Total marketshare was estimated at 1.5% for Linux gaming.
The survey comes direct from Valve's Steam Survey. Potential bias aside the Steamdeck alone is estimated at 40%. Arch and Ubuntu ~8% each.
Is there any other trustworthy metric of all "Linux Gamers" out there? I'm curious how much using the Steam Client effects or tilts results towards systems that easily run Steam. Self selection at it's finest. My logic side knows that with only a 1.5% rounding error to the total "PC" gaming isn't market significant. I should be happy with the trend.
I own a Steamdeck. But it's like how my friends use their Nintendo systems. As an extension of my PC windows I was already personal project time with SteamOS and SteamLink. Point is, I wouldn't consider myself in the 1.5% even though I game wherever.
I can get behind the "Android isn't Linux" argument when it comes to claims of how numerous Linux users there are via smartphones. The userspace is quite distinct from anything GNU-like.
But the Steamdeck uses very much a full-blown Arch-derived Linux distro. So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".
The fact that AMD landed on the Steamdeck vs. NVIDIA or Intel is noteworthy. Their continued investment in mainline Linux support has clearly paid off.
The Deck uses a special, low power (specifically targeting ~9W), graphics heavy AMD SoC. It was actually the first of a new laptop CPU line that AMD seemingly canceled:
AMD coincidentally had the right CPU at the right time. Intel and Nvidia had nothing comparable for Valve to use. In fact, the successor to the Deck chip is kinda an existential problem, as AMD's CPU-heavy laptop line (including the Z1) is less suitable.
Valve also had already spent considerable resources in making proton work well with AMD. even if an appropriate SOC was to be available from NVIDIA, it is possible that Valve would have chosen AMD.
Mind, proton does work well with NVIDIA, but my understanding is that AMD gets the most testing.
NVIDIA doesn’t have the license to make x86 chips with the modern patented features so they’d need to either have a dedicated GPU with an AMD/Intel CPU or develop, or invest resources into an existing, ARM emulation layer
As others have mentioned they are custom parts, but if you were forced to qualify them as either "laptop" or "desktop" parts they are much, much closer to AMD's laptop lineup than the desktop ones. Monolithic design with integrated GPU is not what AMD's desktop lineup has looked like.
One thing thats under-appreciated is the immense design/tape out cost (9 figures these days, maybe more?) of a fully custom chip. That is a huge flat expense, hence one does not simply make a custom design unless the volume (or margin) is absolutely enormous.
AMD/Nvidia/Intel can't just casually crank out an APU for Valve, as one might think. I'm not even sure MS/Sony can justify a die shrink this generation... Heck, maybe the PS6 will run commodity PC hardware.
Compared to what came before, the previous (Modified AMD Jaguar APUs) and the current-generation (Modified AMD Zen 2 APUs) consoles are commodity PC hardware compared to whatever bespoke cost-optimized ISAs consoles used to be built around. So in a way, it's already somewhat commodity PC hardware under very heavy TPM lockdown.
I don't think a next-gen APU for a Steam Deck 2 is going to be that big a problem. The Steam Deck's APU is officially designated: "AMD Custom APU 0405"[1], basically a mix and match of AMD's same-generation parts. With the success of the Steam Deck, a followup custom APU is all but assured, although I don't think it'll show up before next year. If I had to guess, I'd expect a 4C Zen5c and 12 CU RDNA 3.5 on 4nm in late 2024 which should offer a big bump (assuming they can improve memory bandwidth).
Note, we're seeing a lot of Chinese handhelds using 7840s already that while a bit behind at 10W, start beating the Steam Deck's performance (sometimes dramatically) at 15W+. Personally, I'd be pretty excited for a Strix Point handheld next year - AMD seems like they're finally getting serious on the iGPU side of things again (with Meteor Lake looking to be competitive).
> basically a mix and match of AMD's same-generation parts.
It is not. Its a distinct die from the Zen2/3 laptop parts.
If AMD was going to continue the Deck APU line, we would have seen Dragon Crest by now... But its not there, and the Z1 is in its place.
Again, I reiterate, taping out a chip is massively expensive. Valve cannot afford a custom die, they are stuck with what AMD has at the moment when they need it... Though if AMD starts tiling their laptop APUs, Valve might be able to tweak the CPU/GPU config.
No, the Steam Deck would have never upgraded to Dragon Crest (2022 on those leaked roadmaps). In case you didn't realize, the Steam Deck wasn't released until Feb 25 2022, and only sold 1M units in 2022 (vs 3M projected in 2023). It's certainly successful enough now (and has enough marketing, like it had just a ridiculous amount of floorspace at TGS) that it's all but guaranteed there will be a Steam Deck 2 (but probably not until 2025).
Since all the details are NDA'd, I guess we'll have to disagree on the economics, but "tweaking CPU/GPU config" is the whole point of AMD's Semi-Custom Solutions group and if they can't handle delivering a solution for a product that has at least $2B in sales, then I don't know what customers they're supposed to serve (tape-out costs are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as you're imagining I suspect, when reusing existing IP blocks). But we can revisit in a few years and see.
> So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".
It depends on what you’re using this data for.
If you are a game developer deciding what platforms to support then Steamdeck is fully distinct from Linux, imho. Support Steamdeck, it’s likely worth it (depends on type of game)!
However supporting Steamdeck may not require a native Linux port. It turns out the best way to support Linux May infact be to simply use the Win32 API!
And even if you do support Steamdeck with a native Linux port it may not be worth your time to try and support Ubuntu and a billion flavors of Linux that are each broken in different ways.
Supporting Linux clients beyond Steamdeck is likely not worth it for most games.
Source: have shipped games with Linux support. Was extremely painful and not worth it.
Steamdeck is a device with one hardware configuration, one set of drivers, one operating system, and one local environment. "Linux" is an infinite number of combinations derived from an a large and unbounded set of hardware, driver, OS, and environment choices.
The reason that "supporting Linux is hard" is the combinatorial matrix of broken ass shit. Supporting a single configuration is easy.
Proton/WINE works well on Steamdeck. It gets updated regularly by Valve for specific games when it doesn't. It is not as reliable for random gamer's random ass frankenstein setup.
It's a funny thing. I think what you're saying is exactly right from the standpoint of a dev. As a mere consumer, if you support Steamdeck via Proton, then it sure feels to me like you're supporting Linux, but I get why you wouldn't officially say that.
If I were shipping a game today I would say “I support Steamdeck”. If any users complained about it not working on their particular Linux machine I would say “you’re on your own, good luck!”.
I would proudly advertise “Steamdeck support” and I would definitely never claim to “support Linux”.
IIRC for my Linux project something like 40% of support tickets were from the 1% of Linux users. Give or take. Never again!
