Slashdot Mirror
'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'm still LOLing at the Europeans even today, most of whom are mourning the first of many nations to leave the EU. It's a matter of time before the rest of the EU fails, too. I'm so thankful for being a Canadian, because we are smarter and better than the Europeans and Americans. Unlike the United States and most of Europe, Canada is not a failed state. Look for Canada to become the dominant power as China sinks deeper into recession, the United States spirals downward in decay, and the EU breaks apart at the seams.
What is this "Linux" you speak of?
Developers are far more concerned with enforcing the GPL and keeping any proprietary drivers out of distros than they are with providing users with a decent experience. Apparently open source is more important than usability. And that is why Linux will always suck. There are proprietary drivers for Linux with better performance but the distros won't include them.
According to the Linux evangelists here, Linux is better at everything and can do no wrong. Therefore the data must be wrong or there must have been a flaw in the tests. It cannot possibly be true that Linux is inferior at anything.
port Tomb Raider to Linux? I'm not saying it's not cool and all, but I just can't imagine enough of a market for it. Shot across the bow to Microsoft over UWP maybe? From what I could tell that was what SteamOS was all about (and why Valve let it fizzel after the Windows Store bombed in Win8)
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I wonder which group of Slashdotters will rule this time. The ones that say Linux sucks and systemd is the devil, or the ones that say they've used Linux since the 80s and everything else is a pile of shit.
I'm not worried about performance, so much as the games. I have Mint 17.3 on most of my PCs, and I can't play Fallout 4, Dark Souls 3, and GTAV. Bring the games, the performance will fallow.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
> Have Slashdot readers seen any performance issues while playing games on Linux?
Which games? Most games for Linux are Indies and Linux runs them just fine.
Under Linux you won't be able to play the native versions of Overwatch, Doom 4, Quantum Break, or any version of GTA, CoD, Battlefield, Colin McRay Rally, Crysis, Deus Ex, FarCry, Hitman, Mafia etc. etc. etc.
I've never heard of any of those games. But then, I wasn't born after the year 2000.
Even a linsux shill site can't game their benchmarks enough to make linsux look good.
At least you guys have tux racer. The pinnacle of linsux gaming!
The games were cherry picked. Notice they call the linux versions "PORTS" True cross platform games work better on linux.
The leave out some of the best games. Tuxracer on windows is slower than $h1t
Consume desktop Linux is less popular than Windows Phones. It makes zero sense for a game studio to waste effort bringing the game to Linux. It would be better for them to spend that extra effort making the games better to begin with.
And all the snobs that keep bashing hard work of thousands of developers that worked on Windows and Directx. It will be a decade of open source in-fighting before we get something comparable to even DirectX 9
I've got Win 8.1 and Linux in a dualboot setup on my computer and have been playing Dota 2 on both OSes. Performance on Linux has been on par with Windows and since the latest couple of patches I've seen the Linux client run even a few frames faster on average than the Windows one. On most other games the performance on Linux has been really problematic, though. The only other game I've seen run on my Linux perfectly is Natural Selection 2. The devs of NS2 have really put a lot of effort in developing the game further even though it's been over four years since its release.
-SR
The problem is support for gaming hardware.
There is no gaming culture on Linux. At least not yet. And this is why few makers of gaming hardware bother to produce drivers for their devices. And those where such drivers exist, they're usually not on par with the drivers for Windows. From input devices like flight sticks, steering wheels and high resolution mice to output devices like 7.1 audio cards and headphones. Either they don't work at all or you can at best get a token support out of it.
Would you like playing F1 2005 if the force feedback on your wheel doesn't work? How much fun is playing a FPS game when the audio is reduced to a half baked stereo output that doesn't give you any information about the attacker's location?
Performance only starts becoming an issue once you actually want to play the game on that system.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
how "GOOD" the test is! native windows games are tested on Linux machine, I don't think the test makes sense.
> I wonder which group of Slashdotters will rule this time. The ones that say Linux sucks and systemd is the devil, or the ones that say they've used Linux since the 80s and everything else is a pile of shit.
Know who you're trolling. It's the people who have used Linux (or Unix) for a little while who see the problems with systemd. Those who think "Linux sucks" (Steve Ballmer and three others) are midnless Windows fanatics. Therefore they love the systemd/MS Office approach of putting every function anyone could ever need into one monstrous software package.
is why I'm still on Windows... Gaming on Linux just isn't there yet and devs don't care about Linux too. (mostly publishers)
Linux drivers and games don't even get a fraction of the resources of their Windows counterparts. It's just plain stupidity to even think you can compare them side by side.
It seems after Brexit we're back to the newsdraught.
