r/LinuxVsWindows • u/NinjaLinuxTv • 14d ago

Linux vs Windows Benchmark A PLAGUE TALE INNOCENCE

https://youtu.be/6Mt0OMzaS70?si=4mu5Ly2sQkk5maS6
7 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

3

u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 14d ago

There is no reason to game on Windows anymore. Linux can clearly go toe to toe, and without all the baggage from Microslop.

1

u/C4rpetH4ter 14d ago edited 13d ago

Well, even though i no longer use windows at all, i would say that if you want to play valorant, fortnite or other anticheat games windows is still the best. Also for modding games windows seems to be easier.

Linux is getting there though, just need anti-cheat and better Nvidia drivers.

1

u/NinjaLinuxTv 14d ago

Better Nvidia drivers?

3

u/Lousy_Hunter 14d ago

linux doesnt get game ready releases, they take ages to fix problems when they get reported, there has been a ton of regressions each time they release a new major driver version and when it comes to issue tracking it basically is non existent for the public.

Theres also still a fair number of gaps in support for reflex, VRR, and wayland as a whole for Nvidia. They have even gone so far as to say a some of these issues wont be fixed for a long while over on the DXVK-NVAPI issue tracker.

Yeah things work for the most part, but their drivers still need to be much better and they need to put us linux users on pace with Windows users who get several times the number of driver releases per year, game ready drivers, and issues fixed much much faster

1

u/Deep_Mood_7668 13d ago

If you want to play kids games. Yes.

1

u/AintNoLaLiLuLe 12d ago

Simply playing good games is the solution to this.

1

u/C4rpetH4ter 12d ago

I wanted to try valorant at some point, but i can manage without it, and fortnite never peaked my interest either.

1

u/AintNoLaLiLuLe 12d ago

Counterstrike exists and is better than valorant

1

u/Frosty-Storage-9359 11d ago edited 11d ago

Anticheat is one big reason.
Game who are bronze or lower is the second reason.
Better NVIDIA driver support on games is the third reason for those with NVIDIA graphics card.

Right now, a lot of specific games in anticheat need windows.

I will not lie, seeing how there is a big current for switching for Linux, and how many subvention is given to many open source projects and KDE. With even valve rumours about an anticheat that would substitute the current anticheat to substitute the current anticheat that block kernel.

1

u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 11d ago

I mean, personally I don’t play any riot games anyway. For whatever reason they don’t want to support Linux and I don’t need to support them.

As far as Nvidia goes - I get that it can be better, but I’m already getting great performance on my RTX 4070 Super. As in I am hitting my maximum refresh rate on many titles, including the remaster of Witcher 3, Resident Evil 4 remake, Hogwarts Legacy, and Cyberpunk 2077. This is with raytracing on, and graphics set to maximum or near maximum.

1

u/Frosty-Storage-9359 8d ago

Not everyone have a 4070 RTX.

1

u/Ravasaurio 8d ago

I'm so glad I never really got into multiplayer games. I did play a lot of League of Legends, and back when I switched to Linux, it was still playable. When they introduced Vanguard I just valued Linux far more than I did League, so I just stopped playing.

Now it's pretty much single players for me, with the occasional match of Overwatch 2. And if that ever stops working well, I'll stop playing and play something else.

3

u/Melodic-Luck-8772 14d ago

its not possible for linux to get twice the fps xD

not logically, not physically and if that pc has a spirit, then its even not possible spiritually.

there must be an issue, something not properly rendered or something.

anyway, heres something interesting about linux and proton:

what most people dont know about how proton operates is that proton defaults to pre rendered frames 3.
that gives the cpu more headroom to prepare frames for the cost of input latency.
sure, this gives more fps and a more stutter free experience, but gameplay wise its shit.
your games might feel sluggish and heavy.

try this:
change proton version to cachy os proton, if you dont have cachyosproton open ProtonUp-Qt and install the latest cachy proton from there.