Not really, no. In practice Linux is radically more fragile and roughly an order of magnitude more expensive to support for two orders of magnitude fewer users.
Games may hit a different set of pain points than a DAW. A lot of the Linux pain is graphics driver related. Which you could say is not a Linux problem but an AMD/Nvidia problem. But from a game developer perspective that distinction doesn’t matter.
Just curious, what engine did you use for the games you shipped on Linux? And any differences in how well they did(n’t) work that corresponded to which store you shipped on?
FWIW Linux is easy to support if all you want to do is run a headless server on a single distro. Supporting more distros may require a little bit of dependency hell bullshit, but it's doable.
What's a bloody nightmare is graphics and sound and the infinitely large matrix of janky environments gamers have.
My current plans are Godot, Steam, and for Linux packaging the client to run in Steam’s container environment (“sniper”). Will be interesting to see how many problems that doesn’t solve.
The good news is you mostly don't have to support the graphics/sound/environments variations. If you test it on stock Ubuntu (and maybe SteamOS), it will probably work for almost all the noobs and everyone else can probably figure it out without much help.
> I can get behind the "Android isn't Linux" argument when it comes to claims of how numerous Linux users there are via smartphones. The userspace is quite distinct from anything GNU-like.
But why does having anything "GNU-like" determine whether or not something is Linux? Surely the fact that it is literally running Linux makes it Linux more than some related software (GNU) not being used.
Most people say linux, but mean GNU+Linux. Clearly, being a world-renowned software dev, and being in-your-face pedantic for literal decades isn't enough to get the point across for some people. Add whichever tooling you want (I've heard KDE+Linux before, and without looking it up, suspect Gnome+Linux wouldn't be wrong), but don't pretend Android doesn't use the Linux kernel.
I'll take my downvotes here for being an ass, but on a forum that loves being pedantic, I legitimately expect better. Android is Linux. Typically with an outdated kernel, without root, with a locked bootloader, and without the GNU tooling, but it's pretty hard to argue Android's not Linux.
GNU is a distraction here. In a decade or two there will probably be mainstream linux distros where all the GNU parts have been replaced by newer and better libraries (probably written in Rust). People say linux, but mean a linux system to which they have root access (or can phone up the sysadmin who does).
> but mean a linux system to which they have root access
Ah, like my Pixel 2. Respectfully, you might be on the wrong forum (and possibly the worst one outside XDA) to say "Most people here do not, and never did, have root access on their Android handsets".
If your distinction for what makes a Linux system a Linux system, is root access, recognize that many, many people here have met and cleared that bar.
While true, often people talk about the proportion of Linux gamers in the context of growing desktop Linux market share, "the year of the Linux desktop," etc. Since Android and desktop Linux programs are largely incompatible, mobile games on ARM64 don't matter in this context.
Compatibility is much less of an issue these days. My son apparently plays Android games on Windows in an emulator. I'm sure the same thing is possible on Linux. I plan to finally switch to gaming on Linux, because Linux support for games is much better than it was in the past, and even games that don't officially work in Linux, in practice often still do due to Steam Linux support. Even if you didn't buy the game on Steam, I've been told.
So I hope to soon join that 1.5%, and with the direction Windows seems to be going, I expect a lot more people will do the same.
If we're being pedantic, let me be clear that Android is Linux. It just doesn't use the traditional userland, mostly implemented by GNU. So it's Linux but not GNU/Linux.
> Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
> At least to me, it's a bit like lumping old folks who play at churches into a 'Gamblers that visit casinos once a week' metric.
Slight aside, but in the past I've worked at some of those bingo halls that drew the sunday after-church old folks crowd. They were some of the most hardcore gamblers I have ever seen. Gods dandelions these ladies weren't.
Yep. And the same is true of mobile gamers. I’m not sure about the stats, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of hours spent playing crappy mobile games is greater than the number of hours spent playing PC games. Mobile games don’t always look like pc games, but they sure are a giant market.
If not indicated otherwise Linux is refers to GNU/Linux. Like America refers to the United States of America. Android refers to an incompatible custom userland by Google (anti GPL, closed-source PlayServices) and a usually heavily patched Linux-Kernel with many closed-source modules. Looking at Android 13 it is using an old 4.x Linux-Kernel as base.
Probably neither Google nor the FSF like that usage of terms?
I don't think that's very relevant when we're talking about AMD CPU usage, although it does mean that Phoronix may very well be technically wrong when talking about "Linux" gaming statistics. That said it's quite clear they mean GNU/Linux desktop gaming using x86_64-based systems.
Android is a very thick layer/shell around the actual Linux kernel, maybe some or a lot of patches, but still Linux. How much compiled Linux code does it run? Quite a lot. macOS, AFAIK, runs NO Linux (the kernel) source code.
What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
A quotation circulates on the Internet, attributed to me, but it wasn't written by me.
Here's the text that is circulating. Most of it was copied from statements I have made, but the part italicized here is not from me. It makes points that are mistaken or confused... < original copypasta>
The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.
We don't use the term “corelibs,” and I am not sure what that would mean, but GNU is much more than the specific packages we developed for it. I set out in 1983 to develop an operating system, calling it GNU, and that job required developing whichever important packages we could not find elsewhere.
Linux is an endless source of audiovisual issues and friends that use it join Discord and find their audio/mic is super low bitrate/crackly or simply doesn't work at all, consistently between the various distros that they move to every couple months, flavour of the week, etc.
I haven't gone back to trying linux as desktop since pop_os bricked my Dell XPS (even bios recovery doesn't work, it's completely bricked by some UEFI extension or something that pop rammed onto it).
Before that just getting multiple monitors to work consistently/each in their own specific resolution was an absolute nightmare.
The SD is really what Linux should be targeting: "it just works" but if you want, you can crack it open and change what you want. Linux is mostly still a pain in the butt to get up & running, plug monitors & other devices in and just have the damn thing work.
Let alone all of the _choices_: distro, window manager, audio manager, etc, etc. Nobody _cares_. That's why it's not been year of the Linux desktop yet; you install Windows or you buy a Macbook and you get Windows or MacOS. Try to decide which window manager to use based on the internet's option; you'll find forums & forums like HN of people bitching over which WM is superior etc.
The question is how many people are also just switching because they're being forced to go to 11 despite not wanting to, yet again, and so Linux seems like a stable reliable option for most of them?
Most don't do significant PC gaming, right?
Just browsing the web and sharing files, right?
Hmmm.... Many will just get the millenial in the family to install Ubuntu or mint and be done with it..
At least that's what has consistently happened in my family, with people rarely if ever going back to windows (without any real tech support, it "just keeps working").
