this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Linux Gaming

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Nobara OS, Arch Linux and Pop!_OS beat Windows 11 by a slim margin in fps (delta 8) in Windows native games - Cyberpunk 2077, Forspoken, Starfield and The Talos Principle II. Windows 11 wins in Rachet & Clank.

ComputerBase's testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Update: Windows 11 wins in one game.

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[–] Carol2852@discuss.tchncs.de 76 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Soooo when did Arch become a gaming focused OS?

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 85 points 11 months ago (8 children)
[–] BaroqueInMind@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago

Pretty much this.

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 68 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Is arch really gaming focused though?

[–] lea@feddit.de 32 points 11 months ago

Arch is focused on being cutting-edge and lightweight which happens to be perfect for gaming performance in most cases but that's all.

[–] p5f20w18k@lemmy.world 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Arch is focused on however you put it together

[–] oo1@kbin.social 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Arch is focused like the same way a beach is a camera lens.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 months ago

Exactly. The only thing Arch focuses on is not focusing on anything. They ship packages as vanilla as possible, have pretty much no default configuration, etc. In short, they try to make as few assumptions as possible.

It ends up being pretty good for gaming because Linux is pretty good for gaming. They're explicitly not doing anything special here.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 18 points 11 months ago

shrug, I've been using arch and Manjaro for years and gaming in them. They are what you make them, and AUR is massive and solves a lot of problems I have in other distros so that's why I use it.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

SteamOS is based on Arch, likely why they picked it.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago

That's like saying PlayStation 5 and Switch are based on FreeBSD, so you should game on FreeBSD (well, not quite, but hopefully the point is clear). FreeBSD isn't good for gaming, it's just liberally licensed and easy to build on top of, hence why it's used.

Valve has reasons to use an Arch base, and none of them have anything to do with any specific benefit regarding gaming. It's easy to fork and maintain customized build files for since it makes so few assumptions (packages are as vanilla as possible in Arch, so it's easier to maintain a patch set).

Valve likely has patches in SteamOS that haven't made it to upstream Arch, and there's likely a number of packages that are quite outdated vs upstream Arch, so installing upstream Arch will give you quite a different experience vs SteamOS.

[–] pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev 35 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I recently switched to ubuntu in a gaming laptop, right now I've been using it just for jellyfin and some other coding tasks, but it definitely runs smoother, more stable, quicker, and cooler than windows did for the same workload.
I was surprised at the difference of even just having the machine idle, on windows it was noticeable warm, now on ubuntu it's almost as if it has been turned off.

[–] thantik@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Honestly, at this point -- If Valve made a more generalized Linux OS... or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.

Now now, I'm not saying YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP!! - but Valve would be a great mother for fostering an ecosystem that would potentially make Microsoft compete by not making their OS shittier year-by-year.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 11 months ago (6 children)

If Valve made a Linux OS... or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.

Sorry, does SteamOS 3 not count? Is Valve's massive investment in Mesa, Wine, Wayland (HDR, Gamescope, etc) not exactly what you're talking about? I feel like we're living in parallel dimensions or something lol

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[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Steam deck was definitely a move in this direction. From what I hear people like it. If they like it, I see more traction to it as people understand that it's not windows. Ya never know. 2035: year of the Linux desktop!

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[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 26 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don't run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.

Its like people miss the good old days of "This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don't work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don't". Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn't still work to be done serves no benefit.

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[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Computerbase is very solid and well known in Germany and have been covering Linux quite a bit for a while now.
Performance of course can fluctuate heavily between games but the amount of progress that Linux made over the past decade is nothing but astonishing.

[–] wrath_of_grunge@kbin.social 8 points 11 months ago (5 children)

that's kind of my take on it too. Linux has come so far from what it used to be like. it's not quite ready to see mass-adoption, but it's making some amazing strides. so many different parties have been contributing to a massive effort to iron out some of the issues with Linux. once performance improves significantly over Windows, and compatibility gets a little more wide-spread, you'll start to see people willing to put up with the teething problems, in the name of superior performance.

THAT is when Linux will see more mainstream success.

some year, i don't know when, really will be the year of Linux.... maybe.

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[–] WhiteHawk@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago (20 children)

Ok, but what about Nvidia GPUs? Those are what the the vast majority of gamers use.

[–] limitedduck@awful.systems 12 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Nvidia has been kind of a mess for me on Wayland, especially the lastest 545 drivers. I just switched to AMD and literally all my issues disappeared, including one I thought was a KDE plasma bug

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[–] Cycloprolene@lemm.ee 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Slower by default (-10-20%) but very close to w11 if to you enable rebar on linux. For some reason rebar consistently improve perf for nvidia on linux.

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[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Description is false. Windows won in R&C. This was not an across the board win for Linux. Good news doesn't need to be sensationalized.

[–] tun@lemm.ee 9 points 11 months ago

Updated the summary about Windows winning.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

These tech YouTubers should do Linux comparisons. These are not small differences when comparing, let's say, Nvidia 4060 and the RX 7600. It could make the AMD GPU edge out the more expensive Nvidia offering

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[–] icdl@lemm.ee 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I've been using arch and manjaro for the past 3 years with awesomewm and gnome (can't get awesomewm to behave with second monitor while gaming so I switch to gnome when using the second monitor, using laptop) and this has pretty much been my experience. Windows is bloated and it never"just works".

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (11 children)

Windows almost always just works.

This seems crazy to say when talking about Linux. Especially when saying you have to switch to use dual monitors.

[–] Neomega@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I have to agree. I love Linux but Windows really does just work. Especially when it comes to gaming. I applaud anyone that enjoys Linux gaming but don't act like it's anywhere near as simple as on windows.

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[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Nearly always something random breaks for me on windows, and it's a huge pain to fix it. I hate dealing with windows, Linux is easier, because it isn't a black box.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

A stupid amount of non tech users manage to use it absolutely fine, so I'm not sure what you're doing wrong tbh.

Linux is 100% not easier and not advertised as such.

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

A stupid amount of non tech users manage to use it

Meanwhile, most of those users are running systems that are so deteriorated that it takes them a minute+ to open a browser.

On a machine that they only use to browse internet.

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[–] nitefox@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. In all the time I’ve been using windows I never had a problem that people constantly report; even BSOD happened quite rarely. I never got my pc to randomly shut down and update either…

Like, I switched to Linux cause i saw it as cool, wanted to try it out and liked how customisable it was and mostly to spite the megacorp

[–] TwanHE@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Honestly since windows 10 the only blue screens I've gotten are due to my own doing.

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[–] LoremIpsumGenerator@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] 7u5k3n@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's when we know it's:

The year of the Linux desktop

When we all can finally run crysis.

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[–] sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with the games mentioned in the article, but Linux is great for gaming. I run Manjaro on my T540p laptop and have never had problems with Angband or Nethack. I can even run DF with tilesets if I'm feeling spunky. Mind you, I do have 8 gbs of RAM and a pretty sweet Intel integrated graphics setup, so that may be why it's so smooth.

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[–] RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 6 points 11 months ago

Hasn’t this been happening for years?

Intel’s clear Linux had similar articles published about it years ago.

[–] snownyte@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago (5 children)

slim margin isn't significant enough.

I want bigger margins.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 12 points 11 months ago

Still very impressive considering this is all run by translating the same Windows API calls into Linux ones, and then running them. There's definitely some overhead in doing this, and yet they still beat Windows native.

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