Hacker News Reader

Comment by Affric | Hacker News Reader

The summary includes no details of the testing methodology, just results.

No hardware. No justification of the games.

I love gaming on Arch. But I am stupid enough to use an nvidia card, which means that I have no Wayland. I am eating shit due to the drivers every few months. There are a whole host of good games with awful DRM that I can’t play. Steam is good but it’s still DRM.

The summary provided article gives the vibe that it wants to pump up Linux’s tyres rather than either demonstrating Linux’s superiority or making the case that you should be gaming on Linux.

View on HN

The article links to https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distributio... which does provide the testing methodology.

Highlights (from auto-translated German):

> Windows 11: All updates were installed and version 23.11.1 was used for the graphics driver. The global AMD graphics profile was set to standard. This means that Radeon Super Resolution, Anti-Lag and Boost were disabled in the test for better comparison with Linux.

> The gaming PC used for the test was a system with AMD Ryzen 7 5800X on an Asus ROG Strix B550-A Gaming (Bios: 3202). The RAM was 32 GB DDR4-3600-RAM (CL18-22-22-44). The CPU was kept at temperature by a Scythe Mugen 5 while the system was in an open structure. The graphics card is a Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ with active Quiet BIOS. The monitor supported Full HD at 144 Hz. FreeSync was not active.

> A handful of current or currently very popular (Cyberpunk 2077) Windows games were used for the test. This shows the importance of current program packages for performance. The performance under Linux can also be compared with Windows in current titles.

> Since all games are versions designed for Windows, they ran using the Proton translation layer under Linux – specifically Proton Experimental as of 15 November 2023. Tested was carried out in Full HD.

> Finally, the question arises as to whether these results can also be transferred to a Linux system with GeForce? Yes, all titles were able to run; the editorial team had already tested that. However, the performance remained out of consideration for the time being. In the near future, ComputerBase will also address this topic.

Last time Linux + Wine benchmarking was discussed the major caveat was that some features in Wine implemented with empty stubs (e.g. the game may think soft shadows are computed but stub just always returns solid color). So take this methodology with a heavy grain of salt.

Wine doesn't compute soft shadows. :-/

> .g. the game may think soft shadows are computed

Isn't that something a game/engine has to implement itself?

It is, I was making an example of the issue.

So you picked an example the average reader would find believable, is likely to spread, but is complete bullshit without marking it as such?

What is a 'soft' shadow?

I believe it’s a hard shadow with a three sigma Gaussian blur and smoothstep black-to-alpha with a one-half or three-quarter maximum, pre-multiplied to output.

But I could be mistaken.

This explains absolutely nothing to a layperson :)

You know how in real life the edge of a shadow is usually kind of fuzzy? "soft shadows" is the graphics technique to make in-game shadows fuzzy instead of hard-edged.

Ah, thank you.

I'm on Nvidia (2070 super), Arch, X11... It's been literally years since I've had to worry about drivers. Install the proprietary drivers (follow the arch wiki) and they "just work" in my experience. I'm not trying to say you couldn't have had issues, but I am saying I'd caution people from seeing that and assuming that they will have issues if they try this.

Yeah same, wanted to write a similar comment. I have played Diablo 4 , Cities, a ton of emulators with the proprietary nvidia driver and never had an issue. Update works 95% of the time, sometimes I have to do a manual 'mkinitcpio' but otherwise it's all working

OK, but he specifically mentioned “it means I have no Wayland”. So does Wayland work?

I can launch wayland gnome sessions but they be janky as hell. It’s almost got me about to switch to KDE when I get a little time.

I haven't used Wayland in years and have no real intention of trying to again until x11 becomes unusable so I can't answer that.

My initial interactions with waylands, years ago, including attempting to write a compositor from scratch, left a very source taste in my mouth and the strong impression that wayland was going in the wrong direction. Some things have no doubt changed by now, and a lot of cost has been sunk into it, so I'm deleting my rehashing of some of those concerns as no longer relevant, but I just have no interest in being an early adopter of it.

I am not saying I am having heaps of issues.

But for some reason the new open nvidia driver didn’t like my set up yesterday. mkinitcpio log shows it used the hook properly and then I did it manually. Proprietary one works fine and I am chill with that.

But to reiterate, it’s just the the summary doesn’t go into enough detail. It’s just pumping up the tyres.

My comment is not a criticism or evaluation of gaming on Arch or Linux or nvidia. It’s about the article.

> Steam is good but it’s still DRM.

Yes, most games on Steam have DRM. Steam is not synonimous with DRM though.

https://www.howtogeek.com/813209/psa-not-all-steam-games-hav...

Many of those games are on GOG as well, which is drm-free.

https://www.gog.com

"DRM-free makes it easy to re-download games, back them up on external hard drives, and enjoy their single-player mode offline."

I am very happy with gog. though not all games are on there, if they are, it is a no-brainer to get them there.

Steam is the only platform that provides a Linux client, and Valve has provided massive support to Linux with the development of Proton, SteamOS and the Steam Deck.

I have bought a few games in GOG, but until the give us proper Linux support, I won't give them any money.

To be clear, I have purchased and run many linux games on gog.

