Technology

Windows has so much garbage overhead via telemetry, etc. Glad to see someone quantifying how detrimental it is.

Steam Deck and Proton have done wonders for Linux compatibility efforts.

However looking at NEW releases I actually want to play, many launch barely working on windows let a lone via proton / emulation. My back catalog has great support but we need more titles launching with official support.

The worst thing has to be all of the "launchers / game stores" JUST GIVE US GAMES!

Limited to amd though, yea? Nvidia still holding back their drivers?

Well, that's what happens when you don't have crazy spyware services running in the background. Also Windows, just like any Microsoft product, is very inefficient and wastes lots of resources.

Man, I am really looking forward to fully ditching Windows.

My next gaming PC is gonna be Linux. There, I said it.

It must be very hard to exactly compare games between Windows and Linux because it's possible that emulation in Proton, WINE or the driver means some settings or extensions might not be enabled even if they appear to be. DirectX emulation is also bound to slow things down so a game probably has to be use OpenGL or Vulkan directly.

So while I can well believe that Linux can keep up and possibly exceed Windows, it needs a careful technical eye to ensure a true comparison is happening.

This is impressive and interesting, but what about hardware ray tracing support? Proton has been very impressive but I thought that RT on DX12 was basically non-existent on Linux.

GN came to a weaker conclusion when they were looking at one of the handhelds (I want to say the asus ROG?), although they just attributed that to the device rather than claim it was the OS.

But most of this reminds me of how Elden Ring was significantly more performant "on steam deck" at launch. And that was mostly because all shaders had to be precached which had implications on how From were streaming content. Which is likely why stuff like mortal kombat 1 apparently forces players to wait for shaders before they can play.

That’s great and all, but can I still pirate games on Linux? (Don’t judge me)

It's also like saying that bloating an OS with spyware and useles eyecandy it makes it use hardware resources ineficiently. But of course that's not the case with Micro$oft.

I remember when I used to run games via Wine over 15 years ago and they performed better than on similar hardware running Windows.