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Gaming on Linux 2021 | A GNU Era of Gaming
- Thread starter Deleted member 1849
- Start date
It is good with the Nvidia closed source nonsense I believe. Also I think it has a good and simple to install version of Lutris in it's app store.
Oh. Ha. I switched to amd primarily to use a good open source driver. I just like the idea but its a little easier to deal with as well.
Until your system freezes on you after a few minutes of play in various games because AMD's drivers are buggy garbage. And you then have to upgrade mesa (and llvm if you're really dedicated) and set environment variables to toggle features since some of them make the driver more unstable. And then maybe you can fix at least some of the crashes. But probably not all of them.
That's my experience as a Vega56 owner. And Navi is by all accounts in a worse state. I like the idea of open source drivers. I appreciate AMD's support of not just games, but of Linux as a desktop. But the situation is fucked.
That's my experience as a Vega56 owner. And Navi is by all accounts in a worse state. I like the idea of open source drivers. I appreciate AMD's support of not just games, but of Linux as a desktop. But the situation is fucked.
I have a Vega 64 on Ubuntu and haven't seen this issue at all. Maybe not playing as intense of games (lately MTGA, Temtem, FFXIV, various other native linux games), but I don't see crashes once I get the games setup properly. I'm sure there are issues, but the drivers have been pretty good to me in the last year.
This seems to be such a YMMV it's not even funny. It speaks of the problem of fragmentation in Linux, but speaking as though it's the way things just are for everyone seems more than slightly out of line.
Don't play Deux Ex Mankind Divided then.
[drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* ring gfx timeout, signaled seq=5737198, emitted seq=5737200
[drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* Process information: process DeusExMD pid 28927 thread DeusExMD:cs0 pid 28930
And that's the desktop dead. sysrq to reboot. Assassin's Creed Odyssey has crashed on me as well, though not nearly as often. The shitty thing is that I just don't trust this card. Sure, most games will probably be fine. But I can't know that, and I feel like I have to get my affairs in order before starting a 3D game, making sure I don't have any unsaved documents open, letting potential downloads finish, and clean up among my browser tabs so that I won't have to reload two dozen of them if the system does end up crashing.
Also, I'm not sure even your experience can be all that positive if you have to "get the games setup properly" before they stop being a danger to your system.
It's true. It's not a problem for everyone. But if anything that makes it worse. You have a lot of bug reports where developers just don't know what's wrong, because one thing will work for some and crash for others. I have no sense of when I can expect my problems to be solved. As far as I know, they might never be.
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I should be clear here...getting my games setup properly doesn't indicate they are 'a danger to my system'. It simply means installing them. I have never had a game crash or lock up my linux desktop. I've only been playing games seriously on linux for about a year though.
Again, I'm sure there are a plethora of games that have issues with AMD GPU's, but I haven't had any of those issues. I also bet there are a pile of games that have problems on the nvidia close source drivers as well. Gaming on Linux has never been all that easy (proton/wine and lutris are amazing though!).
Ubuntu 19.10. It was crashing out of the box at release. I then switched to oibaf ppa for up to date mesa, with no change. I've tried at least once a week for months now.
To be honest, another distro might "solve" this. I know form personal experience Ubuntu does weird shit with their packages that I've never been able to nail down why it is this way, but they can cause issues with some setups. It's gotten better since last time I dealt with that mess, but it's still not what I would call good or even okay. The same exact driver release and libraries on another distro works fine but somehow Ubuntu's is broken as hell, and this was on nVidia at the time.
Maybe try Manjaro? I know Ubuntu is the "target" for Steam and Proton at the moment, but I cannot trust any *buntu or derivative anymore.
I've toyed with other distros over the years, and I've always come back to Ubuntu as the sane default that does what it should with minimal fuss. I don't want to make operating my operating system into a hobby. So Manjaro is right out. And when reading bug reports, plenty of people on other distros suffer from shader-related hangs as well, which is what gfx ring errors are.
Plus, I started on Debian and switched to Ubuntu when it launched. I've committed!
To be frank, Manjaro is the minimal fuss version of Arch. I mean that wholeheartedly. It has the benefits of being a rolling distro of Arch but adds a lot to not have to practically be a sysadmin like most people expect of Arch.
It runs live until you install, it uses a GUI install, it pretty much only requires cli for the most edge of cases. After a long time suggesting it for others as a *buntu alternative I actually put it on my work laptop to get the benefits of it being less hands-on. I won't be changing my home pc to it for various reasons but I will always recommend it for cases like this.
To be fair arch is only "a hobby" when you first install it. Have not really had any problems with it. Its "hardcore" status is overblown and hyperbole.