Steam survey doesn't represent reality, imho. When was the last time you were asked to participate? On how many machines, assuming you have more than one.
I am sure Valve collects way more than they let on. Linux gaming is at a good place. However, I really wish AMD would release their CPU and GPU control software for Linux. Running newer AMF cards is painful because the stock BIOS settings are anything but sane. Gotta burn power to win benchmarks...
The field of statistics is kind of based on the idea that you can take a sample and it might represent a population. Maybe you have a more specific complaint about the Steam Survey methodology in mind that I'm not picking up on?
So, you do agree that it's not hard data? Not sure what made you think I am "complaining" about the survey. Just pointing out it does not represent the full picture. It's supposedly random and voluntary.
When considering whether or not the survey reflects reality, I invite you to look at other survey methodologies and the error bars that are possible with as many as, say, 1500 randomly sampled survey participants. The voluntary nature might skew the data a little bit, but not so much that it completely invalidates the trends shown. Sure, not the whole picture, but probably quite close.
Maybe you are right. I cannot tell because I have no way of verifying the results.
Would you personally use the survey for actual real world research? Not talking about phoronix articles and blogs. Say, you are a marketing guy and the company you work for asks you to make predictions.
Personally I would not. And that is the essence of what I said.
A fresh install does not trigger it. I know because I made a number of changes, including Linux and Windows installatios, to several machines recently and was not asked once
I'm in the market for a new desktop (it's been nearly nine years since I purchased my gaming rig). My current plan is to leave Windows behind finally.
I'll be getting a Linux rig of some sort. And it won't just be for gaming, it will be for running and training local LLMs, which is far more brutal on the hardware than any games I've seen; I can still play most titles on my 1440p screen with my current "potato."
I've been running Microsoft operating systems for decades: Windows, and DOS before that since DOS 3.3. With all the attention sinks stuck into the new Windows (pops on the menu, pops from the dock, ads everywhere on my machine) it's time to leave it. The two viable alternatives are Mac OS and Linux. Work has me on Mac, but the hardware I want to run... Linux is the right choice. I'll game on the system I have.
I have to wonder how many PC gamers will follow suit as they get older.
Most of the systems I've been pricing out for Linux desktops are AMD Threadripper builds. Intel Xeons would be better for AI workloads, but they're way more expensive.
Basically the state is getting to be that almost every game exluding some, which require specific anti-cheat engines, will work.
In some cases it is just a matter of enabling EAC linux support by game publishers.
That’s a pretty big “just”, tbh. It would absolutely require the sort of proprietary kernel drivers most distros (understandably!) consider anathema, and I’m not sure game publishers want to shoulder that burden entirely themselves.
There's definitely a lot games that don't run as well as they do on windows despite being generally playable on linux. It's nice to have a dual boot for games like that even if you play the vast majority of games on the linux side.
If you’re going to be investing much time and energy into AI/ML on your GPU, I urge you to consider going the nvidia route rather than an AMD GPU. (CPU-wise, either AMD or Intel is just fine.) Using ROCm instead of CUDA may be possible, but it’s unloved, unsupported on consumer hardware, doesn’t even build with PyTorch at its current minor version, and generally a frustrating time-suck.
The proprietary nvidia driver situation is unfortunate, and if you’re sufficiently driven off by it, ROCm can work, sometimes, eventually. But do consider the effort and time it’ll cost.
I think Arubis didn't push the point hard enough. Nvidia is a long way ahead of AMD in AI/ML hardware capability, from my very limited experience.
I got a Stable Diffusion thing up and running locally on a relatively old AMD RX 580 with 8GB of memory, and default settings of 512x512 with 10 (I think) passes, and it takes about 10 minutes to generate an image. On a similarly aged Nvidia 1060 with 6GB of memory that a colleague of mine uses for their local Stable Diffusion instance, it takes about 20 seconds to generate an image.
I don't know how apples and oranges this comparison is, my OS is Linux and his is Windows, for example, but 10 minutes versus 20 seconds is, for me, a massively disappointing difference.
I'm sure the gap has decreased in the intervening 6-7 years, but I don't know how much - such that I'd be opting for a second hand Nvidia over a new AMD (and I philosophically prefer AMD).
To clarify this. On my RX5700 XT, with ROCm, Stable Diffusion generates images on the default sampler at 512x512 20 passes in about 2 seconds. It's definitively slower than a similar NVIDIA card, but I've no concrete numbers.
It's still a pain in other ways. AMD does not support ROCm on consumer-grade GPUs, it only "happens to work". I had to explicitly install the 3.10 python interpreter and use an older torch version, because seemingly, the newer ROCm releases do not support the RX5700 XT. Also ROCm only works on Linux.
When you say "unsupported on consumer hardware", make it clear that it does work it just isn't supported if you run into issues.
My experience with a RX6800 was that compiling ROCm for myself for use with Pytorch just worked, though from reading online it's clear that's a rarity. Current gen cards apparently don't even work.
Microsoft is losing this particular market, but they don't seem to care.
I would pay good money for a Windows version that had a more professional and consistent interface (Win 2K comes to mind, but Win 7 interface was still OK) no advertisement inside the OS, no telemetry, automatic update notification but manual installation, no unexplained HDD usage when idle that goes away as soon as I open the system monitor, WSL support.
Closest thing is LTSC but it is discouraged and hard to legally buy.
Linux can do all of this. Compatibility with games is good enough and better in some edge cases. KVM performance running a VM is good enough for running MS Office for work, and still a better experience than in bare metal as you can limit core usage and the computer will run cooler and use less power.
I built dozens of gaming desktops as a kid and young adult, but lately the time demands of adulthood means it's hard to keep up with the latest trends. Like you I got sick of fighting Windows just to launch Steam. But I also had numerous bad experiences with desktop Linux, and with not wanting to deal with Proton and Wine. When I want to relax I just want to get in a quick game for an hour or two, not go through a ton of driver updates etc.
To that end, GeForce Now has been... no pun intended... game changing. It works miraculously well, and has almost top of the line hardware. Paired with my ultrawide QHD screen, most games run beautifully. Shooters are out due to the input lag (small but definitely noticeable) but all the other genres feel fantastic. No fan noise, no heat, no giant tower taking up space, no worrying about upgrades... It's an amazing service at a terrific price point. I have a Mac but just plug in a Windows keyboard and mouse and it works flawlessly. Same with an Xbox controller.
People pooh poohed cloud gaming for so long, but these days it's so easy and seamless I'm honestly worried about the future of the gaming PC market. Nvidia seems well on their way to providing data center and AI cards and just renting games as a service. (Honestly, that's fine with me...).