(that said, I don't use galaxy, I've been using https://github.com/eddie3/gogrepo for updates)

> until the give us proper Linux support, I won't give them any money

Technically, they don't need to do that - you can run GoG games via Heroic Launcher or even via Steam+Proton by adding them as external games.

If your stance is of a more political nature, that doesn't matter.

Personally, I find myself somewhere in between. On the one hand, Steam is really helping improve support for gaming on Linux (and they've made such good progress that I don't even bother with Windows at all). On the other hand, GoG are fully committed to not selling DRM-ridden crap.

I know that there are alternative launchers, I play the 6 GoG games I have through Lutris. But if I pay for a product I don't want to mess with unofficial and unsupported third-party launchers, at that point I might as well pirate the game.

I'm not sure I follow. The "launcher" really is the .exe . This is especially true for any DRM-free game or application, which we have already agreed is all of those bought on GoG.

WINE (and maybe Proton) is your compatibility layer because you're trying to run _an application_ (games included) on a platform it's not written for.

The reason Steam has a Linux client with Proton integration is not so you, random Linux gamer, can have an easy time running games on Linux. It's mostly 2fold:

1. so that you, random Linux gamer, can run Steam DRM games on Linux at all;

2. so that they can launch products like the Steam Deck without paying license fees, or having to deal with, Microsoft and Windows.

GoG has no such needs. You already have everything you need to run their games. That is their differentiation. One could argue that this is a better proposition for you, the consumer, than that of Steam.

That is exactly my point. Having to manually download and run the installers, plus keeping up with updates and patches, was the standard 20 years ago, but it doesn't cut it anymore. Plus, if you play in Linux, now you need to fight with WINE and Proton, which maybe be easy or might be a nightmare. In total, how much time do I need to waste to play a game?

On the other hand, with Steam when I get a new game I just click on install, I go my merry way, and less than an hour later the game is ready to play, without me having to bother to configure anything.

> But I am stupid enough to use an nvidia card, which means that I have no Wayland. I am eating shit due to the drivers every few months.

Funny you would say this; I'm on AMD (Ryzen 6950HS IGD) and I'm eating shit due to the (FOSS) drivers every few days… to be fair I have two choices of distinct shit with X11 and Wayland, but neither is actually stable.

And none of this affects gaming, just the desktop in general :/. The RX 6950 in the desktop is in fact working without issues (same driver stack). I suspect it's some memory management problem with the CPU/GPU sharing on the 6950HS. But I have no idea how to track it down…

That said, FOSS GPU support has come a long way.

Laptop APU https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-9-pro-6950hs

You don't describe the problems with anywhere near enough detail to guess at what the underlying issue might be.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU << Has a troubleshooting section that might help.

> You don't describe the problems with anywhere near enough detail to guess at what the underlying issue might be.

That's because this is the HN comment section, not the f.d.o bug tracker.

Since you seem to care, what I'm seeing is likely #2220, though the real problem for me is that dmesg output is not particularly helpful on its own and it's the entire desktop that crashes (as opposed to a single application that you could set Mesa/amdgpu debug flags on.) The fact that it "only" crashes about once per week complicates things further; aimlessly enabling debug options would probably result in getting buried in logs.

  [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* ring sdma0 timeout, signaled seq=24191109, emitted seq=24191111
  [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* Process information: process  pid 0 thread  pid 0

This is really kind of a debugging worst case. There's pretty much no useful information here.

    echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level

Or try setting the kernel boot parameter

    amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xfffd3fff

Thanks but I wasn't asking for suggestions, forcing to a high power mode is not helpful on a laptop, and various different values for ppfeaturemask have been discussed in the fd.o bug (none of which helped tackle the issue).

I don't expect it to be the cause, but who knows: does your GPU happen to be sitted in the bottom-most PCIe slot of the motherboard ? I encountered weird stuff with the PCIe lines connected to the motherboard chipset (instead of those connected directly to the CPU) on several B550. Some PCIe packets would apparently be garbled/lost when under load, resulting in the driver for the associated peripheral timing out.

This is an APU in a laptop ("Ryzen 6950HS IGD")

As a data point, you can run a fair number of Windows games under Proton by using Lutris instead of Steam:

* https://lutris.net

* https://github.com/lutris/lutris

It's an OSS game launcher that takes the place of Steam, and you can set things up to run locally so you don't even need an account on their system (lutris.net).

there's also Goldberg Steam emulator that's effectively a 1 line config for many Steam games, but if the exe uses DRM you still have to unwrap it or crack it:

https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/

Lutris is wonderful. I also recommend Bottles.

https://usebottles.com/

Thanks. Hadn't heard of Bottles before, it looks useful.

The name makes it sound like it's related to the macOS package system Homebrew. Any idea if that's the case? :)

You should be gaming on Linux, but you should be using AMD for it too :)

GOG games are playable fine, you don't need Steam to play them.

An alternative (which I use) is GPU passthrough, which works on laptops that have a physical HDMI output to the Nvidia card.

I'm only a causal gamer, but never had any compatibility by simple running all games in a windows VM. This setup also serves as a way to sandbox all the windows spyware

Reply on news.ycombinator.com