Comment by thewebguyd
5 months ago
Interestingly enough, I've had games that had both a native Linux port and Windows version, and the Windows version through Proton ran better than the native Linux version. This ended up being true for Civ5, Civ6 and Cities Skylines (1).
With those admittedly limited examples though, I don't experience the same ranking in performance, but I attribute that to my non-gaming hardware vs. any problem with Linux or Proton/Wine. I play on a laptop with an Nvidia 3050 laptop GPU, and I get much better performance in Windows still. In Cities Skylines, for example, I'll get ~20 fps on Linux via Proton (but I do experience what you said, it's consistent no major spikes or drops) while on Windows I get between 45-60fps up until about 15k population or so.
Other games, despite working, remain unplayable to me due to performance. I can play Diablo 4 on windows no problem on medium settings, but even on low it's just too unresponsive on Linux.
Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
Linux port if there is one is usually done by a third party porting studio, which is not necessarily at the same quality as the original codebase. Also the devs just don't have the manpower/bandwidth to spare for Linux users given how small this community is.
It's better value for money for both the gamers and the devs if the devs just choose to engage with valve and get their game running perfectly under proton.
These ports are also not usually source ports, so they're not much "more native" than the Proton ports. They often use the same kind of API translation layer, probably also built on WINE. I think as Proton sees more investment and becomes more advanced, it's probably becoming difficult for competing compatibility layers to keep up.
A source port that is optimized as lovingly as its Windows counterpart will probably be faster than the Windows version running via Proton, but the incentives aren't generally there to justify the costs/difficulties. Maybe some day it will be! That would be wonderful.
But until then, Proton seems like an increasingly compelling option for these compatibility layer-based ports of Windows games.
Factorio and Minecraft (Java edition) are two of the few games that come to mind where the Linux port got comparable effort to the Windows port, and I don't think people are in a rush to play either of them in Proton.
Your latest AAA open world RPG on the other hand? Yeah, you're probably going to have better luck in Proton even if it gets a native Linux port.
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> and get their game running perfectly under proton
Even better would be to compile for linux, but use DXVK-Native (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk#dxvk-native) if you think migrating from DirectX to Vulkan requires too much effort.
They probably QA mostly for windows, so they run into bottlenecks and edge-cases of windows APIs during QA. Linux-native APIs probably have different bottlenecks and edge-cases.
I think the reimplementations of Windows APIs in Linux, even though alternative to the original, should have similar bottlenecks and edge-cases. So the extra QA on Windows helps the Proton version more.
But maybe figure out how to start getting those third party Linux porting studios paid to work on Proton...
The answer is pretty simple here - hire CodeWeavers to work on supporting your game in Proton/Wine rather than some other porting shop doing an old rewrite-style port.
To be you should compare the windows version on windows, no proton against the Linux version. DXVK, which proton uses, makes some games run better in windows than "native".
> Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
To the extent that Linux doesn’t support nvidia gpu it is actually Nvidia not supporting Linux and keeping their drivers proprietary.
But that doesn't matter. If the feature isn't there, Linux is non-viable if you want/rely on said feature. It doesn't matter whose 'fault' it is.
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> On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
> HDR
Already supported
> Nvidia GPUs
You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue.
> VR
SteamVR works though?
> > HDR > Already supported
Is it though? I confess I haven’t tried in a few weeks but until last time I did, to get HDR in games you had to start a session with `gamescope` rather than a DE, and still had to set a bunch of flags - and in some ways have a very subpar experience with problems with mouse movements and other issues I can’t recall.
I exclusively game on Linux and I find the experience far superior than doing anything on the other OS, but last I checked HDR was not actually supported.
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For gaming and general desktop on Linux AMD is best if you want a dedicated GPU.
If you want a laptop with good battery life Intel is generally the way to go.
A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of effort Valve put into improving the open source AMD drivers, which is what is used on their Steam platform.
Of course if you want CUDA you need Nvidia, but if you use Nvidia to drive your Linux desktop expect some suffering to go along with it.
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> SteamVR works though?
Not at a level where the experience is more fun than frustation.
It's getting there though. I own a high-end PC with nvidia GPU and I play VR on my Linux setup via ALVR (I own Quest 3) It's not straightforward and full of workarounds I have to do, but once you're in the game it works great
By the time it gets there there will be tons of other new features that Linux won't support.
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AFAICT HDR is supported, like on the Steam Deck
HDR on Nvidia with Linux is still very glitchy, I've had the driver crash a few times trying to use it.
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Doesn't support NVIDIA GPU's!? Is this a display or gaming specific thing?
All the ML people are using NVIDIA GPU's on Linux.
There are indeed nvidia drivers for Linux and they're reasonably good for gaming, but the feature set sometimes lags far behind windows. There is no DLSS 3 for Linux, for instance. (as of a few months ago anyway - I haven't checked recently)
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Nvidia support across the desktop ecosystem is poor, for example practically nonfunctional in Sway. And just buggy in other Wayland based desktop environments (kde seems to be the best in my experience).
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I have Debian with KDE Plasma 6 and I have enabled HDR
Can you even watch decent Netflix on Linux yet?
Up to full HD, depending on what Netflix streams out. But this has nothing to do with graphics drivers or GPU performance.
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I wonder of this might be due to your Linux nvidia driver (nouveau?) pinning the card on baseclock by default while the Windows one will allow it to scale up? Something I heard somewhere that seems applicable here.
In that case it might not be anything the game devs or Steam can do anything about but something you'd have to fiddle with on your system.
Happens with whisky and macos in my experience. It is like as soon as a game is installed and you do something like chuck a grenade, no explosion the first time ever you do that.
> Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
That’s interesting and good to know. I’m running an 10th gen i9 with an RTX 3090, so I have plenty of headroom performance wise. I’ve been wondering about Linux gaming on lower end hardware for my younger brother’s sake, and hadn’t assumed it would be worse.
One thing to note: I’ve had all kinds of issues with power management impacting performance. If I let the computer sleep/standby, I’ll get 50% slower framerate until I reboot.
Given the fact that you’re on a laptop, I wonder if power management has contributed to the slowness.
I have a 65 watt ryzen 9 system on chip (8945hs, I think) minipc and make heavy use of it for linux gaming.
My guess is that Nvidia’s linux video drivers are still substandard.
I have a laptop with the same GPU, and Diablo 4 runs really well out of Lutris. Graphics version 570, and the CPU is an AMD with a Radeon 680M integrated. I often play games with FSR on, which probably keeps performance higher?
FSR does indeed increase the performance a lot, before FSR 4 with a significant cost to image quality though.
For your system, the integrated graphics should also be quite capable. More so on Linux, thanks to the driver advantage AMD has here.