1. Provide great value to the user while you are weak. Provide them a great deal and a disproportionate amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
2. Provide great value to your corporate partners once you become stronger than your consumers can organise against. Provide your corporate partners a huge amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
3. Take all surplus value for yourself once you're stronger than your corporate partners.
Cloud gaming is at stage 1.
I have seen this too many times at this point of my life to ever trust a good deal like this again.
Investing in things you own is an investment in yourself.
Shrug. It's just games. If I lost all my games, as I have before... life goes on? What does it mean to own a digital copy of a commoditized good? The hardware is even worse. What costs $4000 today will be $200 in a few years and worthless soon after that.
These are experiences that you go through and move on from, not heirlooms you keep. If you absolutely must play old games, they'll likely become either abandonware for emulators or remastered in 16k a few years from now.
You can go to great lengths to horde hardware and your own DRM free copies of games if that's your thing. Me, I'd rather just rent them from Steam while they're on sale for a few bucks, play them on hardware someone else maintains, and then forget about them. I'll never be able to keep up with all the great new releases in a lifetime anyway.
I agree that this process happens. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take advantage when situation 1 is occurring. It means you should evaluate periodically if you are still in a situation 1 for these types of things. Amazon prime and Netflix used to be situation 1s. They aren't anymore. If you're willing to give them up I don't see the problem.
There are network effects help the companies from phase 1 to phase 2.
Ultimately there's an inertia in human decision making that means we almost always stick around longer than we should when we are being taken advantage of.
I would say that it's not worth the hassle of creating the hassle of escaping.
Yeah, you've been able to stream from your hardware doe a while now. It never works quite as well as just plugging in a HDMI cord though.
There are also services like Shadow that just rent you a GPU enabled Windows box, and you can run whatever emulator on there you want. It's cheaper than renting GPU hours from the enterprise providers (who mostly target AI workloads, I guess?)
I wish there was a plug-and-play cloud gaming box I could just plug into my TV. I’m willing to pay a monthly subscription but not hundreds of dollars to buy into a console ecosystem.
Stadia seemed perfect for a casual gamer like me, but it had so few games at launch and I knew better than to buy into a Google consumer product. I have a MacBook, but using it to game on my TV would be a wonky setup.
Nvidia Shield would work for that with the Geforce Now service. Pros: don't have to pay unless stuck in queue and want priority or higher quality. Cons: have to own your games elsewhere for Geforce Now to be able to stream it (for license reasons), and it's about the same price as an Apple TV.
Game Pass Cloud does work on some smart TVs, mostly the latest ones from Samsung so if you got one of those then you don't even need a box. Amazon Luna is the same. Samsung TV.
You can easily do this with a Google TV (like $40?) plus an Xbox controller. Or just hook up any old Android phone or PC laptop.
Since all the actual gaming hardware is in the cloud, all you need is a device that can output the frame rate and resolution (and maybe HDR) you want, which should be easy enough to find.
I left for NixOS instead of upgrading to Windows 11.
Honestly it can play anything I can throw at it. Including FFXIV which has zero official Linux support. And it might play even better than it does on Windows.
I built a new PC with AMD Zen 4 CPU end of last year, after using Intel for more than 10 years before that (last AMD I used before was an Athlon in the early 2000s! Intel Core 2 made me switch back to Intel then)
I also use Linux exclusively, and play games on Steam using Proton (which works great for modern games. I do single player games though)
However, no idea why there would be a correlation between Linux Gaming and AMD: I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
I had no problems using Steam with the Intel CPU before that. But I find it wrong of Intel to not support AVX-512 in consumer CPUs (and having efficiency cores in my desktop PC is not something that excites me, and it's because of those that they dropped AVX-512), while AMD embraced it. If new Intel CPUs would have been simply like the i9-11900 but better (in a different way than the efficiency cores, more like faster, more performance cores, more SIMD etc...), I'd probably just have kept getting Intel ones out of habit.
Makes sense - article mentions Windows is the opposite (with Intel's share increasing, and AMD's sitting at ~32%), and Windows users are much less likely to care about open source drivers and contributions.
The intersection of technically apt people and value conscious gamers looking to squeeze more fps out of limited dollars picks the value brand with a rep for friendliness with open source.
I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
Woah. While wou don't specifically say it was a "gaming PC", you did say that you game on it. What is your use case that AVX-512 became a deal-breaker?
As someone with a 5900x I wish I had picked a more efficient cpu. Do consider idle and low usage power draw. My room turns into an oven even just watching YouTube.
Personally, I've found over the past few years that AMD parts tend to have better perf/watt than Intel parts for both laptops and desktops and I think most benchmarks tend to corroborate that experience: https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-7600-ryzen-7-770...
Someone mentioned Eco mode (which is easy if your BIOS supports it) - another option is futzing with PBO2 Curve Optimizer. Most chips can support a -10 on all cores but lots of people run up to -20 or even -30. This can make a pretty huge difference in temps/wattage. I lowered my CPU temps by >10C w/ no performance loss on my 5950X. You can also set the PPT to whatever max power you want to use. Here's a guide if you're going to explore some that more: https://skatterbencher.com/amd-precision-boost-overdrive-2/
It seems like AMD's power savings just doesn't compete with Intel. I'm a few generations out of date, but my computer setup idles at ~200W, whereas a few-generations-older Intel HEDT that it replaced idled near 50W. Not turning my computer off at night costs $14 a month!
(BTW, monitors will get you. With my monitors on reading HN, I'm burning 400W!)
I've played with it before yeah. But I think ultimately it comes down to the io die never really clocking down, the wattage per core is insignificant as far as I can tell thanks to parking and entire ccd. Same story with my gpu which for some reason thinks running vram at 2ghz at idle is necessary.
Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.
This was me. I had a Radeon 290x. It worked alright, but fglrx was terrible (and the config UI was the only non-English app in my system, it didn't respect locale settings), and when AMDGPU first arrived, it was a horribly buggy flickering mess. I upgraded to a 1080Ti after high-end Vega failed to materialise, and nvidia's drivers kind of just worked, especially on Ubuntu (they were proprietary of course, but so was fglrx).
It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.
yep. nvidia was the only choice back then. I don't see how folks have forgoten that. But, now it's all AMD for me, because amd doesn't require a closed source driver or userspace. Apparently that will change in the next year or so though. It'll be interesting to see how the open nvidia stuff compares in the future.
Some people have no idea how nice it is now compared to 15 or 20 years ago.
I took an NVME out of an Intel machine, threw it into an AMD machine, booted it, and everything just worked, graphics included. No weird network drivers to track down, sound card drivers, proprietary graphics or even xf86- stuff needed.
Nvidia will always require a closed source userspace, the only part they've opened is the kernel side. And the new kernel driver only works for 2000 series or newer.
