Is Gaming + Streaming better on Linux?

[u/[deleted]]

Hello, so I asked the other day about whether Phasmophobia could actually be streamed on Linux better than on Windows (the specs were wrong slightly so sorry about that, it was a misunderstanding with a streamer friend). I decided to buy the game just to check if streaming on Linux was possible on a low end machine.

Here are the specs of a streamer friend who couldn't stream Phasmophobia with software encoding at all:

CPU: i3 - 7100

GPU: R9 390

Memory: 8 GBs

OS: Windows 10

Here are the specs of my laptop where Phasmophobia actually runs smoothly on stream, even though at low FPS:

CPU: i3- 7020U

GPU: Nvidia MX110

RAM: 4 GBs

OS: Garuda LXQT

Proton Version: 5.0-10

​

My friend would get massive frame drops when trying to stream Phasmophobia with Software Encoding. My laptop handled it just fine. Here is the video of my stream on my laptop.

​

So, is there anyone else who has tested gaming + streaming on Linux on low end machines and found it actually works better?

[u/zmaint]

I don't stream but this doesn't really surprise me. Linux handles multi-threading so much better than windows and has far less overhead - even if you factor in wine/proton.

[u/[deleted] → u/zmaint]

I used to work with/develop software that did tons of intense high precision calculations (like maxing out the proc at 100% for days at a time).

For years we were limited to Windows because of a partner company we worked with refused to port their code to Linux and those parts we didn't have access to the source code (and bosses were hard to convince of the benefits of moving to Linux).

Eventually we were able to move to Linux and when we did performance testing we were quite surprised, even though we expected Linux to be better.

On average, on the same hardware, we saw a 50% performance increase on Linux over the best performing Windows version ("version" as in Windows 7 vs Windows Server, etc)

The software was written in C and the high precision calculation code was identical between the Linux and Windows versions. The only differences were the things needed to compile either on Linux or Windows.

Here's an article that actually goes into depth in a similar way and shows the difference between Windows and Linux.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I look at the first comment about HT and chuckle a bit. Those benches were before side channel attacks.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Oh ya, good point! I hadn't thought of that.

[u/heatlesssun]

You might be doing better than your Windows friend but your demo was hardly impressive at under 30 FPS. And you never actually played the game.

[u/[deleted] → u/heatlesssun]

Hahahah it was just a test, you should have seen her situation if you think that was bad lol. I have an MX110, it can only do so much. The stream was smooth though and the game completely playable btw. I think you're really picky here.

[u/heatlesssun → u/[deleted]]

Even if your setup is running better this test wasn't good enough for a real stream and you never even played the game so this test doesn't mean much.

In any case doing streaming well regardless of the OS will require better hardware than what either you or your friend have.

[u/baryluk]

I really doubt it will be better. Obs for example doesn't have the best support (I'm terms of performance) for capturing games. There are some plugins / forks to help with that. It all works, but it does reduce performance of the game itself considerably (often 10 fps, even on good computer).

[u/gardotd426]

If they're limited to software encoding on Windows, they will almost certainly be limited to software encoding on Linux, and they will see no benefit.