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Posted by haunter 3 days ago

Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features(www.xda-developers.com)
754 points | 489 commentspage 2
londons_explore 1 hour ago|
I was under the impression that most windows games copy and anti cheat protection won't work in Linux. It often has a kernel mode driver to prevent you emulating things, using debuggers etc.

What changed? Do game manufacturers make special versions with toned down anti-cheat specifically to run on the steam box/Linux?

lccerina 1 hour ago||
No, simply 95% of games don't have copy and anti cheat, and some anti cheats run ok on Linux
npodbielski 1 hour ago||
Nothing. Majority of those games do not work, but they are small percentage of all games on steam. Most is just small time developers trying to hit some big niche for big money, like Stardew Valley or Terraria or Meat Boy.
mifydev 17 hours ago||
I predict that ntsync will eventually evolve into full blown ntoskrnl.ko and there would be virtually no overhead on calling Windows API. You can almost call it a Linux Subsystem for Windows.
advisedwang 16 hours ago|
It would be fun to call it Windows Subsystem for Linux!
sedatk 14 hours ago||
which would be the right use of the term. WSL was originally called LXSS = linux subsystem. As I understand, lawyers stepped in soon after.
sunaookami 13 hours ago|||
They already did the same thing 25 years ago with "Windows Services for UNIX": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
wmf 11 hours ago||
Which is also backwards.
throwaway27448 12 hours ago|||
The two terms seem semantically identical (i.e., ambiguous and therefore meaningless) to me.
tetris11 17 hours ago||
I wonder what spanners Windows can throw into the works to slow them down at this point, or if they're so checked out of the Desktop market as they suckle down hard on that Azure teat, that they're more than happy to let Linux eat their lunch
whywhywhywhy 17 hours ago||
You are not gonna get promoted slowing down Linux gaming at MS today, the thing they want is Netflix of gaming where the platform doesn’t matter but everyone’s paying them $20 a month
rounce 1 hour ago|||
You’d think that but Xbox game pass games still won’t natively run on Linux.
hypercube33 10 hours ago||||
That ship sailed when they let Xbox rot over the last 6 years. The platform feels pretty dead since about 2020 or 2019 and they didn't take advantage of making a cheap android based or Windows 10X based streaming stick with a controller to lock people into the cloud and leverage phones. Controller and keyboard support is still a hot mess on Cloud Pass.
ThatMedicIsASpy 10 hours ago||
while buying up gaming companies.
dpoloncsak 15 hours ago|||
I think this, as a business model, really relies on them also selling the licenses to the OS that you're using as well. Otherwise, gamepass would be on MacOS already, no?
jordand 13 hours ago|||
Last I read, it really doesn't now. Less than 10% of Microsoft revenue is Windows with growth stagnant. It's all about subscriptions and recurring revenue now driving growth. They might as well bundle a Windows licence with all Game Pass subscriptions.
Gigachad 10 hours ago|||
Their money all comes from Azure, Office, and now AI services. Windows is just a platform to sell their other stuff now. Which has been reflected in the state of windows over the last 10 years.
basilikum 11 hours ago|||
Well, they are using Windows to sell people that subscription. Windows is Microsoft's bazaar where you can't move 10 meters without being pestered about using $service.
charcircuit 14 hours ago|||
It already is.
jdubs1984 17 hours ago|||
Microsoft/Xbox is in the process of losing the living room permanently in the next gen if you ask me.

I don't know what they could do spanner tossing wise to really screw w/ Linux gaming at this point that wouldn't just drive more frustrated customers off their platform.

Borealid 9 hours ago|||
Their strategy WAS GamePass - get a bunch of users accumulating huge collections of inexpensive-but-high-value games, paid for via a subscription (rented), that are only playable on Windows (enforced via Microsoft's own software and an account login). Use loss aversion to prevent the users from letting their subscriptions lapse.

They made a tactical mistake by trying to directly monetize the GamePass subscription instead of having it remain a purposefully-underpriced vendor lock-in mechanism. Whoops.

funimpoded 16 hours ago||||
That might make room for Apple to finally try. The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go. Most of what's missing is a first-party controller and a marketing push. Disk space is tight, too, I guess. Still, they're most of the way to having a horse in the race, if they want to.

I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.

koutakun 16 hours ago|||
>The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go

What benchmarks are you talking about? CPU-wise the A15 Bionic just barely beats the Ryzen 3700X in single-core and gets absolutely destroyed in multi-core (Geekbench). As for the GPU, the Radeon RX 7600 (closest thing I can find to a "modern console") does >10x the TFLOPS in FP32.