But it's still a pretty huge step in the right direction, even though it won't be as nice as AMD's fully open source and upstreamed driver.
> Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years.
That was very welcome at the time, but the bar has been raised. I now have the option of a GPU that plays games and integrates well with all my other OS features, so I switched. It's great to be free from the endless annoyances that came with Nvidia's drivers.
Maybe my experience is vastly different, but Nvidia just works. I have a laptop with 3080, a Threadripper with 2x3090 and an Intel with a 4090 and A6000 and it works without any fuss in Linux (I mostly use it for Deep Learning but sometimes gaming as well).
Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.
AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).
> Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.
In my opinion an open-source driver not written by Nvidia and an Ubuntu ISO not packaged by Nvidia aren't indicators of Nvidia "just work"ing or not. There are many distros where Nvidia drivers come installed out of the box.
In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work". The last proprietary graphics driver I ran was fglrx for a laptop R1400. One day AMD/ATI just straight up removed that card from the driver, with the newer driver being required for the newer X, unilaterally declaring my laptop obsolete. Never again.
(where I can help it. Mobile is obviously a forced-obsolescence dumpster fire)
> In my opinion, formed from over two decades of Linux, a piece of hardware having a libre driver written for it is the exact indicator of what can be relied upon to "just work".
Then this opinion can be discarded as not grounded in reality. In order to run pytorch at high speed I need to do... basically nothing. It just works.
Many things can be said about ROCm support for 7900XT, none of them are positive.
"It just works" drivers from AMD come several months too late.
Twitter and Reddit were pretty reliable, too. Needlessly putting yourself at the mercy of a company, especially for say your main computer, seems like a recipe for waking up to headache some day, where rage posting on social media is your only recourse.
99% of people's only recourse is rage posting on social media even if the drivers are open source. Not everyone is technical enough to work on graphics drivers or want to sponsor someone else to work on it.
The point is to keep the development incentives aligned with your incentives, and for it to occur within the wider ecosystem, such that cross-purposes problems don't happen in the first place.
According to multiple sources, Ubuntu has more than 30% of the market share; independently how it is, it definitely has a lot of weight in the Linux world, and its practices/standards.
I just did a fresh Arch install last week. Running 6.4.1 kernel on a ThreadRipper CPU with an RTX 2070 Super and an RTX 3060. Driver version 535.54.03 and CUDA 12.2. Everything "just works". There was no manual configuration, tweaking or hacking around needed. No issues running Wayland, Proton is handling gaming beautifully and not a sign of screen tearing.
The experience is different for everyone it seems.
I can play almost all single player games, whether they officially support proton or not; the only major game I have been unable to play (despite following all instructions online) is Gris.
> Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.
This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro.
For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.
This has been my experience with my Radeon RX 6750 XT and Manjaro. I didn't have to do anything and it just works. I use Steam/Proton to game and that just works as well.
I also had to make sure I'm running a decent enough MESA and a recent enough llvm and a recent enough linux-firmware. It's not trivial.
But if you're on a distro with a recent enough version of those things, it Just Works.
I do wish distros like Ubuntu were more on the ball with regards to hardware support though. Ideally, someone running an up to date Ubuntu LTS should have a system which just works with new AMD hardware within at most a few weeks. It's currently a matter of many many months.
Just as difficult? AMD GPUs are plug-and-play on linux (if you have latest gen you should run a recent enough kernel but that's basically it), whereas Nvidia GPUs need their proprietary drivers which adds much more complexity for beginner users.
I'm not even sure why people have this myth that AMD's GPU support is good on linux. Having an upstreamed driver doesn't mean much when it's just as buggy and unstable as the closed drivers were 10-15 years ago. Everyone I know using a modern AMD GPU on Linux evangelize the fuck out of them while simultaneously complaining about constant black screens/hard freezes/poor performance in games/etc. I've never experienced such issues with nvidia and besides the annoyance of having to make sure you have the proprietary blob installed there's no real issues.
I genuinely don’t recognise what you’re describing - for context I have a AMD APU system (5750GE - zen 3 and vega GPU cores), and a steam deck. I’ve had the APU for over a year now. I also have a desktop with a NVIDIA 3090.
All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.
Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).
My experience is that universally my linux gamer friends who own AMD products have worse experiences than I do - they are absolutely usable, but not worth buying at all if your primary purpose for owning a GPU is gaming.
> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).
Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.
Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.
I’m playing quite a wide variety of titles - from recent AAA on the Steam Deck to really old titles that have never even been on Steam. Plus emulators for all sorts of systems - from really old up to things like GameCube/Wii or even Switch.
I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.
I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.
edit: for some more context - I have tried a linux desktop about once a year every year for the last decade. Every time I've bounced hard due to issues on a variety of hardware - intel only, intel CPU + nvidia GPU, intel CPU + AMD GPU, AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU, etc. Last year (feb 2022 or so) is the first time I've made it work for me for the long term, so maybe it's just that in that time it's finally got to a good point? :)
I’ve stuck to nvidia for years and it’s reliable on Linux. Needs proprietary drivers for full performance. I don’t think they’re actively hostile since they have drivers available. It used to be that you struggled to get acceleration. Nvidia drivers were the only reliable way. I had an ATI GPU too and drivers were not as good on Linux.
Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.
Both these statements can be true. Their drivers can be excellent but try to do anything with your Linux machine after the Nvidia drivers are installed and you run into trouble.
Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen.
I've had nothing but issues with AMD on Linux. 7970,280x,rx580 and vega64. All of them had horrible bugs for what I was doing and amd opengl sucks.
I eventually got sick of all the hard lock bugs running emulators, and the driver devs not wanting to fix it because Nintendo was their customer.
Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows.
Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux
Installing the drivers is easy, but that doesn’t mean they work immediately. I got a fairly old computer a couple of years ago and put an RTX 3070 in it… I tried installing several distros and each of them would go through the install fine, then give a blank screen when I tried to boot. I tried all sorts of configuration and driver installations, both free and offical NVidia. I finally got one to work like it should, but it took about 10 days of messing with it.
Yeah what I found with these recent generation combo of nvidia + intel while powerful and while I can install linux, had issues with serious over heating causing a shut down where the nvidia driver was causing heat issues on the laptop, once switching back to windows 11, no more thermal issues.
Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow.
> The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.
NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish).
I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence.
I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.
If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.
How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?
How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?
How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?
If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
> If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.
I've had zero "system breaks", neither has anyone who used a distro supplied driver package. And if you installed from the official SH file, well, you did it at your own risk and you had to understand what you were doing. In short, you're lying.
> kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.
Again, didn't affect those who used a distro supplied package. Those who used the installer patched the kernel, which I've done countless times but over the past four years I've done it zero times. In short you're lying again.
