Comment by Parae
7 hours ago
> pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop
I mostly play fighting games. A 7% drop in FPS is more than enough to break the whole game experience as combo rely on frame data. For example Street Fighter 6 is locked at 60 fps. A low punch needs 4 frames to launch and leaves a 4-frames window to land another hit. If there was a 7% drop in FPS, you would miss your combo. Even the tiniest drop in FPS makes the game unplayable.
It's the same for almost every fighting games. I know it's a niche genre, but I'm quite sure it's the same for other genres. It's a complete dealbreaker for competitive play.
> It's a complete dealbreaker for competitive play
Very true, and this is the biggest issue for me when it comes to gaming on Linux. And it's not just raw FPS count. You can usually brute force your way around that with better hardware. (I'm guessing you could probably get a locked 60 in Street Fighter 6 even with a 30% performance loss?). It's things like input lag and stutter, which in my experience is almost impossible to resolve.
If it weren't for competitive shooters, I could probably go all Linux. But for now I still need to switch over to Windows for that.
I played competitive Quake on LAN and online. If your setup, hardware/software, can't handle your configuration you either get a better one (spending money, rollback your OS, etc) or adjust it (lower your configuration, nobody plays competitive gaming for the aesthetics, Quake in such a context is damn ugly and nobody cares).
It's not about a drop in game, it's about being prepared for the game. If you get a 7% drop, or even a .1% drop (whatever is noticeable to you) then you adjust.
To be clear I'm not saying worst performance is OK, I'm saying everybody wants 500FPS for $1 hardware but nobody gets that. Consequently we get a compromise, e.g. pay $2000 for 60FPS and so be it. If you have to pay $2000 + $600 or lower graphics settings to still get 60FPS that's what you do.
PS: FWIW competitive gaming is niche in gaming. Most people might want to compete but in practice most people are not, at least not professionally. It's still an important use case but it's not the majority. Also from my own personal experience I didn't get performance drop.