Question Linux for gaming ??

[pctests99]

can i use linux for gaming ??
will it run games such as gta v

 

[Frag Maniac]

There's no Linux version of GTA V. In fact poor support for popular titles is one of the biggest reasons not to play on Linux. Had Valve's Steam Box not tanked, it might be different.

The only possible hope as I see it for Linux gaming wise is if Google's Stadia catches on. That however is a streaming service, and I'm not sure whether owning a Windows version of the game gets you access to their Linux versions.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/rockstar-games-confirmed-as-google-stadia-develope/1100-6467366/

 

[King_V]

A number of games on Steam are available for Linux. Additionally, with the Proton project from Steam, quite a few Windows-only games will run on Linux as well.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Using proton, most steam games and some non-steam games designed for Windows will run on Linux. Linux gaming support is much better than in yesteryear. In fact, companies like Nvidia have been working more on linux drivers aswell?

Linus Tech Tips did a video on this recently. The easiest way to do this is to use an OS like PopOS since most graphics drivers are available at the push of a button through the Pop shop. You can also download steam from the pop shop. Distros like Ubuntu can be used, but updating them to work is annoying from what I see.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6FePZoNgE

 

[Frag Maniac]

Personally I still think the game selection, performance, and ease of use needs to get a lot better. Stadia will have a decent chance at that since 1. You don't even need any gaming hardware, 2. the games made for it will be made on Linux vs ported to it, 3. it will be streamed on YT servers already using Linux, and 4. no need to shuffle through 3rd party apps or update them or drivers.

I know Steam Box kinda tanked largely due to not enough content soon enough, especially when the general public saw that games ported to Linux didn't quite outperform (or in most cases even equal) that of made for Windows versions like Valve promised, but now that Google have lots of devs jumping on board to have Linux made games using Vulkan and you only have to stream them, I would think Stadia has a far better chance than Steam Box (or Proton) at succeeding.

Granted I've seen a fair number of die hard PC gamers whom already own pretty good PCs (and consoles a lot of them) say they don't like Stadia, but there are tons of young kids out there whom can't even afford a console, let alone PC, so I think it's going to be a popular platform for many, and much easier and quicker to use.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

The problem is that cloud streaming seems great until the latency and internet connection issues are factored into the equation. Someone who wants a cheap console may not have a great connection.

The Stadia makes sense for someone who doesn't have a lot of money and wants to game. The problem is that you can get a similar experience by using an el-cheapo laptop or desktop and a game streaming service like GeForce now. Sure it's likely not as easy to set up, but you can get a better value and can do all kinds of other things since it is a PC at the end of the day.

 

[Frag Maniac]

The problem is that cloud streaming seems great until the latency and internet connection issues are factored into the equation. Someone who wants a cheap console may not have a great connection.

The Stadia makes sense for someone who doesn't have a lot of money and wants to game. The problem is that you can get a similar experience by using an el-cheapo laptop or desktop and a game streaming service like GeForce now. Sure it's likely not as easy to set up, but you can get a better value and can do all kinds of other things since it is a PC at the end of the day.

There have been and are still streaming alternatives, but no one has ever done it like Google, with tons of infrastructure to support it, and Linux based servers and Linux made games on Vulkan. Even the ISP speed requirements they've listed are well within reason for most gamers, including those in the US without FO.

We'll see how it plays out, but my gut tells me Nvidia and others whom currently offer streaming are the ones who've made tons of bad products and services that haven't panned out, whereas Google have a pretty good track record.

And performance wise, a lot of Nvidia game features are STILL being turned off by gamers because they chug your PC, and RTX is no exception.

Guys, face it, whether we like it or not, the same happened to music, then movies, now it's going to happen with video games. For some time now games have mostly only been available via digital DL. The next step is eliminating the cost of huge distribution and DL time and just streaming them from high end data base hardware.

 

[King_V]

I think you both make great points, and, my own take is that I suspect, barring issues with ISPs getting harsher and harsher with the "We may not have necessarily told you, but you've got a data cap" scheme, that this will wind up being the "third way."

PC gamers.
Console gamers.
Subscription service gamers.




All that said, and while I do think it's a fascinating discussion, we are kind of veering away from @pctests99 's question.

A friend of mine is trying to move away from Windows completely, and he's the one who told me about Proton. It's not 100% there, obviously, but Steam is putting a serious effort in it. If you have a Steam account, and a PC with reasonable specs and Linux installed, it couldn't hurt to try out, though you have to take some extra steps to get the Proton version of the Steam client.

Then just start looking up games if you're curious as to how they work. I went to Google and typed (without quotes) "does gta v run on proton" and got a few answers right away, some saying it's great, what additional steps were needed to get it to run right on Proton, etc.

I haven't done it myself because my Linux box is an EXTREMELY low spec system (see The Micro Machine in my sig), but I've gotten BroForce to work without needing to take any extra steps. But, I've only dabbled in this very minimally.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

If more people do steam gaming, Proton will get more support.
If Proton gets more support, there will be more Linux gamers.