> How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?
Never ever happened to me or anyone who I know. Show me actual fixed bug reports where NVIDIA is blamed for breaking the DM or bust. I think you're now lying again. Xorg support in NVIDIA drivers have been stellar aside from older GPUs and older drivers not supporting newer Xorg releases but then HW companies do not owe you infinite support. People who expect their more than 15 year old GPUs to work with modern OS'es and support all the features are lunatics.
> How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?
What?? Did you come up with this BS in your dream? I've been using NVIDIA since late 90s. Never ever in my entire life I've got the Xorg config file lost. In fact, and here's you lying again (!) Xorg reads this file and closes it right away. It doesn't keep it open. Under no conditions this file could have been lost now or ever. And Xorg has used auto configuration for almost a decade now if I'm not mistaken, so there's no xorg.conf file to speak of. I have a small file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d to enable CoolBits in the NVIDIA driver, that's it.
> How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?
You are making stuff up. Again, there will be no bug reports, citations, anything.
> If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
I've been using NVIDIA since Riva TNT2, thank you very much. And the list is a lot longer than you could imagine including MX440, FX 5600 (it was horrible), GeForce 6100 (integrated GPU), 7600 GT, 8800 GT, GTX 660, GTX 1060 and now GTX 1660 Ti.
I don't remember your nickname on nvnews.net (do you even know about this website? nah, I don't think so) - NVIDIA's Linux support forums in the late 90s/early 00s which tells to me everything.
Almost everything you wrote (sans occasional kernel incompatibilities which did _not_ affected normal people) is just pure made up crap.
I can show you nvnews.net and forums.developer.nvidia.com threads with actual issues but you've listed none.
I know how none other than kernel hackers _intentionally_ broke NVIDIA drivers recently by breaking EFI console, a malicious patch which was later reversed because it affected more than just NVIDIA drivers.
And I also frequent kernel bugzilla and AMD/Intel bug trackers. They have far more serious bug reports.
AMD open source drivers have become semi-decent maybe in the past two years at most. Oh, except, RocM. Intel fares better but they are not strangers to deal breaker regressions.
No one is perfect, and trying to say that NVIDIA is hostile to Linux while offering a high quality driver is either malevolent or just mean but it's definitely not true at all.
the positive/negative parasocial relationships people have with AMD and NVIDIA (respectively) borders on "splitting" in the personality-disorder sense. AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing and nvidia represents everything bad and malicious about computing, to a lot of people. And when they see one of the brands they just have to hammer that post button to signal their virtue.
Nah, these off topic rants are pretty much there in every single topic here. Every AMD/nVidia article has bunch of people just ranting without even trying to read the topic.
Even here on HN, even when it isn’t a mistake, basically any thread that mentions nvidia essentially devolves into “Linus said fuck nvidia”. It’s effectively a thought-terminating cliche and it poisons almost every GPU discussion.
It’s really not just the Linus thing either. Every time AMD does anything anti-consumer people feel the need to temper it with praise about all the good they’ve done, and give them every benefit of the doubt about “maybe this isn’t true, maybe they had a good reason, etc” while every single thing nvidia does is viewed through the most negative and malicious possible lens.
It’s pretty clearly some variety of splitting plus parasocial attachment, AMD is “the good one” and nvidia is the bad one.
Anyway, it just sucks because it poisons discourse. How many posts did we get into this thread before the “Linus said fuck nvidia” canard came out? Zero, they opened right up with the thought-terminating cliche. It gets old after the 10,000th time.
To be fair, pre-amdgpu, nvidia's proprietary linux drivers were sadly an exceptional "supported" situation.
Back then it was basically just Intel's integrated graphics that had first-class mainline support. The AMD linux support is a relatively recent shift historically speaking.
Intel really should get a lot more recognition for its mainline Linux graphics support though. Without their contributions over past decades we might not even have a modern graphics stack at all in-kernel.
They still suck though. I fully believe they're trying their best - AMD apparently can't write production-quality graphics drivers on Windows either - but I don't think they're reliable enough to be called "supported hardware", at least not yet.
Please don't spread misinformation. AMD GPUs have had full 3d acceleration out of the box for several years now. I use Linux exclusively and had great performance in 3D games on R9 380, RX 570, and RX 580, all using the mainline (obviously FOSS) driver.
Wow, software 3D rendering must have really gotten fast then. I play all my Steam games on Linux using the open source amdgpu driver. Or maybe I just imagined all those extra frames in RDR2. Someone should tell Valve that the Steam Deck could be a lot faster.
Or, I guess the other option is that you’re spreading misinformation.
Not very significant. Linux gamers represent 1.5% of the market share, 40% of them are steam deck users, which use AMD components. But the steam deck is closer to a game console, people don't really chose the hardware and OS, they buy a pre-built system, and who care what's inside if it can play games well. It is more hackable than a Nintendo, but hackers are, I think, a minority.
If you remove the steam decks, AMD market share goes down to 50%, similar to their Windows counterparts.
Gamers in this category have a choice between Steam Deck and Windows alternatives like the Asus ROG Ally, GPD Win, and many others. One could see the success of Steam Deck as being directly related to it's choice of OS. As a consumer, I want a game device, not another copy of Windows to administer.
It was one of the deciding factors for me when choosing between the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally. I don't want to deal with Windows and all of the BS that cokes with it on a device meant for fun.
I am using AMD Ryzen CPU because I don't need to use water-cooling, and I get a really decent performance out with 8 core/16 threads. Intel CPU runs way too hot, and I don't want to spend more money on AIO, when I don't need to. AMD CPU generally runs much cooler (except on the high-end and thread ripper stuff, but I don't have high-end).
So far, my Linux 5800x was my second most stable machine after a Haswell Hackintosh (i5 4590), honestly, I am keen on returning to that, my intel machine has caused me immense trouble tbh.
I just built a Linux computer with a Ryzen 9 7900 paired with an intel a750 (couldn't resist the 200 dollar price tag).
I boosted the power target to about 125 watts and it runs like a charm. The GPU also just friggin worked. Not "just worked" as in "forget about your Nvidia driver, compile a kernel and end up with a text only boot". I haven't done anything, and suddenly I can do av1 encoding or run 3 screens in 4k60 without a hitch.
Right now I run 100% Linux with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3070.
Everything works perfectly. My only gripe would be nVidia's driver isn't on parity with the Windows one, things like video upscaling haven't made it through yet.
That said I haven't come across games I can't run. Steam / Proton just work, very rarely do I need to go in and tweak something.
Highly recommend Heroic Launcher as well. Very polished Epic/GOG client, get the FlatPak version as that has max compatabilty.