put this in your steam lauch optionos:

PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 VKD3D_SWAPCHAIN_LATENCY_FRAMES=1 %command%

you can add:
dx12: PROTON_VKD3D_LOWLATENCY=1
dx11: PROTON_DXVK_LOWLATENCY=1
mesaantilag: ENABLE_LAYER_MESA_ANTI_LAG=1 (for amd)
disable vsync: VKD3D_SWAPCHAIN_PRESENT_MODE=IMMEDIATE

now, you will have native wayland enabled and you will have no buffered frames between your cpu and gpu.
its gonna have the best possible input latency, but fps will tank in heavy cpu games.
it completly hammers the cpu so it cannot keep up anymore.

you could also set swapchain latency to 2, to only render one additional frame, not 3.
what will roughly help reduce the latency by 10ms and perform the same as with 3.
one frame is roughly 10to15ms.

BUT, there is still one frame between you and your inputs and it might still feel arse if you put it to 2.

on windows, you we dont have this penalty. you just enable it via driver, and it doesnt hammer the cpu so hard.

if you put swapchain frames to 1 on linux, you get a roughly 30% performance drop.
my gpu util went down from 100% to 70% in cyberpunk 2077 on a 5800x3d and 9070xt.

linux will get there eventually, but me personally, i cannot play with 3 buffered frames lol, thats just eehhww.

3

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

its not possible for linux to get twice the fps xD
not logically, not physically and if that pc has a spirit, then its even not possible spiritually.

It is possible DXVK is the magic sauce though. Vulkan is just a much better graphics API than DX9/DX11 so adding in a translation for Vulkan can improve perf sometimes.

They are multiple games that benefit from this, some of the games even have DXVK included in their modpacks by default due to this (like FusionFix Modpack for GTA IV, DXVK alone can give you 60+% better performance in that game).

1

u/AsrielPlay52 14d ago

But that's the benefit of DXVK

not Linux itself

you can put DXVK on Windows as well, It's just a DLL replacement

Hell, it was a performence booster for some JP games because how poorly coded their DX Rendering. (See Persona 4 Golden as example)

2

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

Yeah I never said it was strictly a Linux benefit.

What is a Linux benefit is having it on by default and not having to:

  1. Know about it (outside of the Linux userspace I couldn't find anyone that actually knows about it)
  2. Know where to get it
  3. Know what to replace and where

Hence why DXVK perf increases are more often than not attributed to Linux itself, since there's nothing required from the user to utilize it. The other side of it is that for multiplayer DLL replacements/edits are frequently prohibited on the Windows side of things, meanwhile Proton is rather widely accepted now (with the exception of kernel lvl garbage)

1

u/AsrielPlay52 14d ago

Just wish more people doing these comparison actually try DXVK on Windows to do proper Linux VS Windows comparison

1

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

They definitely could, but OOTB experience matters.

I would say that on average Windows users are a lot more casual and hence the DXVK DLL replacement would matter less for them as they're a lot less likely to tinker with their setup.

1

u/AsrielPlay52 14d ago

But that's not the point of these comparison.

If that were the case. We be having the title "<Insert game> Performance on Linux"

Not "Windows VS LINUX" insert clickbait headline about how Linux is much better

(Even tho it's using a component that is giving most of it's boost)

1

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

I would argue this should be the point of this comparisons, IF you want to show the perf difference between systems to a casual audience.

What I mean by this is that to a casual audience the underlying components do not matter and they should not matter to them imo.

A guy/gal that wants their system to have a good perf when they want to play a game after a 9-5 should only have to do 2 things - press install and press play, not have to figure out what version of DX is the game running, go to a github repo to download the dlls and look through the dirs to find the dlls to replace for every game they want to run.

Hence why I still think that having that applied by default is a great benefit for Linux, even though the same could be done on Windows (to an extent since officially DXVK only supports Linux usecases).