I say it should work fine and maybe actually better thanks to Linux being more lightweight in general.
I might actually dual boot PopOS and win10 just to test this.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

If more people do steam gaming, Proton will get more support.
If Proton gets more support, there will be more Linux gamers.

I say it should work fine and maybe actually better thanks to Linux being more lightweight in general.
I might actually dual boot PopOS and win10 just to test this.

please do it and report back your findings, thanks

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Will do! I have used PopOS and other ubuntu varieties on a Celeron N3060 laptop before and found basic tasks ran much better than windows 10, but I didn't test games since a 4w Celeron isn't exactly a gaming CPU.

 

[pctests99]

Everyone thanks for replying, i guess i will just go back to Windows 7 till 2020, i hope Microsoft releases a new Windows before 14 January 2020, i dont know why but Windows 10 1809 is too slow on my PC Windows 10 1803 was a lot faster but it just automatically updates, i haven't tried 1903 but i think Windows 7 would be better,
my PC Specs
ASUS GTX 750 Ti FORMULA OC
Core 2 Quad Q9500 (released Q1 2010 "the last core 2 processor")
8GB RAM DDR3 1066MHz CL-7-7-7-20
Windows installed on SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
2TB HDD (i keep games on this HDD, because i dont have money to buy games so i just download them and keep them on my HDD so i can install them anytime)

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Im never going linux. Its a pain.
Unfortunately after repartitioning my ssd to keep the existing data on the ssd safe, pop os installed but refused to boot after a restart.

I just gave up on the ssd and completely formatted my hard drive and successfully installed pop os. After a reboot it booted however i couldnt install steam. I remembered then my wifi dongle doesnt work on linux. Aargg.

Ill try it with a different adapter if I can find a spare.

 

[Frag Maniac]

Im never going linux. Its a pain.

I think realistically this is currently the case for Linux, and may never actually have a high enough ease of use factor for mainstream. It's easy to get lulled into thinking after watching a few guides that it will go smoothly, but most whom love it are basically tech geeks.

Any open source software can be frustrating at times. I learned pretty quickly from trying KOBI for aerial TV viewing that such software is not as user friendly as most guides make them out to be. I use Avidemux for editing and compressing my game videos, which is open source. I find it fairly easy to use, far easier than OBS. However pretty much everyone I've recommended it to passes because they feel it will be too complex. If I so much as tell them you can easily resize your 1080p vids to 1440p with it to make use of YouTube's 3 to 4 times higher conversion bitrate and make your 1080p vids no longer look blurry on YT, they think even that will be too complex. Most players these days want something that's quick and easy, which is why I don't see Linux gaming going anywhere, unless streamed for you over servers like with Stadia.

That said, a good point was made on Stadia regarding data caps. I read just the other day that 4K 60 FPS game streaming can consume 1TB of data usage in about 65 hours of gaming, which is far less than a month for avid gamers, maybe more like 2 weeeks. When I first got on my 100 Mb ISP speed I signed on for unlimited data for only $10 more a month (normally it's $20). However I dropped it because my usage was consistently far under the default 400 GB cap, and it was looking like Netflix would take quite some time (if ever) to stream 4K content.

The thinking was, by the time 4K streaming becomes common place, so will FO and affordable high speed internet in the US, so I couldn't see wasting that $10 a month meantime. I often wonder though if the greedy communication industries in the US will always overcharge compared to the rest of the world.

If more people do steam gaming, Proton will get more support.
If Proton gets more support, there will be more Linux gamers.

I say it should work fine and maybe actually better thanks to Linux being more lightweight in general.
I might actually dual boot PopOS and win10 just to test this.

The thing is though, for mainstream users, Steam has already peaked. Now I know full well Uplay, Origin, and Epic Games don't really compare, but they're finding ways to compete just the same, and doing fine by it. Then you factor in Stadia, and we have a whole new situation where if anything, Steam has not only more competition, but a bigger struggle to stay on top.

If streaming becomes the future of gaming, I have to think Stadia has the edge. To say Stadia is the new kid on the block isn't the whole story either, because the YouTube infrastructure it's using has been the biggest game video streaming service in the world since it's inception. Bumping up to game streaming is just a matter of adding the needed hardware, bringing in developing partners, and ironing out the policies.

I'm not sure if some of you know it or not, especially those worried about latency streaming games, but Id, one of Stadia's biggest partners, developed a software tool called Orion specifically to make streaming more efficient. It is said that it can add a 20% performance boost to games that are streamed. That in itself is huge, and Stadia streaming, especially on Google's massive infrastructure, will make past game streaming pale in comparison.

 

[Asadumer]

Well it's not possible to play games on linux there are just few games available for linux, most of the titles are released for windows platform.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Not anymore. With proton and lutris most games will work.
In the video above there was 5000 games on steam that work natively with linux but after enabling proton and lutris nearly all worked.

