'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?

Comments

Windows to linux ports are crap.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Leave games, take high performance engineering analysis done by CAD/CAM design analysis tools. There is this leading company which became the leading company by acquiring many different physics simulation companies. And the acquisitions include pure-linux shops, pure-windows shops and some mixed. Their fluid mechanics tools come from what used to be a pure linux shop. It simply rocks in linux AND windows. Well done system, it would even catch access violations, clean up the sub systems and continue without crashing. Graphics would simply rock. It would take a fluid mechanics simulation being done on 128 node cluster and render the pressure contours on a remote work station. Fully scriptable too! Very good performance in windows and liunux. On the other side a geometry processing tool comes from a pure windows shop. This tool has the precision of Parametric Technolgies CAD engine and the flexibility of blender like UI. Slicker than Exxon-Valdez in Prince William Sound! But the damned thing does not even run on Linux. Their electronics analysis tools come from what used to be a unix shop, that went to Windows with Mainwin porting, then some sort hybrid of mainwin, kernel mode, console apps behind a reasonably good UI (unlimited undo/redo, complete parametric sweep with two levels of distributed processing!). Works reasonably well in Linux but even users who solve in linux postprocess in windows.

Moral of the story: develop in linux and port to Windows, you could compete with native windows apps. Develop in windows and port to linux, you would be lucky if it just runs.

Re:Anyone know what made them

[Alwin Henseler]

As far as my limited understanding goes: OSX ports of games involve building against many of the (open source) components included in Linux distro's. So when doing an OSX port, a Linux port is 'low hanging fruit'. Some studios may take advantage of that to do a Linux port as well. Or not... depending on title, game engine, sales, in-house developer expertise, etc etc.

The market for OSX games is small compared to Windows games, but still significant and considerably bigger than Linux gaming. So in a way, you could say Linux gaming is freeriding on the OSX games market. And of course for games that are popular enough, even a 1~2% market is enough to warrant the effort for a port.

Re:This can't be true

[chipschap]

Thank you for a reasoned post which tells things as they are. I also use Linux because it meets my needs. I don't pretend that it's for people who want the highest performance from the latest games or anything approaching that. There are games for Linux (and more all the time) but I would hardly call it a gamer's platform.

And Linux not being a gamer's platform is not a problem. Gamers should use platforms suited to their purposes. I don't tout Linux as the One Solution That Fits All.

Linux is useful to me for getting things done. That's all I need.

Re:Q n A

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

This is the games currently played on steam:
Current Max today
646,219 1,099,697 Dota 2
525,059 535,298 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
71,194 71,655 ARK: Survival Evolved
70,252 70,252 Sid Meier's Civilization V
65,985 66,079 Football Manager 2016
62,039 64,762 Team Fortress 2
57,520 57,795 Garry's Mod
54,727 55,830 Rocket League
54,280 60,794 Grand Theft Auto V
45,628 45,628 Arma 3

Only the last 3 games is not availble for Linux. Top-7 of those games are available for Linux gamers.
So most of the game you call top-tiered are not among the most played games.
  And the gamers today play alot of a bit older and more popular games.

Re:This can't be true

[Tough Love]

I don't pretend that it's for people who want the highest performance from the latest games or anything approaching that.

But if you look at the Dota2 Vulkan and the Unigine results, it is approaching that. Vulkan on Linux within 1.5% of windows on AMD and 9% on nVidia. Not that OpenGL is any slouch - Unigine OpenGL are within 9% of windows DirectX, showing the huge difference between native support and translation layers. But developers already voted with their allegiance: few had the luxury of supporting two dissimilar rendering platforms and almost all picked the one with the biggest market and modest performance advantage.

That equation changes now. See this this or this if you have any doubts. The new equation is, if you want one platform that delivers top performance across Android and Windows you go with Vulkan, end of story. Desktop Linux is the lucky beneficiary of that.