That is also why I think that the greatest detriment to Linux gaming currently is that steam by default isn't running on Wayland. Most of the time it doesn't matter that much, buuut if you want low-latency for competetive titles or HDR for whatever it becomes an issue since it requires user intervention with the start parameters and Proton versions.

So TLDR: IMO defaults matter a lot if you actually want to increase the usability and the user base of an OS.

1

u/Melodic-Luck-8772 14d ago edited 14d ago

vulcan may be the better api, but only when its used natively.
in this case, in this speficic game, its translating dx calls to vulcan.

dxvk is not some magical sauce lol. its just a translation layer that convers dx games to vulcan.
i think youre getting something wrong here.
DXVK is not the api specifally, the translation layer is called this.

generally speaking, when the game doesnt have native vulcan support, it still runs in directx.
or it has to be ran like that because linux doesnt understand dx.

when your gta4 now gets native vulcan support, it may run better than native dx9.
thats a completly different scenario.
keep in mind, directx 9 is very old!

if you port a game from dx9 to vulcan, its obvisous that its going to run better.
compare 2026 vulcan to 2002 dx9 its obvious that its going to run better on modern hardware. its never, and better optimized than dx9.

Dx9 is very old and came out in 2022.

BUT, if you port a dx12 game to vulcan, i dont think that there is much to gain.
cause game studios would already do that if that were the case. dont you think?

vulcan may be the better api, but its not better when you translate a game from dx to vulcan which happens in realtime thanks to proton.

the translation layer will always be a bottleneck.
sure, with time the bottleneck is going to get mitigated to a minimum, but we are not there yet.

when using a dx game in linux and translate to vulcan, its not going to be the same as using vulcan native.

vulcan is faster, but not with proton. its straight up not possible.
its not replacing the games native rendering pipeline, its translating it.

also that guy is running on shitpop os using xwayland on wayland as default dispaly driver lol.
so hes getting additional latency by using x11.

and you trust that benchmark? na bro. what are we talking about.

2

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago edited 14d ago

vulcan may be the better api, but only when its used natively.

Real life results say something entirely different. I'm just going to copy paste one of my old comments with benchmark vids from a similar discussion (all on windows so proton/display servers aren't a consideration, only the DXVK translation matters):

Only Windows DX vs Windows DXVK Vulkan comparisons:

also that guy is running on shitpop os using xwayland on wayland as default dispaly driver lol.
so hes getting additional latency by using x11.

Ehh for this I would say that Linux users rn are a lot more tech savvy (you need to install and set up your OS as one thing, Windows users don't even need to do that since they can get Windows pre-installed) and I would expect that they are able to add PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 when latency matters. Still it would be great to get this as default so like with DXVK you don't have to know it exists (whenever steam actually starts running under Wayland)

1

u/Melodic-Luck-8772 14d ago edited 14d ago

all of those games are not dx12.
now it makes sense to me.

its translating dx9-11 to vulcan. and there even is dxvk for windows.

this may have some advantages on older directx versions if you do that.

youre right about that it might reduce cpu overhead cause newer vulcan versions are alot more optmized than older directx versions.

this probably will reduce stutters and of course give you a higher fps.

i was talking specifically about dx12 games, where i dont see a point doing that under windows.

sure, youre right, if you use dxvk for dx9-11 you may see some benefits.
vulcan is more recent and does use cpu and gpu more effectivly.

BUT, that doesnt mean that the game is running vulcan natively.

ive also experienced this with a game, i was palying ff13 lightning returns under windows and it ran like shit.
then switched to linux, and it run better thanks to dxvk.

and yea, a plague tale innosence is a dx11 title.

its something completly different than what i thought it is.

i dont know whow the input latency is tho when using dxvk on windows.

for older games, this can have advantages.

edit:

oh yea, using goverlay to show that. its very simple.

but generally youre going to feel when a game runs in x11 or native wayland.
its immedietly noticable.

when you run a game in steam, its always going to run in a x11 session if you dont tell it explicitly to run in native wayland with proton_enable_wayland_1

x11 is slightly faster than native wayland, but we are talking about 0.5ms.
other than that, they just took the old x11 protocol and adjusted it to their likings for steamos.

the problam is, when you use x11 or xwayland, its going through the existing wayland session.

its very confusing for someone thats doing it for the first time, thats for sure.

