Software Engineer, Linux Enthusiast, OpenRGB Developer, and Gamer
Lemmy.today Profile: https://lemmy.today/u/CalcProgrammer1
Until any competing store releases a Linux client, I can’t really argue against Steam. They are a gatekeeper and almost a monopoly, but they’re also the most benevolent and pro-consumer gatekeeper that we have in the PC gaming distribution space. As long as all the competition continue to be Windows-only and, in some cases, actively work against Linux users, I don’t want Valve’s digital fiefdom to fall.
I’ve been experimenting with both of these and recently wrote up a guide for installing FEX on postmarketOS (as I am testing it on my phone and tablet) but the steps should work for Pi as well.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Steam
I also just made a video tutorial/demo on YouTube. I ran Half Life 2 and Tomb Raider (2013). I’m not sure how capable the Pi 4 GPU is in comparison to the Adreno GPUs I tested.
Box86/64 and FEX can both run Steam on ARM. Lighter games should be playable on RPi4 and 5.
Except the one platform that actually matters, Linux. My girlfriend got me into this game and it’s the only game I have to keep a Windows installation around for. It doesn’t run on the Steam Deck, so it’s the only multiplayer game I play where I would even contemplate having to play it on Switch. I hate Epic Games.
Too bad they added shitty anticheat that broke GTA Online. I can’t trust Rockstar anymore and I won’t be buying these. RDR on PC was something I really wanted, but not after Rockstar betrayed us by basically revoking our access to GTA Online after almost a decade.
I’ve been pretty happy overall with my Arc A770. For the price, it performs well, and driver issues are mostly a thing of the past. My only complaint is that the anv Mesa driver doesn’t implement VK_NV_device_generated_commands which appears to be a requirement for some D3D12 games on Linux (Starfield being the one I had issues with). Luckily, it looks like there is a new non-NVIDIA specific extension to solve that and an open MR in the Mesa GitLab to add it to anv.
This was my early high school days. My friend and I would play Mario 64 DS wirelessly across the hall because we were in different classes but close enough for a WiFi connection. Great times. Also, the Metroid demo included with the console was a fun multiplayer experience.
I got ab RG35XX Plus when it came out. Very nice little Game Boy style handheld. I played a bunch of GBA, GB, and Genesis games on it but it’s capable of a lot more.
The only instance I can see this is if a game requires a new Vulkan extension, which wouldn’t need a new kernel but would need a new Mesa version to provide that extension. For the most part, games use established and standardized APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D) to utilize the GPU and as long as the driver implements the APIs used by the game, the driver doesn’t need to continuously update in order to support game updates. On Linux, the driver doesn’t handle Direct3D anyways and an intermediate layer (DXVK or VKD3D) is used to translate Direct3D API calls into the Vulkan API. Vulkan does support extensions which are added every so often to provide new interfaces and the userspace portion of the driver (which is responsible for compiling/translating Vulkan API calls into raw GPU instructions) needs to be updated to support these, but also sometimes these extensions are optional and games can use less optimized code paths to work around missing extensions.
The kernel driver is a rather small piece of the overall puzzle though, itps just the pipe that GPU commands are passed through. The bulk of the GPU driver code (and the majority of its impact on performance) is in the userspace components like the shader compiler and the OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. These are closed source.
The exception to this rule is that the kernel driver is responsible for power management and controls the GPU clocks, but as part of opening up the kernel driver NVIDIA made reclocking available for the fully open driver (nouveau/nvk) to use as well which means the performance differences between the two driver stacks are now down to optimizations.
Yeah, NVIDIA will do that to you. That still sounds too low though, are you using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers? I’m not sure Fedora ships NVK yet as it is rather new, I think became mostly usable around Mesa 24.0 earlier this year.
I got a Radeon 7800XT in March and have had no significant issues with it on Arch Linux. The issues I have had were from running the bleeding-edge mesa-tkg-git drivers which are the pre-release development builds, and sometimes things break there (I had a weird issue where red and green got swapped in X11 apps). You have to go out of your way to run those drivers though, stick with the released version in your distro’s repository and you’ll be fine. I can play most games above 100Hz at decent resolution and quality. I have a 4K 144Hz monitor with Freesync but for more demanding games usually need to turn down settings a bit or use resolution upscaling like FSR. I upgraded from an Intel Arc A770 and it was a big performance increase.
AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.
What are you running it on? I haven’t touched Apex in a while but last time I tried on Linux it was playable (this was probably on my Intel Arc A770). I’ve played BeamNG on my Steam Deck (AMD GPU) and it runs decently too.
Did you wait at all? Slow performance when you first open a game is sort of normal because of shader compilation. It’s a side effect of the translation layer used to run Direct3D games on Vulkan. Once shaders are all compiled the slowdown should go away.
The key thing to note about NVIDIA “open sourcing their driver” is that they only open sourced the kernel portion. I see no intention of opening the userspace portion. GPU drivers have multiple parts. The kernel driver is the low level interface that passes data to and from the hardware while the userspace is what actually handles converting OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, CUDA, etc. calls into GPU commands and that part is where most of the performance impact happens. NVIDIA is not open sourcing the userspace.
That’s why NVK/Nouveau are so important, because it is a fully open stack. It is also part of the Mesa project which encompasses all the open GPU drivers on Linux which makes it more integrated with the Linux graphics stack.
On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.
On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that’s my most played game.
And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!
AMD. Not even a question, really. AMD has by far the best drivers. Intel is in a reasonable second place in that they at least have open source drivers and those drivers work well, but due to their newness in the discrete GPU space I still occasionally see issues on my A770. It is solidly usable for the most part though. NVIDIA? Dead freakin last. Their proprietary driver is a mess to install and only recently is able to render anything without screen tearing and unplayable flicker. The situation is improving though thanks to NVK, an awesome third-party, reverse engineered, open source driver that is seeing rapid improvement. I can play Overwatch at 165fps on my RTX3070 laptop finally, but only at lowest settings and 50% resolution scaling (it can do the same at ultra on Windows at 100%). I am very confident we’ll see NVK improve performance though.
I don’t disagree, but today the blame lies with CrowdStrike, not Windows. As much as I hate defending Windows.
If Bungie is behind it I have zero interest without even knowing what it is. Destiny 2 was an OK game, but its god awful anticheat bans Linux users. That is a sure-fire way to make me pretend your game doesn’t exist. Client side anticheat is a plague. Do it properly on the server side.