The desire to release a game on both Windows and various consoles
A developer that has been approved by ID@Xbox but told "not yet" by SCE and Nintendo is likely to target Windows and Xbox One. Or in other words, Windows and Windows.
we already want to make the game as reasonably portable as possible so we can put in on PC, consoles, and possibly mobile--ie, often Android.
I don't see how one game can work well on both consoles and mobile, especially if isn't inherently a point-and-click game. Consoles have a thumbstick and buttons as their primary input device. The vast majority of Android devices* have a touch screen. If you try to adapt a game designed for a thumbstick and buttons to a touch screen the trivial way, by putting a D-pad and buttons on a flat sheet of glass the way emulators do, you get something like Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure . It's a platformer in the vein of Super Mario Bros. or Giana Sisters. When I tried it on my Nexus 7 (2012) tablet, it was a pain in the ass to play because I kept accidentally pressing outside the active area of the on-screen controls due to lack of any sort of tactile feedback as to where my thumbs were. (Pairing a Bluetooth keyboard solves it but also somewhat defeats the point of mobile.) The workaround to make a platformer work with a touch screen often involves simplifying it to an endless runner.
* Most Android devices are not OUYA, SHIELD, JXD, or GameStick.
If you haven't played it you're missing out. Although Minsta-Hook is not my cup of tea, if you love flying around like Spiderman with a insta kill laser in your hand this is for you. Xon has Vehicles, Jet Packs and Overkill Mod too. My fav since its mine is my Shotgun only server Called Mofo with a Shogtun. With wall jumping and crazy pushback force from the bullets to make your enemies fly back fast and die while hitting a wall :) or just fly back off the map and of course die....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
'Nobody' cares about gaming on Linux (statistically - I know a few companies do), so the drivers are always going to be lagging and the ports are mostly going to be half-hearted, and Vulkan won't fix that. Probably the biggest issue is a lack of something like Direct X to make things easy - being Linux, there are multiple competing standards for it.
It's why all my servers are Linux but the gaming machine is Windows. When I want to play a game, I just want it to work without messing with WINE configs or having to put up with stuttering and low frame rates. I tried!
That's only true for games that are ported over. Everyone's obsessed with that for some reason. This is a very real chance to open a new market, attract in new gamers, and gain life-long supporters. Sure, the likes of EA will never take that chance, as they're too busy spending hundreds of millions making single games that appeal to a watered-down gaming demographic. But indie devs have a chance to not only make cheaper games that are more personal and don't have to appeal to the existing gaming culture. And that always leads the way for the predatory larger-scale firms to finally open their Sauron-like eyes and realize there's money to be won. Ports have nothing to do with this.
This is awesome news. I cant wait to run games on Linux that were released in 2006.
I'm not sure what your message is. That Windows makes it difficult to port to other environments? That Windows programmers can't make portable code? Something else?
My suggestion is that this situation is caused by a specific cultural issue. Unix has long had an active culture of creating portable code. While not every program is created this way, there is a specific subset that remains active and has very deep roots.
Windows does not have much of a portable code culture. These skills are not valued there and so the training, development and investment is not done. Programmers are not rewarded in the Windows world for making portable code. The result is that little portable code is created and the programming skill sets are not developed.
And yes, I know about Zinc, Java, the AWT and Swing. Those haven't really changed the cultural dynamics and as toolsets, are not terribly popular overall.
On the contrary, I am aching beyond all belief for Linux to have awesome game support. Just because you posted this, I demand that you cease using Linux for all eternity! You must also cease using Windows as well.
I'm in the same boat with others, The game I play the most is 7 Days to Die. Being based on Unity, it actually runs better on my Linux installation than it did on my old Win7.
Linux gaming is definitely becoming more of a reality especially due to Valve pushing the Steam Machine. Even though that's not gaining much traction, it is ushering in games that support, or are developed for Linux. Half of my 400 Steam games are SteamOS/Linux compatible, and that ratio seems to be growing.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Because this is a thing?
Honestly, my son and I have this argument all the time. I use linux because it's easy and cheap and no one shoves adds and updates down my throat every five seconds. He uses Windows because his PC is a glorified toy.
Linus for work. Windows for play. How hard is this?
unless a) home users get computers with linux on them...and b) games can be popped in, install, and just work, without having to jack with crap on said linux system.
Until they can do b, they won't bother with a....
As such, the minority doesn't count.
If you can get it to run on PS4, without DirectX and without any of the Windows stuff, then surely it should be doable on Linux
These games are "indie" but can realistically only reach their market, especially with linux, by being distributed on Steam.
Perhaps developers can target the "Steam Runtime" while not using Steam. No idea how they should be sold or DRM'ed then, but if there's a middleman it's not as indie as it was in the 90s.