The only reason why they look like they're "in a similar tier" in ported games is because the A15 Bionic is usually tested on 5-6" screens that can be upscaled from 360p without any measurable loss in visual quality, with a massive downgrade in model and texture quality for the same reason. The only modern console the Apple TV "may be" similar to is the Switch 1

SchemaLoad 12 hours ago||||
Apple is fundamentally incompatible with "serious" gaming. Games are largely not regular software platforms which receive endless updates and maintenance. Every few years Apple makes a breaking change and expects every app to update or break, which is fine for Photoshop and electron apps, but most games just end up unplayable. This happened when Apple killed 32 bit support and tons of games that used to work on Mac never worked again.

It doesn't seem like a market they have any interest in. The real money is in mobile slop games with micro transactions.

criddell 15 hours ago||||
I use Steam Link on my AppleTV which lets me play games on my PC. It works great as long as the game works well with a PS5 controller (and lots of them do).
kakacik 14 hours ago||||
I dont want a locked down living room, not from apple nor anybody else (but everybody else uses open standards so not really possible).

Simply no, thank you.

funimpoded 10 hours ago||
That’s… the game console market. Even the NES in the ‘80s tried to lock out unauthorized (by Nintendo) software. When the screen flashes over and over on boot, that’s the lockout chip not seeing what it expects (due to a poor connection, usually, if it’s a cartridge that should work). Though I hear the latest Xbox is notably more open than the norm, and of course a living-room PC from Valve would buck that trend entirely.
babypuncher 14 hours ago||||
The Apple TV 4k is nowhere near a PS5 in performance
12_throw_away 10 hours ago|||
> The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go

[citation needed]

neutronicus 16 hours ago||||
Hmm.

Me and all my dad friends are all signing up for XBox accounts so our kids can play Minecraft. So IDK about that.

babypuncher 14 hours ago||
Are they playing on Xboxes? Because that is Microsoft's living room product, and the part of the business that is struggling right now.

To give you an idea of how bad it is, they slowed console manufacturing to a trickle last year to try and juice their profit margins, and are now stuck in a situation where they can't spin manufacturing back up to cash in on the inevitable rush of demand for hardware when Grand Theft Auto comes out this fall.

weezing 17 hours ago||||
Their gaming marketshare is minuscule both on PCs and consoles already. It's a downward spiral for years already.
laughing_man 13 hours ago|||
That's not true. It's actually spiraling the other direction now. Consoles just don't have the value proposition they used to have. You can buy a general purpose PC for the same price as a console that has better performance and also allows you to do your taxes.
chocochunks 12 hours ago||
No you can't. Even at the raised prices. And if your argument includes used prices don't forget you can buy used consoles too.
laughing_man 8 hours ago||
Sure you can. Remember, we're not buying a normal gaming PC, just one that's better than a console.
chocochunks 1 hour ago||
I know. But iGPUs aren't there yet, and once you add a discrete GPU it becomes a lot more expensive. You can get a PS5 digital at GameStop for $400 new right now. A decent similar GPU like a Arc 580 or Radeon RX 7600 or 6600 is going to be $200-$300 new, leaving you $200 for a case, CPU, RAM and power supply.
onli 16 hours ago||||
Windows still has a huge gaming marketshare on PC, and Microsoft as publisher is still a big player. You mean something else?
pinkmuffinere 16 hours ago||||
wow that's interesting. Where is the gaming share moving, if not pc and consoles? I guess hand-held devices (do those not count as consoles?) and phones?
laughing_man 8 hours ago|||
Mobile is the 900 pound gorilla in the games space through sheer volume, but it really depends on what you're measuring. Revenue per user is console > PC > mobile, but total gaming revenue is more like mobile > console > PC.

But here we're putting Candy Crush in the same category as GTA V, so I'm not sure we're really comparing apples to apples.

Narishma 13 hours ago|||
They're talking about Microsoft's gaming marketshare.
mvdtnz 16 hours ago|||
According to my google searching XBox has almost a quarter of the console gaming market share. Hardly miniscule.
doublerabbit 17 hours ago|||
Lock future game developers in to a corner forcing them only to produce compatible for WSL, Windows for Linux releases. Restricting the license of use on GNU/Linux.
sph 2 hours ago|||
My theory is that Microsoft is paying Adobe billions never to release their tools on Linux. It's Windows' last stronghold.
MBCook 12 hours ago|||
Given how popular Steam Deck and fiends have gotten I wonder if companies would avoid it because it could noticeably hurt sales until it’s added to proton.
baq 15 hours ago|||
They can’t, they’re selling backwards compatibility - but it matters less and less each year as more stuff moves to the browsers.
WhiteDawn 13 hours ago|||
Really their best card is new and additional APIs, building incentives to develop against it.

