BrkdncrWe messed up with the Windows 12 article. What we got wrong and how it happened
I wasn’t sure about that article at the time, but it did inspire me to finally try out bazzite on a spare nvme and I found that a lot of my issues in games went away. Particularly fallout 4, the painfully slow loading screens between map changes are like 70% faster now. So I’m sticking with it for my gaming rig.
I never would have though running games through a translation layer could actually improve performance. Id heard a lot of people say so but I assumed it was just Linux devotees being fanboys. They were absolutely right.
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You can run DXVK (DirectX -> Vulkan) in Windows, too.
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Antivirus (even Windows Defender with defaults) can massively slow down disk IO in some games. As an example, my Rimworld loading times were over 2X as long with Defender realtime active, and it caused all sorts of hitching.
I’m not trying to dunk on Linux here; it can help a ton, sometimes. Sometimes it is Linux that provides the massive boost.
…But sometimes it’s just about a good default configuration, with linux gaming OSes provide. Windows can be like this too, once it’s stripped down.
Again, not trying to dunk or tout either OS; I use both, though linux mostly. But I think attribution is important. And the assertion that Linux provides a big performance boost is not always true; I’m still stuck on Windows with several games just because (in spite of my best tweaking/modding efforts), they still perform better on Windows in A/B tests.
I get all that, they’re all very good points. I had windows tuned to the best of my abilities, I try to use windows whenever possible at home because I manage windows servers professionally and it’s helpful to get as much hands on time with the platform as I can. But this was such a dramatic difference out of the box that I’m going to stick with it for now at least. I’m not willing to invest the time into tweaking windows to run this well (if I even can) and it’s a dedicated gaming rig so many of the “Linux on the desktop” complaints won’t apply to my use case.
Mostly I’m shocked that getting significantly improved performance when running through a compatibility layer was even possible. I expected proton to be almost as good as native. In this instance it ended up being a huge improvement.
Yeah. Wine/Proton is an incredible achievment. DirectX->Vulkan translation is a miracle by itself.
EDIT: Also, stripping Windows is not daunting. It comes down to:
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Install it fresh.
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Don’t install anything unless something absolutely doesn’t work without it.
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Delete apps you don’t need, like (say) Xbox.
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Tweak the power profile to minimum 0%/maximum 100% CPU, if it isn’t already.
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Run a Windows debloating script.
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Disable realtime AV.
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(Optional) auto-undervolt your GPU with MSI Afterburner’s curve optimizer.
…And that’s about it, really. There’s tons of other Windows performance mysticism, but it’s (mostly) either very situational, or straight up nonsense.
Thanks for the tips but I’m a very experienced windows user, I did all of that immediately after install lol. To put it in perspective, my first step after installing bazzite was to join it to my personal AD domain that lives on my hyper-v cluster. If there’s something I could have done to get this performance on win 11 it would have probably been significantly more complicated and time consuming than any of the basics.
it seems if game hasnt been specificially made in such way it will not work on linux, it will work much better than on windows ever.
For me, not a single game i have wanted to play has failed to work on linux. I even got star citizen to work by installing it according to guide and using windows emulator.
On steam, even some really old game, longest journey (from 2000) worked flawlessly when i tested how it will run.
Yeah I ran my steam library past protondb before I started and a surprising number of games had Linux native versions. Of the rest, everything I actually want to play was rated either gold or platinum.
There’s a mod to basically remove loading screens in Fallout 4. It “unlocks the framerate” when load screens are detected, and it functionally eliminates load screens. It’s fucking insane that that’s all the game actually needs. It’s lile Bethesda put a goddamn “wait” command in just to slow the game down.