336
Windows:
Linux:
"Ignore the cat pic"
How???
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
336 points (96.2% liked)
Linux Gaming
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Cool cool. Now if only linux worked on my PC. Tried like 6 distros and each had their own issues preventing me from playing games.
Does that include the gaming-centric distros like CachyOS or Bazzite?
Both of those plus Nobara
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(21 replies)
Sometimes, you can get similar benefits on Windows running DXVK.
Some older DX9/OpenGL games like it in particular.
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.
Now if only I don't have to compile vulkan shaders every time I try to start deadlock
Oh wow, wonder why that is! Microslop is only here to slowly but surely make your computer a slave to their system, Linux along with pretty much all FOSS are here to keep your computer yours (some exceptions sadly exist)
Makes sense, but I'm not expecting companies to support linux natively. I'm already happy enough if they put effort into a proper proton port and ensure any kind of anti cheat will run with it.