Linux gaming really has come a long way

[TrapLine]

---

@AndrewF wrote:

Microsoft used to be a member of the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) until they realized that making a proprietary version of it called Direct3D (part of DirectX) would be advantageous as a Windows lock-in tool.

It's not that Windows is better for gaming in that it's a competent efficient system. It's not. It's that Direct3D became the vendor lock-in tool. It teaches developers Windows-only development and then when they go that route, the idea has always beeen that customers no longer have a choice and if they leave, the game stops working at all. So you don't need to optimize, you need to trap those customers. That way no matter how hideous the performance drag of Windows gets, it's irrelevant. They'll buy new hardware to run inefficient software faster.

To be fair, OpenGL was not designed for gaming, and OpenGL did improve a lot when it started taking some of the ideas from Direct3D like ditching the fixed function pipeline for GLSL.

And now we have Vulkan.

Proton is a variant of Wine that is maintained by Valve for Steam. The patches eventually end up in Wine because of the LGPL license.

We're getting to a point where Linux can just run all of these games at high performance levels because of Direct3D<>Vulkan support and the NTSYNC driver in the Linux kernel.

It's often faster to simulate foreign Windows APIs because the underlying system is more efficient. The abstraction layer has an overhead, but it's not enough to be notable considering that the Windows OS is bloated and, deliberately designed that way to promote new PC sales and more Windows licenses. Higher turnover. More frequent upgrade cycles.

There's nothing Linux distributions gain by not optimizing. They're not collecting a license fee on mid-cycle upgrades like Microsoft is, so Microsoft has perverse incentives that keep Windows getting worse every release.

---

Amend!

[crystal626]

---

@TrapLine wrote:

@AndrewF 

Yes, the sticker shock on purchasing computers is over the top! The blame is being laid on the avalability of computer chips and that data centers are sucking them up and an ever increasing rate. Read yesterday it was reported there were over 4000+ of them sucking electricity and computer chips (not sure I believe it but - unknown).

Now I do know the world tariff situation is having an affect too.

Purchased a large lap top and got it through the customs one day before tariffs went on around March 2025. It cost me net $1200 (one of those sales as it supposedly retailed for $1700) and it was a custom build. Today, I cannot find an equivalent to build and anything close is showing $2500 to $5000 ... for real?!

Now your example of paying four installments of $500 each looks workable but what is the carrying cost (interest) for such an action?

---

I bought a bundle from Micro Center a few years ago. Was $560 for a CPU, motherboard, and 32GB of DDR5. That RAM alone is now $460. Micro Center does have a bundle with my processor, another 32GB kit, and worse motherboard for $660 but I don't see how they're not taking a bath on it considering RAM prices right now. PC Part Picker shows comparable parts to that bundle for ~$900.

I'll probably not be upgrading any time soon.

[crystal626]

---

@AndrewF wrote:

Microsoft used to be a member of the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) until they realized that making a proprietary version of it called Direct3D (part of DirectX) would be advantageous as a Windows lock-in tool.

It's not that Windows is better for gaming in that it's a competent efficient system. It's not. It's that Direct3D became the vendor lock-in tool. It teaches developers Windows-only development and then when they go that route, the idea has always beeen that customers no longer have a choice and if they leave, the game stops working at all. So you don't need to optimize, you need to trap those customers. That way no matter how hideous the performance drag of Windows gets, it's irrelevant. They'll buy new hardware to run inefficient software faster.

To be fair, OpenGL was not designed for gaming, and OpenGL did improve a lot when it started taking some of the ideas from Direct3D like ditching the fixed function pipeline for GLSL.

And now we have Vulkan.

Proton is a variant of Wine that is maintained by Valve for Steam. The patches eventually end up in Wine because of the LGPL license.

We're getting to a point where Linux can just run all of these games at high performance levels because of Direct3D<>Vulkan support and the NTSYNC driver in the Linux kernel.

It's often faster to simulate foreign Windows APIs because the underlying system is more efficient. The abstraction layer has an overhead, but it's not enough to be notable considering that the Windows OS is bloated and, deliberately designed that way to promote new PC sales and more Windows licenses. Higher turnover. More frequent upgrade cycles.

There's nothing Linux distributions gain by not optimizing. They're not collecting a license fee on mid-cycle upgrades like Microsoft is, so Microsoft has perverse incentives that keep Windows getting worse every release.