 

[King_V]

Im never going linux. Its a pain.
Unfortunately after repartitioning my ssd to keep the existing data on the ssd safe, pop os installed but refused to boot after a restart.

I just gave up on the ssd and completely formatted my hard drive and successfully installed pop os. After a reboot it booted however i couldnt install steam. I remembered then my wifi dongle doesnt work on linux. Aargg.

Ill try it with a different adapter if I can find a spare.

I can see possibly having a wifi dongle that doesn't play nicely, but the issue with the refusal to boot is outright weird.

HOWEVER - I've only tried on Lubuntu. Once on a system that was originally Windows 10 (I didn't have much installed on it, so split the HDD into 2 partitions), and on The Micro Machine, where the system was all Linux from the get-go.

On the latter machine, I installed Steam, can't recall if I was able to do it with apt-get, or needed to do some extra stuff, but then had to look online as to how to get Proton enabled. I can't recall it exactly, but it was all done through options in the Steam GUI, if I recall.

But I only did it out of curiosity more than anything. I haven't really investigated in-depth.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

The issues was with partitions. I wanted to install it onto the blank space on my ssd after i shrunk my partition with my steam library.
It installed correctly but didnt boot. Bios didnt see the drive as bootable.

I'm trying pop os on my older Pentium laptop with a 120gb ssd. Lets see what happens. I know a few games that will run on the chips "integrated graphics for intel atom processors".

I do like lubuntu since it makes even the slowset of hardware usable. Netbook with 2gb ram and an n3060 struggles in windows 10. Firefox takes a minute to load. With lubuntu running off of a slow usb stick is soo much faster.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

lubuntu is awesome. i use it as a development environment as well

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Just i stalled popos onto my laptops ssd. Runs amazingly fast and my wifi card+igpu drivers were detected immediately. Came with steam installed.
Of my small library of games on steam, only 4 support linux natively. Gta v doesnt work at first, but if you enable proton from the settings in steam, all of my steam library was able to install.

So yes, gtav will work on linux if you do this:

1. install linux (pop os makes drivers auto install)
2. open steam (already installed in pop os)
3. enable proton from steam settings

Now games like gtav, tf2, hitman 2, beam ng drive, automation, and more are able to download and play as normal.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Unfortunately I cant test how well the games run since this laptop is abominable for gaming.
Linux is just soooo fast compared to Windows, but software support isn't great.

 

[King_V]

Just had a chat with a colleague at work - what he refers to his Shoebox is a small form factor PC (microITX I think) with I believe an R7 1700X and a GTX 1080Ti.

Used to be dual-boot Windows and Linux, and now is Linux exclusively. Understading that this is anecdotal, from one guy who admits that he hasn't played a LOT of stuff...

ME:
For the Steam games that work, whether natively in Linux, or via Proton, how good would you say the performance is relative to running straight on Windows?

COLLEAGUE:
Anecdotally, It's hard to say. Proton's gotten better over time, so performance has changed. There was only a handful of games I've played on both windows & linux on the same hardware (shoebox was dual-boot windows/linux for a while before I decided to run linux exclusively on it), and that machine was overkill hardware-wise for the games I played anyway: Borderlands 2, Fallout: New Vegas, etc.
The only thing I can say without hesitation is that Fallout 4 is markedly better on windows.

ME:
That's an odd kind of outlier..

COLLEAGUE:
It's just genuinely glitchy on linux

ME:
(insert sarcasm here): Fallout games are generally glitchy on Windows for about the first year or so, as well

COLLEAGUE:
But I've read that there's a general performance hit on Proton overall. Can't give a meaningful number though, sorry.
It's constantly changing, which is good

ME:
For the better, presumably...

COLLEAGUE:
Yeah, there are some regressions here and there but that's to be expected
ProtonDB shows how far it's come in such a short time.
No sarcasm necessary, that comment about Fallout stability is pretty on-point

ME:
lol
ProtonDB?

COLLEAGUE:
yeah it's just a tracking site for reports and game status: https://www.protondb.com/

ME:
kewl. I'm participating in that thread on Tom's Hardware, but with my "I heard from a guy.." expertise


COLLEAGUE:
Ah geez, well I have pretty limited exposure. Most of what I know about Proton comes from other people anyway.
I never looked into it, but there's gotta be a gaming channel that's covered testing proton vs. windows on the same hardware.

ME:
no worries, hence why I asked personal experience - I'm gonna delete the names, but copy-paste this bit of the conversation into the thread.

COLLEAGUE:
But since Proton's evolving, those metrics may even be out-of-date
actually scratch what I said about Borderlands 2. I think it has native linux support.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Sounds promising. I would like to do a comparison myself, but I am unable to install windows on the laptop aswell since media creation tool refuses to see my usb stick.

 

[King_V]

since media creation tool refuses to see my usb stick.

That's just bizarre!

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Woops. USB drive was formatted as MBR somehow. GPT fixed it.