80% of Steam's top games now work on Linux | Hacker News Reader

80% of Steam's top games now work on Linux

neowin.net

84 pointsMarcellusDrum19 comments

It took me two reads and some additional thinking before I was able to unravel what is shown here. So I try to summarize what is displayed in this chart.

Looking at the Top 100: Here we have Unrated:0 Borked:10% Bronze+:61% Silver+:58% Gold+:51% Platinum:6% Native:29%

Some, but not all of these categories include the ones below. (Not even the rating definition will explain this) So every game that is considered Platinum is additionally counted as Gold+, Silver+, Bronce+, but not as Borked, Unrated or Native. So you have 51% of games that are Gold+ and additionally 29% with Native support, summing up to 80% Gold++.

I feel they guys at /r/dataisbeautifull might be able to create a better visualization of this.

FYI, the original title says 80% of top 100 games.

What's the performance of the games? Is emulation killing a hardware? I have a laptop that is some 5-6 years old and has a Intel HD 620 on it.

Games support Linux either natively or through Steam that leverages Wine (Wine is no emulator), which just supplies the necessary libraries to build the required software environment. There can be a performance impact and some compatibility issues, but you don't have to expect this to be the case. There are even some cases where users report improved performance.

Performance of the games is good, in your case the Intel graphics hardware is likely to be the bottleneck.

To be honest, it is also a bottleneck for some games on Windows. I'm not a gamer, but if it can run Sim City 4 it is good enough for me.

> Is emulation killing the hardware?

Wine Is Not an Emulator. ;)

...well, okay, so that depends on your definition of “emulator”, but compared to a more traditional emulator like Dolphin or even Rosetta, there’s very little performance impact from Wine in most cases.

Rosetta is actually more efficient than Wine when it comes to graphics, which is the biggest bottleneck for playing games on Wine.

Metal calls are pretty much kept as-is, whereas Wine has to translate DirectX operations to OpenGL or Vulkan, like VirtualBox or Parallels.

But it's true that when it comes to raw CPU power, Wine very likely provides the best performance.

Well, I feel like running a Vulkin-native game in Wine would be a better comparison here, but I could see the counterargument.

Maybe I should then try to put Ubuntu on my laptop and give Steam a spin on it. :)

Honestly, it depends on the game. Hence I suggest checking ProtonDB[0] for the games you are planning to play. Most of the reports also have details about CPU, GPU, GPU driver etc.

Anecdotally, I remember playing Team Fortress 2's native port on Intel i7-2630qm CPU on my laptop back in 2012-2013 at 1366*768 resolution with no major performance difference. (setting up bumblebee was not an easy task for me back then.)

[0] https://www.protondb.com/

This is great! I didn't know for ProtonDB. I'll check it out.

The article or the ProtonDB website says that 80% of the top 100 games from Steam are at least Gold++. For his group Gold++ consists of 51% Games with Gold+, meaning that the run as good as on windows and additional 29% that run native on the platform. So your performance should be as good as on Windows.

IIRC quite some games did run faster on WINE (if running at all) than an Windows. I would be interesting to know if the same is true for Proton.

From my experience, most games have no perceptible performance impact. Some, however, seem to run much better for some reason like Final Fantasy XIV.

While that's good, the top 10 chart on ProtonDB.com still looks terrible.

Until someone finds a way to get anti-cheat systems to work in Linux, I won't be switching to Linux as my main OS.

Tbh this would be much more to brag about if so many games hadn't been removed from Steam.

> ...removed from Steam.

What do you mean?

I have probably 500 games in my steam library and at least 50 are no longer available for purchase on Steam.

I have as much and I can't think of more than 2 that got removed in the 12 years I got my Steam account. Games no longer available for purchase (but still playable) is something the publisher controls. Bit weird blaming Steam for a publisher pulling their game from the store.

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