Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games - Linux 17% faster on Average
Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games - Linux 17% faster on Average
From Hardlimit
139 comments
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I don't think the issue is performance though. The unspoken part of this comparison is in bold:
"Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games. In the games we could find that work on linux, the performance was 17% faster on average. In all the rest of the games, Windows worked 100% better."
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Fortunately majority of games work on linux. The major pain point now is the anticheat used by multiplayer games. Single player games more or less work out of the box
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To add on here, you can use the Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? site to track which games are not working due to anti-cheat. In my experience it's extremely rare for "Linux" (aka Wine/DXVK/VKD3D/et al) to not support arbitrary games. If a game is not working on Linux it's almost certainly because of an anti-cheat or some bloated/obscure DRM telling Linux "no you cannot run this".
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I really want to switch to Linux, but I’ve been told this before and then ended up spending hours trying to get everything to work, and usually give up … but it’s been a couple of years since I tried the last time, so is this the right time?
I have zero interest in the technical parts of Linux or setting things up. I want things to work out if the box. I may have to dual boot because of WoW and MS Flight Sim, but if everything else works it may be worth it.
Edit: wow thanks for the answers. You may have convinced me to try again.
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I'd argue that the idea that most games don't work on Linux is a flat-out misconception in 2023.
It's hard to quantify, but Valve's own Steam Deck (=running on Linux) verification stats have 70% of games either Verified or Playable (Playable generally means that it runs but text is small on the Deck screen, or it needs a lot of keyboard input -- nothing that matters on the desktop). Crucially, "Unsupported" doesn't mean it doesn't run -- it means untested, and in my experience at least, many of those just work too.
Protondb shows 80% of its catalog with a Platinum, Gold, or Silver rating -- 70% are Gold. Silver generally corresponds to e.g. switching to Proton Experimental, which is a single-click process.
Anecdotally, after being gaming only on Linux for more than a year, with a catalog of 500+ games, I've had one (1) that gave me any more trouble than that Proton Experimental switch (Assetto Corsa, first one).
So there is no "unspoken part" here. The experience running Windows games on Linux isn't what it was even 2 years ago. It is, for many people, an entirely seamless experience now.
PS: seeing Windows games running better on Linux isn't a new observation either. Elden Ring was a great example where Proton shader precaching eliminated the stutter that plagued that game at launch, so it didn't happen on Linux.
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"Proton shader precaching eliminated the stutter that plagued that game at launch, so it didn't happen on Linux."
I've been meaning to ask, and it probably should be it's own thread, but when launching a game and it says 'Processing Vulkan Shaders', does allowing it to partially process do anything.
Warframe for me will quickly jump to 33%, then do about 1% per 10-20 seconds. I don't want to wait 10+ minutes to reach 100%, but does letting it get to like 40-60%, then hitting skip, at least keep the processed sharers, or does it skip/dump and process on demand? Basically, is Immediate skip vs giving it a minute or two before skipping worth anything?
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Is anyone else bothered by the 100% better statement?
100% better is twice as good, not infinitely better which is what’s happening here. This is dividing by 0.
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It's better 100% of the time, when it's doesn't work on Linux.
Also, I'm sexy 100% of time, when I am sexy (which is 0% percent of the time).
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IMO that is a disingenuous way to state that. It makes it sound like they had to work to find games that worked on Linux at all and suggests that most games do not. Which is far from the truth. Most games just work these days and it is only a handful that don't, so only a handful work 100% better. Then it all really depends if you care about those few games or not.
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Most games just work these days and it is only a handful that don’t,
To add my own experience, I play a lot of Japanese visual novels (it's a good 80% of what I play). Very few Japanese visual novels are released on Steam. But if they are on Steam, they're usually DRM-free or work in Proton anyway. However, most of these games are English-only. I play them in Japanese.
So I need to get my games from other places, like digital storefronts such as DLsite and DMM. However, I quickly found out that absolutely no games that DMM sells will work in Wine. This is because they are all encumbered with a form of DRM that isn't compatible with Wine. DMM is the largest digital storefront for VNs. DLsite sells some games with various kinds of DRM. PlayDRM does work in Wine, but the rest doesn't. They also sell DRM-free games. The selection isn't as large, but it's good. We recently got the DRM tagging feature in VNDB, so it should give you a good idea of what games are incompatible.
You can also buy VNs physically. Some games are DRM-encumbered but many are DRM-free. You generally don't know until you buy, though, and it can be an expensive mistake. Hopefully we can change that with the new VNDB DRM tagging system.
Even when they're not DRM-encumbered, though, you have a decent chance of facing issues with media playback. Older games using DirectShow you can probably get working with native DLLs using Winetricks. If it's a newer game that uses Media Foundation, you might not be able to get it to work at all. Worst case, the game crashes on the opening movie. I'm looking for a way to improve that section of the wiki since I know very little about Media Foundation for solving these issues.
There also tend to be a bunch of Windowing issues with older VNs like fullscreen being broken. Gamescope will solve those issues.
So, while you can play a lot of VNs in Wine, you need to be careful about it. Fortunately, only two of the VNs I bought are unplayable and they're both from DMM.
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This seems a little exaggerated. For example, over 10k games are Steam Deck playable/verified. About 75% of the games that were tested were compatible with the Steam Deck, so probably many more will follow. Also, all emulators work on Linux too and sometimes even better than on Windows. The number of games that are available to you on Linux is simply massive.
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Based on what the 100% better? I Mostly games have only minor issues.
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It's a shame I need Adobe to run flawlessly for work or I'd switch over. I'm so tired of Microsoft.
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If it’s photoshop that programs been solid for about a decade under wine.
Idk about the other stuff.
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A VM might be a solution for you? I have a single Windows program that I need for work. I chose a VM rather than futzing with wine because it's a solution I know will work. I just run the VM for that during work and shut it down at the end of the workday.