Don't see any reason manjaro would have any fuss.
Don't see any reason manjaro would have any fuss.
Manjaro is very approachable in my opinion. You even have GUI for a lot of stuff you would need command line for on Ubuntu. The support for snaps, flatpaks, and aur in the package manager, is also very usefull. I've only used it for a couple of weeks on my laptop, but so far it has been a very pleasant experience.
AMD's driver issues are well documented and can strike anyone on any distro. And that's for their older cards; Navi has been a total disaster everywhere.
I'm not going to rule out switching to Manjaro might fix up some of my personal issues (although, as I mentioned, plenty of people on non-Ubuntu distros such as Manjaro are also discussing their freezes, so this is by no means an Ubuntu-specific problem), but even if true that doesn't let AMD off the hook for their failure to deliver support for their latest cards and stability in general. That is their job, and they've been botching it.
I'd love to be able to recommend AMD to everyone. I love that they have an open source driver, that the desktop experience is more plug-and-play, that they support things like Wayland. I love that I don't have to remember to edit GRUB to even boot my system (goddammit Nvidia). But when it comes to actually playing games, AMD has far more issues than Nvidia, and they're of the scary desktop-sinking variety. That is not a controversial statement.
Manjaro is still on my list of distros to dabble with at some point in the future, and it has been for a while. Maybe next time I buy an SSD; I've been thinking about replacing an ancient 60GB SSD that seems to be dying, so that might be a good time.
I'm not going to rule out switching to Manjaro might fix up some of my personal issues (although, as I mentioned, plenty of people on non-Ubuntu distros such as Manjaro are also discussing their freezes, so this is by no means an Ubuntu-specific problem), but even if true that doesn't let AMD off the hook for their failure to deliver support for their latest cards and stability in general. That is their job, and they've been botching it.
I'd love to be able to recommend AMD to everyone. I love that they have an open source driver, that the desktop experience is more plug-and-play, that they support things like Wayland. I love that I don't have to remember to edit GRUB to even boot my system (goddammit Nvidia). But when it comes to actually playing games, AMD has far more issues than Nvidia, and they're of the scary desktop-sinking variety. That is not a controversial statement.
Manjaro is still on my list of distros to dabble with at some point in the future, and it has been for a while. Maybe next time I buy an SSD; I've been thinking about replacing an ancient 60GB SSD that seems to be dying, so that might be a good time.
Dunno, seems that this update is more about consolidation of all the previous updates and taking advantage of the improvements Wine did (due to Proton). I dont expect to see a big increase of working games in this update.
Microsoft back doing the exact same behaviour that should get them convicted once again of monopoly abuse, and clearly paying armies of astroturfers once more to defend it:
www.reddit.com
Reddit - Dive into anything
www.reddit.com
∆∆∆ Ha. Yeah ms can't help themselve. And so it will always be.
...
Ive been on kubuntu in the living room for about a year now. It's treated me well but I finally have an ssd coming in the mail and I wanted to take a few more distros for a spin as long as I have my stuff backed up and planning a fresh install.
This weekend I tried:
Steamos. It's been a minute. U sed Brewmaster for years. Now it appears to be falling apart with more obnoxious glitches. No go.
Pop. Uh oh. I think may that I only know my way around ubuntu....
Solus: Yep. Fuck. Even slightly different than ubuntu yet I'm getting tripped up enough that I didn't want to spend much time on it. Plus after starting a game from bpm, quitting game goes back to your desktop with bpm minimized. Annoying. Overlay doesn't seem to work, either. My first time using budgie, tho. I like it alot...
Ubuntu budgie. Okay I like this. I'd like to stop here. But budgie seems to be reponsible for the bpm going minimized!! Arrgh!!! I'll try to find a fix, i guess. Anyone know? Also, is it still reccomended to add the padoka pps for best performance?
It was fun to sit around and alternate trying new distros and redecorating our appartment. :> I need to settle on a distro for a minute so I can actually enjoy playing games on my new ssd when it comes. Or I guess I could enjoy it by indecisively installing one distro after another more quickly than ever.
...
Ive been on kubuntu in the living room for about a year now. It's treated me well but I finally have an ssd coming in the mail and I wanted to take a few more distros for a spin as long as I have my stuff backed up and planning a fresh install.
This weekend I tried:
Steamos. It's been a minute. U sed Brewmaster for years. Now it appears to be falling apart with more obnoxious glitches. No go.
Pop. Uh oh. I think may that I only know my way around ubuntu....