WinRT (not to be confused with Windows RT, the early ARM version of windows), UWP, GDK, xgameruntime. All of these are relatively new and require virtualization and other security features.

Put pressure on devs by gateing xbox and gamepass behind this runtime and now you have a lever to make the situation more difficult for linux.

Kinda has the opposite effect on me however, as the only reason I'm not subscribed to gamepass right now is the games wont work on my steamdeck. But if MS can get enough killer apps as exclusive to that platform then that will certainly add some pressure.

Night_Thastus 15 hours ago||
MS does not care. At all. This doesn't affect anything that they make a profit on.
asdfbank 4 hours ago||
My linux gaming experience has left me with a wierd irony... I have been stealing windows for the last 25 years and never ever felt like i owed M$ a cent. Now after totally switching to free stuff i suddenly feel (not in a bad way at all) a kind of debt to open source developers for just making cool stuff and putting it out there for me to use and play with and i'm not doing a crime anymore!
asveikau 10 hours ago||
This is a fluffy, non-technical article so I googled NTSYNC. It seems like they implement Win32 events, semaphores, mutex and WaitForMultipleObjects.

It's curious that they didn't do this as file descriptors that can be epolled. For example I think you could do semaphores and events with eventfd(2), which always struck me as inspired by those Win32 objects somehow. But maybe this is a simpler purpose built interface.

peesem 10 hours ago|
isn't this how esync works?

edit: i think so https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync/README.esync

FartyMcFarter 1 hour ago||
As someone without strong feelings on Linux vs Windows (I've used and developed on both about equally): this kind of news, along the way Windows has been changing has me wondering if I should change my primary desktop environment at home to Linux.

In my eyes, Windows used to be the desktop environment that "just works and can run almost everything". Lately it's becoming enshittified, with weird bugs showing up more and more frequently (a memorable one is not being able to launch Notepad from the start menu!!). I think Microsoft is losing its best attributes when it comes to consumer software. Linux may not be perfect but it's looking more and more attractive in comparison, even with its imperfections.

bradley13 15 hours ago||
It's actually been a couple of years since I ran across a game that didn't work well on Linux. At most, I have had to bump the default Proton version.
laughing_man 13 hours ago||
It really depends on the type of game you play. As everyone points out, kernel level anti-cheat is a problem on Linux, but also games that require odd controllers have trouble as well. One game I play, Farming Simulator 22, doesn't work well on Linux because they use the raw windows input from joysticks and wheels. You can still play with mouse and keyboard, but the fun isn't there.

I was pleasantly surprised at just how many of my games worked well on my new Ubuntu install. Even more so at how many games are playable on my Xubuntu Chromebook install.

tombert 8 hours ago|||
Same. I admittedly don't play a lot of new games, and I don't do online games, but like 95% things Just Work when I load a Steam game on my box. The remaining five percent are fixed if I change the Proton version to GE Proton.

I played through Miles Morales at full specs a few weeks ago, and it ran just about perfectly as far as I could tell.

makeitdouble 10 hours ago|||
On the games that won't work well, last time I looked at it anything VR was a huge PITA (e.g. https://github.com/chaosmaou/wivrn-guide)

That's where Valve's Frame brought huge expectations.

tdb7893 15 hours ago||
I have occasional issues mainly with graphics drivers or anti-cheat. Otherwise thought it's remarkably stable. I've also gotten a lot of non-Steam games to work fine.
anordal 2 hours ago||
Are there 2 things called fsync now?

I had to ask google, because the article fails to explain it. Google says yes, this is something else than the fsync syscall (man 2 fsync).

tobyhinloopen 3 hours ago||
I'm very happy with my Linux install. After almost 2 decades of trying Linux Desktop and falling back to Windows (and MacOS) I've finally switched to Linux (and MacOS).

The only thing missing is my Adobe stuff. I now run Lightroom in a VM and it's incredibly slow to unusable.

KingOfCoders 2 hours ago|
Having migrated from Windows11 to Popos/Nvidia, Minecraft is ~20% slower depending on shaders installed and distant horizons mod. TF2 is also slower but both still fine.
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