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Second this. If you make the effort for vfio and use a 2nd monitor and a kvm (or a 2nd + kb/m) it doesn't even feel like you're using a VM.
But, if your job requires you to use their computer a docking station could suffice.
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With all the historical windows bloat that's not surprising lol
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OP of the original video here. Wait till you see the Nvidia Optimus results. Even I was dumbdfounded by them. Windows is SOOOO bloated it's thermal throttling like no tomorrow on my laptop. Linux is about 20% faster even on Nvidia. XD
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Aside from performance, I also noticed that older PC games work better on Linux than Windows nowadays. I really enjoy playing games from the late 90's to early 2000's, and they tend to run great on Linux with proton. Just the last year I've played all of Baldurs Gate 1, Icewind Dale 1 and Icewind Dale 2 on my scrappy Lenovo laptop and it's been great.
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I like how they show ffxiv, do addons work too though? I can't play without dalamud (I can but, fuuuck) so that's 1 down already.
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The Dalamud FAQ had Linux install steps so imma guess it does work
Which means it's prolly time for me to swap back to Linux
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It does indeed work. I've been playing ffxiv on linux with plugins since the release of endwalker. If you're on arch, you can use the xivlauncher package from the aur. Or if you're not on arch, there's a flatpak for it (which is what is recommended for the steam deck for example)
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Yeah, I plan on guying a new SSD card and plug it in with a USB 3.0 adapter to hack a new SSD slot for my mobo and test linux without losing anything. There's more games I'm doubtful but I'll admit that I haven't looked it up yet.
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Yes, plugins work really well on linux. Use xivlauncher, available through git or aur. Every addon that i have tried has worked flawlessly. Use IINACT for parsing, it's a plugin version of ACT that is much more stable than standalone ACT in my experience, albeit with fewer config options
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This is incredible. It's time for me to setup à Linux dual boot to give it a try 😎
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With proton the benefit can be +/- by quite a large margin to the point where I wouldn't rely on this data to say that Linux is faster by default. Though it's promising that Linux CAN compete with windows in performance despite the added layer of abstraction necessary to run many titles.
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Beauty of DXVK.
PS: works on Windows too.
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17% faster than the majority of other players out there is kind of cheating, if you think about it.
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Then having the latest hardware is cheating as well.
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How dare you have the newest hardware! Fuckin cheater
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So then buying a brand new 560hz monitor must be cheating to you as well then? I'd say mayyyybe 2% of players, at most, are running 560hz monitors right now.
Are they cheating because some people are still using 60hz hardware?
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Great, but I can still only realistically play a portion of my library with friends on Windows.
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Compatibility isn't perfect, but I have to ask, what does your library look like if so few games in it work?
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Most recently the pain in the ass games have been AoE4, and BeamMP. AoE4 crashes in muliplayer, there is a patch for that crash on protondb, but it seems I'm also impacted by an AMD related bug that happens intermittently and will restart X at a random times specifically due to playing AoE4. Tried various kernels and video cards, still crashes.
BeamMP, looks like a lot of people have this issue, some have been able to resolve it.
Civ6 used to have stability issues, the Linux client is a joke, I use the proton version because it's more stable.
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Why do you say that? I've been testing on pop os and almost all my games work well.
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Ummm, I say that because I'm the friend in the friend group where the games don't work sometimes, and I'm not going to pretend like that isn't the case simply because I'm a FOSS advocate.
I own a steam deck, I have decades of experience with Linux as a Desktop, server, and even some years doing game development, so it's not for a lack of effort.
It's undoubtedly a fact that some mainstream games don't work at all, or well enough that you'll play seamlessly with your windows friends. Even protondb admits hundreds of outright borked games. Being dishonest about this does more harm than good.
It's amazing what Steam, Valve, AMD, etc, have done recently for Linux gaming, but it's not the YotLD yet.
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Prove it. There's protondb to check your library
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If you are using Steam, try Proton, it should work out of the box. Otherwise try Wine.
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I have hundreds of games in steam. Some had poor or broken play with games Windows users play together without issues.
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I found these comparisons not useful. Nobody play on Linux for searching for performance, but to avoid switch os only for playing.
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It's rather important to understand the performance characteristics for people to know what to expect if they want to switch to Linux.
If games ran at half the FPS on Linux as they would have on Windows, then pretty much no one would be gaming on linux.
If you got 90% performance on Linux, only Linux enthusiasts would take the performance hit.
At 100% performance the choice is completely free, people that got fed up with windows could just switch.
When Linux outperforms Windows, this puts us in very interesting territory, as this might even entice a bunch of people to give Linux a try to see whether the switch is worth the performance. I'm personally quite interested in seeing whether this could be the tipping point for Linux on desktop and laptop to really start taking off.
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This the real test of the "PCmasterrace" crowd.
They always talking how windows is all about ease and performance. Linux no good for them.
If OP's finding hold water, some of them should be reconsidering their OS choice.
Obvi anti cheat bullshit if being blocking from.being fixed
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Well explained!
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Huh, I wonder if as Linux (optimistically) becomes more mainstream, this might bring down the price of laptops. You're only paying for the hardware and have a ton of free operating systems to choose from that are leagues better than the paid for one thinking of new rent-seeking strategies.
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This might be helpful to someone that hasn't done a dual boot gaming benchmark to know that they can now stop dual booting and just run Linux. It has been years of conditioning for some being told that for best performance you had to play in Windows.
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I do. Windows 11 is just a bunch of bloatware and ads stuffed in a trenchcoat. I want to be able to use all those rams and GBs I downloaded, without half them being tied up in tracking.
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Nobody play on Linux for searching for performance
I'm no fps snob, but that's blatantly untrue
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139 comments