Solus: Yep. Fuck. Even slightly different than ubuntu yet I'm getting tripped up enough that I didn't want to spend much time on it. Plus after starting a game from bpm, quitting game goes back to your desktop with bpm minimized. Annoying. Overlay doesn't seem to work, either. My first time using budgie, tho. I like it alot...
Ubuntu budgie. Okay I like this. I'd like to stop here. But budgie seems to be reponsible for the bpm going minimized!! Arrgh!!! I'll try to find a fix, i guess. Anyone know? Also, is it still reccomended to add the padoka pps for best performance?
It was fun to sit around and alternate trying new distros and redecorating our appartment. :> I need to settle on a distro for a minute so I can actually enjoy playing games on my new ssd when it comes. Or I guess I could enjoy it by indecisively installing one distro after another more quickly than ever.
Trying to install SteamOS on the Deskmini A300 I'm building for my parents just to try it out before wiping it and installing Windows for them, and the install locked up midway through. Trying again but if it doesn't work the second time I'll probably just try out Ubuntu instead.
Yeah, fuck it. It spit out a bunch of errors at me and refused to continue installation. What a shame, this is has really sucked a lot of wind out of my sails.
Trying out Ubuntu instead.
Trying out Ubuntu instead.
Ubuntu ISO is right over 2GB and the only spare I drive I have is exactly that, so I had to try to run a "mini" ISO and had no luck with it, so fuck it, just doing Windows.
Wait, you don't have a USB stick with more than 2gb anywhere lying around?!
Lol yeah i was gonna say.
Anyway, as up a few posts, steamos brewmaster seems trashed now. Shitty. It used to work great.
...
I loaded up straight Ubuntu last night. I havent tried it since they switched to gnome. I i John st founda phoronix article from the release of 19.10 about how the wayland session performs as well as the x session for games Thats cool. Before, wayland was always slower.
I even work for a hosting company but keep a 16GB drive on my keychain: 2GB FAT32 partition with an Arch installer that is also there for using the crappy work printer and the rest is exFAT for portable storage between systems.
Got lenovo x1 carbon (gen3) pretty cheap, installed arch for it and tested wow classic. Ran like shit, at least twice as bad as on w10 I first tried it. Installed W10 back to it. A shame really but I guess mobile broadwell cpu just doesn't cut it.
Okay so this thing where bpm loses focus when closisng a game... Good thing we have so many shells to choose from. I just went through several.
Bpm dont work right:
Budgie - too bad because the look is great.
Gnome
Vanilla Ubuntu's gnome
All gnome?
Works fine:
Kde
Xfce
Im going to try xfce for a minute and see how it does with games. Last i tried was long ago and i would gets lots of tearing. If im not into it... I guess its back to kde which will make it the only shell im aware of that really works for me.
Bpm dont work right:
Budgie - too bad because the look is great.
Gnome
Vanilla Ubuntu's gnome
All gnome?
Works fine:
Kde
Xfce
Im going to try xfce for a minute and see how it does with games. Last i tried was long ago and i would gets lots of tearing. If im not into it... I guess its back to kde which will make it the only shell im aware of that really works for me.
I am so jealous that KDE has worked out for you. I wanted Kubuntu to work desperately but nothing I did made the Nvidia drivers stick as default, so I swapped to Pop! For ease of use.
I'm using xfce and here is what I learnt about its interplay with games and amd/intel cards:
- For amd cards, you can enable the TearFree driver option with a config file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. This gets rid of tearing at a driver level. I use it.
- When using the default xfce compositor (xfwm4) with xfce4 >= 4.14, you might be interested in adjusting the vblank_mode. This can be done using using the xfce4-settings-editor: Open the settings editor and navigate to the xfwm4 channel, then search the line vblank_mode. There you can set:
- glx: Uses opengl for vsync. You get at least one additional frame of input latency, but applications render the smoothest.
- xpresent: Is snappier than glx but does not really get rid of tearing on my system. Games might get an additional frame of input latency.
- off: The snappiest of all. Games have no additional latency, but you get tearing on the desktop. I use this setting in combination with TearFree. With this setup you can even disable vsync in games and still get low input latency without tearing! There is a slight drawback though, because games are not as smooth as with vsync.
- auto: Defaults to glx on my system.
I don't know how this plays out with an Nvidia card though.
One last remark about the compositor:
If you use either xpresent or glx, you get more lag in games. You can work around this by disabling window composition before launching any game. You can do this in xfce4 settings -> advanced window management options.
WOW. Thank you for all that knowledge. I tried witcher 3 with no adjustments and it runs great. Whole different world from the xfce of yore. Ill definitely try these tweaks, thanks.
Do you think i'd benefit from one of the ppas for the latest mesa stuff?
