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            28 months ago

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

            • @jabjoe@feddit.uk
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              28 months ago

              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).

              • @arc@lemm.ee
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                18 months ago

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

                • @jabjoe@feddit.uk
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                  18 months ago

                  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.

        • Cethin
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          218 months ago

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

        • @arc@lemm.ee
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          48 months ago

          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.

          • @raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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            118 months ago

            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 :)

            • @erwan@lemmy.ml
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              88 months ago

              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.

            • @arc@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              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.

    • @nathris@lemmy.ca
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      38 months ago

      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.

  • @FrankLaskey@lemmy.ml
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    128 months ago

    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.

    • @deathmetal27@lemmy.world
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      48 months ago

      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.

    • K0W4L5K1
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      98 months ago

      Yeah just add the game as a non steam game to steam and click play.

    • Cethin
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      88 months ago

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

      • @deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
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        218 months ago

        (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.

          • @kjetil@lemmy.world
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            18 months ago

            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

            • @erwan@lemmy.ml
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              18 months ago

              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.

  • @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    118 months ago

    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.

  • @Gerula@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • @01011@monero.town
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    8 months ago

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

    • @evulhotdog@lemmy.world
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      -98 months ago

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

      • @kescusay@lemmy.world
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        188 months ago

        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.

  • @Drxmiz@reddthat.com
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    68 months ago

    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

  • @malchior@aussie.zone
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    58 months ago

    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.

  • @FrankLaskey@lemmy.ml
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    58 months ago

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

    • @yuriy@lemmy.world
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      58 months ago

      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!