---

Vulkan games also have a performance hit compared to Windows despite not needing graphics translation. It's not just DirectX that suffers in Linux. Even native Linux games not using any translation tend to have a 5-10% performance penalty compared to Windows. Windows is still the best experience for gamers and that's unlikely to change any time soon.

Proton is also not developed by Valve. Valve pays Codeweavers to develop Proton for them and since Codeweavers is also the single largest contributor to wine, enhancements end up in both wine and their commercial CrossOver product as well.

[AndrewF]

Like I said, the best place to get a laptop is probably shopgoodwill and look for one with Linux Mint.

What is that? $50 maybe. It'll still outperform a RPi5 which MicroCenter recently added over $100 more to because of RAM prices and tariffs.

[FicoMike0]

@TrapLine 

I definitely have too much time on my hands! I needed maxima to do some calculations using numerical methods. First, I wrote a program to do it as an excel macro in basic. I thought it would be simpke, since I already had excel and knew how to use it. Then I decided I wanted 100 decimal places of precision. I couldn't find any way to get excel to do that. I gave up and went to maxima, which I then had to learn how to use. Since then, I found another computer algebra system, pari/GP which not only will do the job, but has a phone app, 

https://f-droid.org/packages/fr.ubordeaux.math.paridroid/

Hard to believe what a phone can do.

[TrapLine]

WOW  Hats of to your ingenuity and use of the pocket computer called a Smart Phone. You leave me in the dust.

Got'ta love your drive to get the program you want!

[TrapLine]

@FicoMike0 

In reviewing your posting, I missed the part about not finding a software compiler.

Brought back memories of using Fortran, Basic and Cobol. Slipping into RPG and lots of computer brands such as Univac, IBM, Compac, Burroughs and so on. Felt like a lesson in history. Noted you used a Cray ... not to shabby.

Worked on the Burroughs for public school administrative reporting. Tried a Burrough for use in our counties but they ended up more useful as a boat anchor. So we switched the counties to IBM 34, 36 and AS 400. Today, many of the counties are still using IBM AS400s. Our largest state county by population is still using Cobol in their systems, old adage never say never and they needed to find an IT Analyst to work and write Cobol which tooks months ... called out an old timer to get the job done.

If that is not enough ancient history, as I understand it many of our Federal Computer  Systems are using modern front ends with old architecture still running in the background ... my comment "say what"?

Now where is my Quantum Computer using Laser Light and Xeon for cooling (if even necessary)? Know it exists ...!

[FicoMike0]

Yeah, one time we contracted with Hughes aircraft for time in their cray. Turned out our program didn't run well on the cray! You really need to match the tool to the task. It did run well on the sun clusters, but they had to be dedicated.

The sun's ran Solaris, their Unix brand. I remember they could handle larger files than ntfs could.I

[AndrewF]

---

@FicoMike0 wrote:

Yeah, one time we contracted with Hughes aircraft for time in their cray. Turned out our program didn't run well on the cray! You really need to match the tool to the task. It did run well on the sun clusters, but they had to be dedicated.

The sun's ran Solaris, their Unix brand. I remember they could handle larger files than ntfs could.I

---

Many unix/posix/linux file systems have larger limits than NTFS.

In addition to volume and file size limits, NTFS is very old and long in the tooth. It does support a compression algorithm, but it's a very slow one. There's nothing in the driver that intelligently detects if a file is compressing well and gives up on it if not, so you can only use it selectively. Microsoft uses that feature, mostly, to hide the size of folders with thousands of variations on each dll, which was their "solution" to dll hell.

The Alternate Data Streams feature should have been removed, in fact I think it was removed in ReFS, but they also removed ReFS in the sense that if you upgrade Windows past a certain build you lose the ability to create new volumes.

I don't think anyone at Microsoft knows or cares about file systems.

chkdsk's online repair tool has occasionally been catastrophic to the file system. In some cases it could even destroy the underlying storage medium.

The interesting bits of NTFS are actually that it was already ready for the WSL/WSL2 systems because of native POSIX space support leftover from posix.1 and Interix/SFU.

The posix.1 support landed (and was removed) only to get government contracts. It was never intended to actually be usable and their version of the Korn shell was said by David Korn himself to not be compatible with any version of ksh in actual use, although I think SFU later fixed this.

II used Solaris on two systems as OpenSolaris, it worked very well on my Phenom II X4 system. And OpenIndiana supports that too. It still runs very well because MATE Desktop's requirements haven't changed much since being forked from GNOME 2.32.