If you are fine with the stability and performance of the ubuntu provided kernel and mesa stack then I'd just stick with it.
Personally I tend to avoid PPAs that provide drivers and system libraries, because in the past sometimes a rollback / removal of ppa left me with a broken system.
If you really care about performance, the new ACO shader compiler backend should increase the framerate by about 3-5% with RADV. I'm not sure whether or not it is included with the current ubuntu mesa stack but it should certainly be included in the oibaf ppa.
For newer hardware that requires the latest kernel and mesa stack, IMO a more bleeding edge distro like Manjaro is better suited than any of the ubuntu derivatives + oibaf ppa.
Personally I tend to avoid PPAs that provide drivers and system libraries, because in the past sometimes a rollback / removal of ppa left me with a broken system.
If you really care about performance, the new ACO shader compiler backend should increase the framerate by about 3-5% with RADV. I'm not sure whether or not it is included with the current ubuntu mesa stack but it should certainly be included in the oibaf ppa.
For newer hardware that requires the latest kernel and mesa stack, IMO a more bleeding edge distro like Manjaro is better suited than any of the ubuntu derivatives + oibaf ppa.
Soo Optimus is working perfectly now with Turing laptops right?
For example, I have a MSI GE65 Raider with a RTX 2070, if I install, say, PopOS, does Optimus just work? If I launch a game will it just enable the Nvidia GPU? Are there cases of the Nvidia GPU enabling itself when it shouldn't?
For example, I have a MSI GE65 Raider with a RTX 2070, if I install, say, PopOS, does Optimus just work? If I launch a game will it just enable the Nvidia GPU? Are there cases of the Nvidia GPU enabling itself when it shouldn't?
Officially Linux only on the desktop, transfered everything to a qemu image for the occasional boot.
The word is *should* with more emphasis marks of varying types. The real work is making sure you're using the most up-to-date nVidia since the driver handles PRIME Rendering offload on its own since 435.17:
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/435.17/README/primerenderoffload.html
You might need kernel 5.4 since that was where they fixed Prime sync, but I haven't tested it personally since I haven't had a laptop with that in forever.
The usual caveats, for me, apply in this case since you're using Pop! which is based on Ubuntu, though it at least seems from a lot of reports they don't have the usual breakage I've experienced with Ubuntu in the past.
I had a XPS13 sitting around doing nothing. So I installed Linux Mint on it and it's really nice.
Like, amazing. Liberating.
I'm about ready to take the full dive with my desktop.
Like, amazing. Liberating.
I'm about ready to take the full dive with my desktop.
I really hope the web browser on Linux will finally support video hardware acceleration. I can't handle it when I watch YouTube and fans suddenly run on full speed on my laptop.
It would be nice if Google would finally just put it in (the toggle is there but doesn't do anything, apparently). There's a patch for Chromium to add va-api support, which then you either ensure your video driver is up to date and support VP9 or use h264ify to pull a different YouTube stream.
I see. Hmm. I'm inclined to leave it as it is if we are talking under 5%.
Nice. Did it take a few tries before you wanted to stick with it?
I guess this one is kinda old. What could we do with a new one? Fresh start could be nice.
It gets better and better. Both as you learn your way around and as general improvements come along.
Nah, I've been using Linux almost exclusively for the past 10 years. Just needed some courage to replicate my windows installation setup in a VM >.>
Nvidia enables porting of DirectX Ray-Tracing to Vulkan
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-DXR-To-Vulkan A more detailed post from Nvidia: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/bringing-hlsl-ray-tracing-to-vulkan/ I'm quite surprized that Microsoft open-sourced their DirectXCompiler and that it lets developers to support both Vulkan...
www.resetera.com
I saw that news. Maybe I'm just old and crusty, but given that there exist maybe single-digit DXR programs anyone would even think about porting in the wild, the idea that a 'porting initiative' is needed, or some grand achievement, is eye-roll worthy stuff. Really trying to squeeze every bit of PR juice out of it.
It's not that it doesn't make sense, it does; Microsoft wants DX to remain the 'first choice API', and Vulkan to be the "port down to it if you really need it" API, while nVidia just wants all the raytracing everywhere all the time.
DXC supporting SPIR-V to the largest extent possible is good (and frankly expected), I'm just tired of the PR, especially when the initiative seems entirely self-serving.
It's not that it doesn't make sense, it does; Microsoft wants DX to remain the 'first choice API', and Vulkan to be the "port down to it if you really need it" API, while nVidia just wants all the raytracing everywhere all the time.
DXC supporting SPIR-V to the largest extent possible is good (and frankly expected), I'm just tired of the PR, especially when the initiative seems entirely self-serving.
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