Linux Gamer here. My primary machine, built around 2015 or so, runs Void Linux and an Intel CPU (an old i7-4770S + 1060 Ti 8GB). My next one, however, will definitely be an AMD Ryzen, probably 5600X. Will still stick with nVidia for GPU, likely a 4060 Ti 16GB.
I know they mention Steam Deck but I expect it’s heavily skewing the results. I wonder what percent of linux gamers are accounted for by the Steam Deck. I expect it’s rather large.
From the same Phoronix title page today, Steam Deck accounts for 40% of Linux Steam users. This means the other 60% are split roughly evenly between AMD and Intel.
I tend to still buy intel for new desktop builds - I'm not really bottle necked on the cpu for most of my computing needs, so I prefer the built in gpu for ease of maintenance and the better power efficiency (particularly idling, where intel still tends to do better).
But my Deck means I'm showing up as AMD for most of my steam usage over the last few months.
---
To avoid just being anecdata - I went and looked up some numbers (on google, they might still be wrong). As best I can tell, Steam claims about 1.9 million monthly active users on linux (may - 2023). Steam also claims that sales of the deck surpassed 3 million total units in 2023.
So 50% of steam decks can end up buried in drawers somewhere and the steam deck would still be 70% of the active linux userbase.
They mean that most people don't think of Steam Deck users as "Linux Gamers". SteamOS is essentially an appliance OS. It's what comes with the Steam Deck. People don't choose it, it's the default.
This feels like a double standard to me. If you exclude Steam Deck users because it comes with Linux by default, then you should also exclude all the people who bought laptops that come with Windows by default, no? They’re not Windows gamers, they’re just using what came with their computer.
I disagree. I don’t believe that distinction is relevant. My reasoning is that the large number of SteamOS users allows Valve to justify spending time and resources improving things like Mesa and amdgpu (edit: and of course Proton, which is huge), which benefits many Linux gamers that do not own Steam Deck. I use the SteamOS compositor (gamescope) on my desktop PC because it’s great—-and it probably wouldn’t exist without SteamOS.
The only reason I care about the number of Linux users is because more users means more development resources. Using that criteria, Steam Deck users very much “count”.
SteamOS is just Arch. You can use it for anything you could use Arch for. The fact that people elect to mainly use it for gaming doesn't really mean that's all it's designed for. I also have a gaming PC that runs Windows 11 and I never use it for anything other than gaming. Doesn't mean it couldn't be used for other things.
That's technically true, but oversimplified enough to be misleading. SteamOS boots from a read-only OS partition from which you can change nothing. You can only write to your "home folder", and you can only add new software using Flatpak, or Steam itself.
For a long time now I’ve picked AMD solely on the basis that they seem like better people than Intel or Nvidea. Sure it sometimes bites me in the ass when things only support the majority market share holders, but meh, don’t care about them anyway.
Just chiming in to say that after 15 years of building PCs for gaming on Linux, the 5800X3D is probably the best product I've ever purchased. The price to performance of this thing is completely absurd for the type of games I play.
Despite the major ground that AMD has gained in the CPU space in the past few years, I think it's still somewhat seen as the less mainstream of the two x86 CPUs, and I suspect that a userbase who has opted into an alternative OS is more likely to seek out alternative hardware as well, at least as far as is practical. Gamers in general have more freedom of choice in hardware compared to other segments of Linux users (fewer specific technical needs), so perhaps that's what's being expressed here.
I'll start to code my own wayland compositor once the steam client drops its legacy 32bits code which is hardcoded on x11 and GL (and they seem adamant at keeping it), and they have a wayland backend. I'll use Xwayland for the old games without a wayland backend... if any...
Cyberpunk 2077 runs fine (GOG version). I use latest Wine + esync patches from staging + dxvk + vkd3d-proton. You need dxvk for the dxgi library that vkd3d-proton depends on. esync is needed for better performance (it helps a lot).
I meant a vanilla lean build of wine 8.11 (core win64), with only vkd3d. Namely, only a small C compiler is required (not those horrible gcc and clang, or even worse, a c++ compiler).
Was that tested on cyberpunk 2077 and forbidden zero dawn?
I don't recommend using vkd3d. It's worse by design becasue it's trying to target crippled cases like macOS and trades performance for that by limiting Vulkan features usage to what works in MoltenVK and such.
vkd3d-proton on the other hand is using whatever available Vulkan features for best performance, so use that. I see no point in vkd3d at all on Linux.
It is not what I did ask for. I did ask for vanilla wine 8.11 (and a lean one aka only win64 core). The one which compiles with a small C compiler and a C compilable SDK (aka not cmake and co). If I understood well, it is actually 2 small C compilers, one ELF, one COFF.
I guess you never tried. No worries. I am a #noproton guy.
The wine 8.11 guys, more specifically the vkd3d guys should provide a compatibility level list which should include titles like cyberpunk 2077 (which has a vulkan backend in theory) and horizon zero dawn (if it has a dx12 backend).
Because if you can compile a lean software layer with small C compilers on elf/linux and you get _really_ working such major titles, that's going to change a lot of things (usually, they manage to put something like an ineffective anti-cheat or custom drm to lock the binaries on windows and please msft).
I'd say if you want to play such demanding games like CP2077, using above is really of no value. What kind of issues do you have with using a better compiler?
Using vkd3d for gaming is counter productive, so I see no point in trying it. The result will range from takes a very long time to reach playable state but with bad performance, to not working.
I had to do a bit to manage to make work their search with my noscript/basic (x)html browser: they had cyberpunk work very nicely (silver) with one of the first versions of the game and an antique wine version 5.22.
Nothing about the latest wine 8.11 and latest version of cyberpunk 2077 on steam.
Horizon Zero Dawn seems to have a dx12 or a vulkan backend, and the EPIC(gog) is gold on wine 8.0 (since it does not have dx<=11).
I know that on complex software, "working" on a previous version does not mean working on the last, but it stays a good signal (same issue with proton).
As far as I used appdb, all entries I browsed seemed to be for vanilla wine (as it should be).
Don't forget that one of the killer features of vanilla wine: its SDK it only 2 small C compilers, an ELF one, and a COFF one. Namely, tinycc (ELF/COFF) should be sufficient.
I don't see a small C compiler as a feature of any importance really in this case. Especially if gaming is concerned. All relevant use cases support all needed compilers.
And yet it takes a lazy, uncompetitive position against Nvidia, happily delivering overpriced and garbage new GPUs such as the 7600 RX with only 8GB RAM and a 128 bit memory bus.
Nvidia pretty much refuses to drop prices beyond a token tiny amount on any of its current generation GPUs, many of which are underwhelming and extremely overpriced and unappealing to consumers.
