this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Because regular users aren't going to be changing drivers based on the game, or doing a ton of system-level configuration to get a bit better performance.
So it should be defaults vs defaults.
If we want to compare OSes, we should do targeted benchmarks (Phoronix does a ton of those). There are far more interesting ways to compare schedulers than running games, and the same is true for disk performance, GPU overhead, etc.
How many people actually do that though? I'm guessing not many.
"Windows vs Linux" is comparing the default experiences on both systems, and that's interesting for people who are unlikely to change the defaults (i.e. most people).
That's just not true, as evidenced by this video. If you take the typical setup on Windows vs the typical setup on Linux, it seems you get a 17% average performance uplift on Linux on these games.
That doesn't mean Linux is 17% faster than Windows, nor does it mean you should expect games to run 17% better on Linux, it just means Linux is competitive and sometimes faster with the default configuration. And that's interesting.
Linux does not have a default configuration, that's why we have over 600 distros. If you want to have a baseline "default configuration" then fedora would be the way to go, which he has not used.
Yes, he got a performance uplit by 17% on average in these games, the point he is trying to make is that you can get this in every game on Linux which is what is not true.
Most of those games are also CPU bound, an area that Linux is going to destroy windows. Once again, I am referring to GPU performance specifically, as that is the general point that OP makes with these posts.
That may be true, but de facto defaults today is Proton experimental on Steam with the a recent Linux kernel. That's pretty much the same across all distros.
Yup, the difference between Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch or whatever isn't going to be all that big, assuming you're working with each distribution's default kernel and running with a Steam's provider runtime. You might get 1-2% here and there, but that's pretty much within run to run variance anyway.
That's not all the factors that play a role in performance in games.
For instance, what fork of the kernel are they using? Are they using zram? What graphics driver are they using? Gamescope? Gamemode? All of those things affect performance of a game to varying degrees.
Also, Proton experimental is definitely not the default on any system, that would be Proton 8.
Sure, but each distro has a default configuration, and distros don't vary that much in terms of performance with those default configurations for playing games. If there is a consistent performance difference, it'll likely be something like 1-2%, which should be within run-to-run variance and not really impact the results.
And if anyone assumes that an average between 10 games represents the difference you'll see on average for your own games doesn't understand statistics because 10 games is not enough to be a representative sample, especially since they weren't even randomly selected to begin with. It's still an interesting result.
You're being hyperbolic here.
The differences, all else being equal, should be pretty small most of the time unless there's a hardware driver issue (e.g. when Intel's new p-core vs e-core split came out, Windows had much better support).
If we're seeing a huge difference, more is going on than just a "better" scheduler or more efficient kernel or whatever. It's much more likely Windows is using DirectX and Linux is using DXVK or something. The bigger the gap, the less likely it's the kernel that's doing it.
As someone who has used Linux exclusively for ~15 years, these kinds of benchmarks are certainly exciting. However, we need to be careful to not read too much into them.