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'Linux vs Windows' Challenge: Phoronix Tests Popular Games (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Michael Larabel at Phoronix has combined their new results from intensive Linux/Windows performance testing for popular games on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics cards, and at different resolutions. "This makes it easy to see the Linux vs. Windows performance overall or for games where the Linux ports are simply rubbish and performing like crap compared to the native Windows game." The games tested included Xonotic, Tomb Raider, Grid Autosport, Dota 2, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, F1 2015, and Company of Heroes 2 -- and the results were surprising.
Xonotic v0.8 outperformed Windows with a NVIDIA card, but "The poor Xonotic performance on Linux with the Intel driver was one of the biggest surprises from yesterday's article. It's not anything we've seen with the other drivers." And while testing on the Source 2 engine revealed that Valve's Dota 2 "is a quality Linux port," most of the other results were disappointing -- regardless of the graphics card and driver. "Tomb Raider on Linux performs much worse than the Windows build regardless of your driver/graphics card... Shadow of Mordor's relative Linux performance is more decent than many other Linux games albeit still isn't running at the same speeds as the Windows games..."
The article concludes with a note of optimism. "Hopefully in due time with the next generation of games making use of Vulkan...we'll see better performance relative to Windows." Have Slashdot readers seen any performance issues while playing games on Linux?
Xonotic v0.8 outperformed Windows with a NVIDIA card, but "The poor Xonotic performance on Linux with the Intel driver was one of the biggest surprises from yesterday's article. It's not anything we've seen with the other drivers." And while testing on the Source 2 engine revealed that Valve's Dota 2 "is a quality Linux port," most of the other results were disappointing -- regardless of the graphics card and driver. "Tomb Raider on Linux performs much worse than the Windows build regardless of your driver/graphics card... Shadow of Mordor's relative Linux performance is more decent than many other Linux games albeit still isn't running at the same speeds as the Windows games..."
The article concludes with a note of optimism. "Hopefully in due time with the next generation of games making use of Vulkan...we'll see better performance relative to Windows." Have Slashdot readers seen any performance issues while playing games on Linux?
I can't speak for the Tomb Raider devs, but I can at least give you my general impressions from the industry.
It's a small market, certainly, and inroads remain slow. Most high profile game developers, or at least the ones I've previously worked for, never even gave it a second thought. I think that's slowing changing, although certainly not as fast as in the indie scene. My impression is that a lot of indie game devs (my own included) focus on Linux precisely because the AAA studios don't seem to care about it, so it's a more untapped market. It takes fewer sales to make an indie game profitable, so we can afford to take the time to support that platform. When your budget is tens of millions (or hundreds in the largest case these days), you have to focus on the largest market for the biggest return.
Another factor is that many large studios have in-house engines or heavily modified commercial engines, or else rely on a large number of 3rd party technologies. Developing your own Linux port is expensive, and if you're using 3rd party software, unless Linux is fully supported, a port is much less likely. Indie devs, on the other hand, are very likely to be using vanilla Unity or Unreal, which have native Linux support.
I'm probably a bit unique for indies in that I'm using a custom engine, but am still planning complete Win/UWP/Mac/Linux support, doing all the ports the hard way (only Linux remaining now). Once your engine is done, though, it's just a matter of QA and update costs, so I'm counting on that long tail to make the initial investment worthwhile.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"It makes zero sense for a game studio to waste effort bringing the game to Linux."
It's not the game studios themselves that are doing the porting.
Specialized companies like Feral Interactive (native), Aspyr (native) and Virtual Programming (wrapper) do that work.
In many of these cases they already make ports for OS X, so they are familiar with the code.
(If you are really interested - I doubt you are - you could listen to this interview with Edwin of Feral Interactive.)
Steam has over 125 million registered accounts, so while 0.84% Linux isn't much, that's still more than 1 million potential Linux customers on Steam alone.
Also, there are more reasons to port than immediate money.
Creating goodwill, for instance. Or maybe a game's developer is a Linux fan.
Something like Tomb Raider doesn't run well on Windows Phones.
It's a small market, certainly, and inroads remain slow. Most high profile game developers, or at least the ones I've previously worked for, never even gave it a second thought. I think that's slowing changing, although certainly not as fast as in the indie scene.
A good question is still: Why? According to Steam's survey 95.42% run Windows, 3.60% Mac and 0.84% Linux - not sure where the last 0.14% went. The number of Linux gamers is not budging, it's the same hardcore 1% that's used it on the desktop for the last decade. Unless Valve starts to get serious about Steam Machines and Linux I really don't see much of a business case...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Your #4 and #1 are mutually exclusive. And are related to #3.
If there is no central package manager, you can't trust somebody else to care about minimum security for you.
So in windows, if I need to batch re-size images, if I google "linux image resize", image-magick is in the first page.
"windows image resize" has a lot more of noise, so a user will probably download a demo with water marks, need to pay for a well known program or download a program from a non legit sources.
It's clear that the average linux user is more skilled that the average windows user, and that the most important linux tools are open source and available for windows.