Comment by gigatexal
3 years ago
Yeah I love this. Christmas came early for me when I heard this news. In my Fedora 36 gaming box with proprietary Nvidia drivers and games from steam every game just works. I don’t even think about it. They have gotten the whole proton stuff very seamlessly integrated. It’s beautiful.
I'm thinking of moving my gaming box from Windows to Linux, but last time I checked, things weren't as great on the hardware tuning side of things.
I'm running a Radeon 6800 XT undervolted at stock clocks and 980 mV (+ custom fan curve) and I don't think I could keep it cool without the undervolt. How achievable is that in Linux these days?
I'm also thinking of getting a steering wheel and getting back into race simming, are these kinds of peripherals well supported, or is it a game of chance?
https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl should do it. I've got a 6900XT and undervolting works fine. So does core clock and fan curve, but memory clock has issues: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/issues/139 (edit: that issue is closed, so maybe it works now).
As far as peripherals, sometimes it works better than windows and sometimes not great. I'd look up the specific wheel you plan to buy and see if it's supported or someone has built something to support it. For example, you've got piper (https://github.com/libratbag/piper) for Logitech devices.
I have a 6800xt. Undervolting works fine in Linux. You need to set a kernel option to enable it.
Force feedback wheels work in Linux too. The "Linux" builds of games tend to have inferior or missing implementations, but running the windows binary through proton should work pretty well. The input layer in Linux is a bit fiddly; you need to set up obscure udev rules to eliminate dead zones for a steering wheel.
I actually built a force feedback wheel from scratch as a hobby project. I developed the firmware in Linux originally, but switched to Windows so that I could more easily run force feedback test programs. When I bother to set it up, I am probably also setting up VR too. VR works in Linux pretty well these days too, but all the subtle reliability problems compound. On any given day, 80% chance of game launching * 80% of wheel working * 80% chance of VR startinf means it only works 50% of the time. So I just boot into Windows, which works more like 90% of the time.
You want to check out CoreCtrl[0] for GPU undervolting. I'm not sure exactly what features are available for RDNA1-3, I remember reading an issue that some level of control was lost at some point, but granular clock/voltage control, fan curves, etc were all available for my Vega 56.
[0] https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
Looks like the undervolting was answered. As for the racing stuff I’m not 100% I’m sure there are Linux gamer subreddits that could help but I’d imagine if it speaks usb and the game supports it you’ll be fine.
amd overclocking is fantastic with corectrl. they added (recently) overclocking the memory. but amd performance on linux is much better than on windows.
Wow are things that good now? It's been about a decade since I've played PC games. Linux support was not great back then. There were a few titles that worked well.
It's really quite good. When I browse the steam store I tend to just assume that anything with a windows flag will at least be functional.
If I'm purchasing a game that I plan to play exclusively on linux, I still tend to check proton DB before I click buy, but it's becoming more and more of an after-thought.
I ended up playing Elden ring on Linux rather than windows as it seemed to stutter a little. Hard to believe how far gaming on Linux has come.
Night and fucking day, my friend.
Proton support is scarily decent now, Linux daily driver is reasonably feasible even for games, though you might run into some grief with EAC if you play MP titles.
Yup. If it’s in Steam it just works. I play mostly shooters. I’ve been playing Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (Borderlands game) and it’s been glorious.
The first 50 minutes of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (Borderlands) on Linux and Review https://youtu.be/T_3sCcQksKQ
You can check https://www.protondb.com/ for game compatibility.
It's gotten pretty good the last couple years, and it's improving at a very fast pace. Some games work flawlessly on the Steam Deck, but don't yet work for me in Steam on my desktop running Arch, though.