329
Windows:
Linux:
I will not ignore the cat pic, in fact I enjoyed it, tyvm.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
329 points (96.1% liked)
Linux Gaming
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Same. This is now a cat thread.
Does the cat use Arch, BTW?
Fun fact: cats use arch all the time, btw
How is there not an Arch-derived distro that uses a cat in the shape of the Arch logo for their logo?
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(3 replies)
Ignores the post, read the cat
I will ignore everything but the cat. I demand more pics of the cat.
:3
I will not ignore the cat.
In many games it does, but I'm not sure this comparison is a good example of that, as it shows persistent CPU stutter on Linux. With those spikes, Windows would be the smoother experience even if the average frametimes are slightly better on Linux.
Yeah I’m not sure what’s up with that, maybe OP needs to try a different scheduler?
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Didn't valve test this sort of thing over a decade ago and found Linux to easily get better performance?
Yes.
Kind of.
Its... why they spent that decade making Proton, and now basically have an OS based off of it.
The OS is based off of Arch.
I mean literally yes, but, it could not exist in any meaningful way without Proton.
Thats why I say its really built around Proton, they started with Proton and then said 'how do we make an OS that will work with/around this' and landed on Arch.
The whole point of it is: Be a functional, efficient, fast, Linux OS that primarily plays video games.
Thats impossible without Proton.
Agreed! 🎯
http://web.archive.org/web/20200504112412/http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
with the caveat that that was opengl vs directx9 accross operating systems and not necessarily "easy". but it did make an important point that linux could run workloads like games in a very viable fashion.
"Ignore the cat pic"
How???
Irrelevant cat picture to get people to read the post works every time.
I feel like people don't believe me when I tell them this is the case. Always glad to see evidence.
Impressive.
Very nice.
...
Now... lets see Paul Allens cat.
Really needed that cat pick today. Also always cool to see Linux kicking butt
Now if only I don't have to compile vulkan shaders every time I try to start deadlock
Appreciate the cat image.
ITT: OP learns why reviewers take days to provide benchmarks for games. If you don't come with receipts, it's death by a thousand buts.
I once posted on /r/MacGaming how pleased I was that I could run Horizon Zero Dawn on my M2 Air using Crossover, and how it seemed (to me) to run better than on my massive, old, water-cooled PC with an Nvidia GTX1060. I wasn't getting 120fps or anything, in fact, it was closer to 20fps at times. But I was running HZD on a fanless laptop, on an architecture on which it was never designed to run.
Foolishly, I was expecting a chorus of folks saying "yeah, cool, nice!", but what I actually got were a bunch of folks demanding proof.
So I closed Reddit, because it wasn't worth the arsehole.
I will not ignore
I'm not exactly playing anything new but I've been playing Grounded (the first one) on Window for like 2 months. My computer was so hot it was warming up my entire room.
I switched to Linux due to other Microsoft issues and decided to give it another shot. Man, my computer doesn't really get warm at all. Like yeah I can see the temp monitor change a little bit but not much. There's no hot air pouring out of my PC. I'm not sweating sitting next to it.
I've made no changes to any game settings (other than using proton) or hardware changes. It's an insane difference.
I love Vulkan so much. Having everything precompiled ahead of time is probably a big contributing factor on why your machine is running cooler. It's just pulling from the shader cache instead of doing on the fly computation for shaders.
That makes sense. I'm still new to all this so I'm kinda learning as I go.
The long and short of it is that Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs are extremely explicit. As the game developer, you tell the GPU exactly what resources are being used, when they're available, and how work is synchronized. Once you've built those command buffers, the driver mostly just submits them to the hardware "fire and forget" style basically.
Older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11 were much higher level. You described what you wanted to draw, and the graphics driver figured out resource transitions, synchronization, and a lot of the scheduling behind the scenes. That made them easier to use but also added CPU overhead and made performance less predictable.
Thank you for taking the time to explain that. That's really cool too learn.
Doesn't seem to happen going by the graphs included, but one thing I look in benchmarks is not how fast or not a program was, but how frequent spikes and hiccups in speed are. Having played games at 11 FPS but that were consistent at that and seemingly weren't lagging (variable max fps?), big numbers don't tell much imo.
Also, statistically, one single benchmark, and from an unamed game at that, doesn't tell much either. If I might suggest, maybe do like the microblogging folks and start a responses/quoting thread of more tests?
I shan’t ignore the cat!
Ignore the cat pic? Why did you add it?
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