Nobara OS, Arch Linux and Pop!_OS beat Windows 11 by a slim margin in fps (delta 8) in Windows native games - Cyberpunk 2077, Forspoken, Starfield and The Talos Principle II. Windows 11 wins in Rachet & Clank.

ComputerBase's testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Update: Windows 11 wins in one game.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 82 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Soooo when did Arch become a gaming focused OS?

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 74 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Is arch really gaming focused though?

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Arch is focused on however you put it together

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Arch is focused like the same way a beach is a camera lens.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • Exactly. The only thing Arch focuses on is not focusing on anything. They ship packages as vanilla as possible, have pretty much no default configuration, etc. In short, they try to make as few assumptions as possible.

    It ends up being pretty good for gaming because Linux is pretty good for gaming. They're explicitly not doing anything special here.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    SteamOS is based on Arch, likely why they picked it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • That's like saying PlayStation 5 and Switch are based on FreeBSD, so you should game on FreeBSD (well, not quite, but hopefully the point is clear). FreeBSD isn't good for gaming, it's just liberally licensed and easy to build on top of, hence why it's used.

    Valve has reasons to use an Arch base, and none of them have anything to do with any specific benefit regarding gaming. It's easy to fork and maintain customized build files for since it makes so few assumptions (packages are as vanilla as possible in Arch, so it's easier to maintain a patch set).

    Valve likely has patches in SteamOS that haven't made it to upstream Arch, and there's likely a number of packages that are quite outdated vs upstream Arch, so installing upstream Arch will give you quite a different experience vs SteamOS.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    shrug, I've been using arch and Manjaro for years and gaming in them. They are what you make them, and AUR is massive and solves a lot of problems I have in other distros so that's why I use it.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I recently switched to ubuntu in a gaming laptop, right now I've been using it just for jellyfin and some other coding tasks, but it definitely runs smoother, more stable, quicker, and cooler than windows did for the same workload.
    I was surprised at the difference of even just having the machine idle, on windows it was noticeable warm, now on ubuntu it's almost as if it has been turned off.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    Honestly, at this point -- If Valve made a more generalized Linux OS... or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.

    Now now, I'm not saying YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP!! - but Valve would be a great mother for fostering an ecosystem that would potentially make Microsoft compete by not making their OS shittier year-by-year.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    If Valve made a Linux OS... or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.

    Sorry, does SteamOS 3 not count? Is Valve's massive investment in Mesa, Wine, Wayland (HDR, Gamescope, etc) not exactly what you're talking about? I feel like we're living in parallel dimensions or something lol

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • load more comments (6 replies)
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don't run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.

    Its like people miss the good old days of "This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don't work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don't". Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn't still work to be done serves no benefit.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (4 replies)
    [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Computerbase is very solid and well known in Germany and have been covering Linux quite a bit for a while now.
    Performance of course can fluctuate heavily between games but the amount of progress that Linux made over the past decade is nothing but astonishing.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    that's kind of my take on it too. Linux has come so far from what it used to be like. it's not quite ready to see mass-adoption, but it's making some amazing strides. so many different parties have been contributing to a massive effort to iron out some of the issues with Linux. once performance improves significantly over Windows, and compatibility gets a little more wide-spread, you'll start to see people willing to put up with the teething problems, in the name of superior performance.

    THAT is when Linux will see more mainstream success.

    some year, i don't know when, really will be the year of Linux.... maybe.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • load more comments (5 replies)
  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Description is false. Windows won in R&C. This was not an across the board win for Linux. Good news doesn't need to be sensationalized.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (20 children)

    Ok, but what about Nvidia GPUs? Those are what the the vast majority of gamers use.

  • source
  • hideshow 22 child comments
  • load more comments (18 replies)
    [–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    These tech YouTubers should do Linux comparisons. These are not small differences when comparing, let's say, Nvidia 4060 and the RX 7600. It could make the AMD GPU edge out the more expensive Nvidia offering

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • load more comments (3 replies)
    [–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I've been using arch and manjaro for the past 3 years with awesomewm and gnome (can't get awesomewm to behave with second monitor while gaming so I switch to gnome when using the second monitor, using laptop) and this has pretty much been my experience. Windows is bloated and it never"just works".

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago* (12 children)

    Windows almost always just works.

    This seems crazy to say when talking about Linux. Especially when saying you have to switch to use dual monitors.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 15 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah. In all the time I’ve been using windows I never had a problem that people constantly report; even BSOD happened quite rarely. I never got my pc to randomly shut down and update either…

    Like, I switched to Linux cause i saw it as cool, wanted to try it out and liked how customisable it was and mostly to spite the megacorp

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Nearly always something random breaks for me on windows, and it's a huge pain to fix it. I hate dealing with windows, Linux is easier, because it isn't a black box.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
  • load more comments (9 replies)
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not familiar with the games mentioned in the article, but Linux is great for gaming. I run Manjaro on my T540p laptop and have never had problems with Angband or Nethack. I can even run DF with tilesets if I'm feeling spunky. Mind you, I do have 8 gbs of RAM and a pretty sweet Intel integrated graphics setup, so that may be why it's so smooth.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Hasn’t this been happening for years?

    Intel’s clear Linux had similar articles published about it years ago.

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    slim margin isn't significant enough.

    I want bigger margins.

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    Still very impressive considering this is all run by translating the same Windows API calls into Linux ones, and then running them. There's definitely some overhead in doing this, and yet they still beat Windows native.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (4 replies)
    load more comments
    view more: next ›