This gives AMD a chance to rip Nvidia to shreds in the GPU market but AMD chooses not to.
> And yet it takes a lazy, uncompetitive position against Nvidia, happily delivering overpriced and garbage new GPUs such as the 7600 RX with only 8GB RAM and a 128 bit memory bus.
The AMD RX 7600 competes with NVidia RTX 4060. The suggested MSRP of the RX 7600 is $270, the suggested MSRP of the RTX 4060 is $300. Both have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 128 bit memory bus.
I don't necessarily disagree that AMD's current GPU lineup is overpriced, but so is NVidia's. It's probably because NVidia's current GPU lineup is so vastly, hilarious overpriced that AMD is getting away with it right now.
AMD Threadeipper with a Radeon Pro. It just works. I'm running Steam on Void Linux musl using flatpak. X11 with XFCE. I only had to switch to pipewire to get sound working reliably across all programs like things that used Jack or Alsa. Windows games mostly work with Proton - save for a few ironically, the original Crisis being one (maybe the remastered edition works). I've yet to setup any gaming controllers though I was recently given a really nice steering wheel and pedals setup for free and BeamNG.drive is calling out to it.
It's a shame AMD doesn't really have working acceleration or GPU compute. I guess they're cheaper than NVidia for a reason, but it would be nice to have an alternative. Likewise, though, I guess all the video editing and VFX pipelines use Linux and NVidia for an equally good reason.
Their compute stack is still very lacking compared to CUDA, but it is improving.
The OSS 3D acceleration for Radeon cards is functional, implements Vulkan and OpenGL competently, and is fast. It’s built primarily by AMD & Valve engineers (and contractors).
Saying they do not have working acceleration is completely untrue.
I'm due an upgrade to my gaming rig core soon, currently running an old 3950X with a 4090.
AMDs crippling of new game releases by paying to have DLSSv3 support omitted (most recently Jedi Survivor, and looking like Starfield) has completely soured me on the company. I don't feel inclined to support that behaviour financially with my next rig.
> I'm due an upgrade to my gaming rig core soon, currently running an old 3950X with a 4090.
I have a 3900x and I'll probably just hold onto it forever. New CPUs are faster but are 25%+ more expensive core for core on top of motherboards being 2-3x more expensive than their pre-COVID pricing for less features (specifically I need a second CPU linked pcie slot for a network card, and no affordable AM5 motherboards seem to do 8x/8x lane splits like you could get with trivially affordable AM4 boards).
> AMDs crippling of new game releases by paying to have DLSSv3 support omitted (most recently Jedi Survivor, and looking like Starfield) has completely soured me on the company. I don't feel inclined to support that behaviour financially with my next rig.
This isn't a new trend sadly. It's insanely annoying to boot a game and see only AMD's subpar stuff baked in whereas when you boot a vendor agnostic or nvidia sponsored game you usually get nvidia's stuff alongside amd's. They did it with the RE4 remake recently too, very annoying to be stuck with FSR when the game advertised DLSS 3 support and had it in the pre-release demo.
Intel >> AMD >> Nvidia for GPU driver stability and Linux compatibility (source: used all three on different machines for everything including gaming). Of course, if you require some specific GPU feature or amount of RAM, that probably overrides most stability concerns.
At least for my RX6800, it's been smooth sailing in all kinds of gaming.
The only issue, which has started to disappear thanks to the Steam Deck, was certain Anti-Cheat software, which prevented competitive multiplayer in certain titles.
They're great if you have a recent (<10 years old, starting with the Radeon HD 7000 series, released in 2012.) video card which are supported by the AMDGPU drivers. Rock stable and good performance.
If you have a 10-15 GPU, which are supported by the older, but still open source, radeon drivers they're meh. They're stable but the performance is very poor. (they also lack vulkan support and I think you're limited to opengl 3.x but that's as much because of the hardware as the lack of driver support) (when I say the "performance is poor" I don't just mean that it's 10+ year old hardware and Moore's law has passed it by. I mean the drivers were poorly optimized, and the chipset itself spent a lot of time idle/doing redundant work, even when the graphics card was the bottleneck. The same card playing the same game in Windows would get higher framerates because the Windows drivers were better optimized.)
If you have a 15+year old GPU supported by the fglrx drivers they are (were) bad. Extremely flakey, crashed all the time. AFAIK AMD has long since abandoned them, and if you have a driver that requires the fglrx drivers, you're probably out of luck. For all intents and purposes these cards are expensive, power hungry VESA cards.
This depends on your use cases. If you running stable distribution like Ubuntu LTS and use Blender (or any professional 3D software) Nvidia proprietary driver is still make sense to use. Also Nvidia is obviously your choice if you want to run any machine learning software.
But if you want to run some bleeding edge distribution and play games on Linux then AMD open source driver will work great for you.
I've only ever had one issue related to power delivery while running VR a few years ago. Would not provide enough juice to the GPU and would cause artefacts in the rendering. Other than that though I've had no major issues running relatively modern games over the last 2-3 years with my 5700xt.
Are we really doing this "well technically Android is Linux lololololol" nonsense in a thread that's very obviously referring to Linux on the Desktop? Next to nobody refers to Android as "Linux" in a general sense of the word, much like how next to nobody, outside of specific technical contexts, refers to birds as dinosaurs: while technically birds may be the sole remaining member of the dinosaur family, we call them "birds" day-to-day.
It's not a technicality. Android uses the Linux kernel like any other Linux distribution. Games that target Android depend on the Android runtime and framework and games that target Steam on Linux depend on the Steam Linux runtime. Linux games can also target an arbitrary set of dependencies, but compatibility may not be very good.
Just because Android has a stronger brand than Linux and doesn't feel the need to advertise to people that it uses the Linux kernel, that that doesn't make Android any less of a Linux distribution. Most consumers don't care about the kernel the operating system they have uses. Saying that nobody calls Android "Linux" is irrelevant.
iOS is macOS too according to this definition since they share the same kernel and a bunch of other stuff (probably more than Android & GNU/Linux at this point)?
The survey comes direct from Valve's Steam Survey. Potential bias aside the Steamdeck alone is estimated at 40%. Arch and Ubuntu ~8% each.
Is there any other trustworthy metric of all "Linux Gamers" out there? I'm curious how much using the Steam Client effects or tilts results towards systems that easily run Steam. Self selection at it's finest. My logic side knows that with only a 1.5% rounding error to the total "PC" gaming isn't market significant. I should be happy with the trend.
I own a Steamdeck. But it's like how my friends use their Nintendo systems. As an extension of my PC windows I was already personal project time with SteamOS and SteamLink. Point is, I wouldn't consider myself in the 1.5% even though I game wherever.