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Comment by p10a | Hacker News Reader

Can you please explain like 5 year old what it means to players?

From my reading, it will be replacing a user-space sync emulation handler with a kernel-space sync module. Generally, kernel space will be faster or more efficient than user space. Whether this matters in any appreciable way (more than 1% improvement) in reality will have to be seen.

It's more that FSync was close to but subtly different from the Windows synchronization primitives when used in certain specific ways and NTSync is a 100% accurate implementation of those same exact Windows synchronization primitives. It should resolve hitching and other minor issues in older games, especially.

Basically it will have no performance improvement, in some cases minor degradation, but it resolves some compatibility issues with older multi-threaded programs.

I don't understand. You say it's no perf improvement yet it resolves hitching. Hitching to me is a pretty clear perf problem.

It's not a performance improvement, it's fixing a performance regression (compared to the Windows baseline).

Just reading about it now, it implements some system calls from Windows NT normally emulated via Proton in user-space to the kernel which should reduce overhead. Very cool.

Sounds like it would be useful for that new Linux/Win32 user space distribution.

The Linux Subsystem for Windows

I think he meant the recent distro called Loss32.

That absolutely makes sense. Thanks for a quick TLDR!

Better performance and less bugs.

For more info, see here, including a link to Youtube video with more details: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241213193511.457338-1-zfigura...

Games that have problems with the previous approach might have hitches or stalls, though it could manifest in many ways.

Edit: I am running a kernel with it on, as well as Proton-CachyOS which has it opt-in. I have yet to see it make an improvement of any kind. Maybe it might help on lower-spec hardware such as the Deck.

You likely won't see any improvement aside of resolving some bugs in some very specific edge cases that you may have never stumbled on personally.

Cyberpunk 2077 used to stall on shutdown with esync. No such problem with ntsync.

Yeah, the page could use some inline context.

It does link to this page, which has a bit more info and links to further info. Not at all 5-year-old level, but should help: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-NTSYNC-Driver-Ready

Faster games

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