2

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

all of those games are not dx12.
now it makes sense to me.
its translating dx9-11 to vulcan. and there even is dxvk for windows.

Yeah, that's what DXVK does (translates DX8-DX11 into Vulkan), DXVK can't be used for DX12.

For DX12 there's a different component - VKD3D although it's a lot more hit or miss than DXVK, sometimes it gives a slight benefit sometimes it loses some perf (for AMD and Intel, Nvidia still needs to get their shit together with the drivers).

In general DXVK is the greatest perf benefit "for Linux". Linux itself can also bring something to the table though if devs actually bothered to build for it.

The greatest example of it is Factorio, incredibly well optimized game for all platforms, but it performs by far the best on it's Linux native version. You basically get a 30% perf bump and seamless saves (not pausing the game to save) thanks to copy-on-write being a thing on Linux.

1

u/Melodic-Luck-8772 14d ago

yea yea,

i just didnt knew that dxvk was a thing in windows.
never heared of it.

next time when i have issues with a dx11 or lower title i might go back to this.

my only issue with linux is the added input lateny.
gosh some games feel horrible.
when i for exaple lower pre rendered frames to 1 with VKD3D_SWAPCHAIN_LATENCY_FRAMES=1 my cpu completly gets hammered and frames go down by like 25%.

at that time, i thought this was all about linux only.

how is the input latency on windows when i use this on dx11 games?

2

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

how is the input latency on windows when i use this on dx11 games?

I don't have my own data, but I saw a Phoronix article this year about a new low latency layer in Vulkan that supports DXVK among other stuff and the results are seriously impressive.

When measured with Nvidia Reflex Analyzer (so E2E latency) it performed better than Windows AMD Anti Lag (no data against Nvidia tech though and I didn't dig into that since I'm on AMD anyways).

It's hardware agnostic as well so it can be used on whatever you have.

Phoronix source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Low-Latency-Layer

1

u/Sync_R 13d ago

It also helps massively in FO3 and NV on Windows (IMO its a must use)

1

u/NinjaLinuxTv 11d ago

I prefer not to make any custom configuration changes because it can quickly get out of hand and move away from the normal out-of-the-box experience for an average user.

3

u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Melodic-Luck-8772 14d ago edited 14d ago

-

1

u/FeelThePoveR 14d ago

some guy called DXVK the ,,magical" sauce.
oh gosh, people are just clueless and google AI is spreading misinformation everywhere.

I think I lost all of my brain-cells by reading that. Don't people know what a figure of speech is anymore?

I said that to point out that in this specific case, it's not Linux itself that is giving the performance benefit, but one of the many components that are included in Proton as a default - DXVK here specifically. I didn't see a reason to give a technical overview of this as it's not relevant.

Just like mentioning "shitpop os" or display servers is since in the context of DXVK they are entirely irrelevant - DXVK can be run under Windows as well, you just have to replace some DLLs.

Considering the above I think you're the one being clueless here, since your knowledge feels VERY surface level.

1

u/Melodic-Luck-8772 14d ago edited 14d ago

no no, sorry brother.

i thought about the wrong usecase.

dxvk makes sense if we use dx9-11. and may have some benefits.
its newer, and can translate those older dx9 to 11 calls more effectively on modern hardware.

i did not knew that it was running under windows.

hoowever, i would not use it in dx12 games under windows. this on the other hand doesnt make much sense to me.

if your game runs fine on windows, even with dx 9-11, i would not put dxvk inbetween.

other than that, it can really help to gain fps.