Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Gaming Performance With NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060/1080

[liam]

DirectX titles are not more optimized - that's BS, pure and simple. When games are written in OpenGL right from the beginning they work as fast as Direct3D ones (talk Doom).

I understand that poster as saying "developers spend more time optimizing for the direct3d target".
All the more reason to take the burden off driver developers and put it in the hands of the game engine developers. Having to deal with two moving targets (thick, buggy drivers and buggy games) is pretty ridiculous.

[liam]

Eh, age old story: when a translation layer is not involved, Linux and Windows are basically on par. Still waiting for they day AMD can do the same.
Also the silence of AMD aficionados in this thread is rather revealing.

What does amd have to do with this article?
Would you be happier if they were spamming it?
Considering nvidia is using one codebase, and have many more developer resources, it would be odd if the two platforms performed significantly different.
With amd, at least somewhat, taking the "correct" path, their driver can be written to take best advantage of Linux.

[bridgman]

This benchmarks are depressing, seen how huge is the performance gap between dx11 and opengl, running some games on linux where performance is trash (like ark survivor evolved), while on windows is silky smooth makes me think that linux will never catch up as a gaming platform, or maybe the industry is just biased to the windows side, after all, after so many years now is that linux is been considered a gaming platforms thanks to steam so no effort was done before to properly optimize the linux software stack to run intensive games which is sad for enthusiasts that are trying the platform now. How many more years we need to have decent linux gaming performance!!! And when I say decent is equal or better than windows.

Two points:

1. Gaming industry is moving to newer APIs like DX12 and Vulkan; the performance hit between Vulkan-on-Windows and Vulkan-on-Linux is much less than between DX-on-Windows and OGL-on-Linux

2. There is a decent chance that DX12 games will get ported to Linux using Vulkan as target rather than OGL, this won't happen immediately though, since any game supporting DX11 and DX12 will probably get ported onto OGL simply because the DX11/Windows->OGL/Linux frameworks & expertise already exist

[smitty3268]

Another thing that would be great, would be to get some comment from Aspyr and Feral on these. As an AMD user on the OSS driver, I always expect FPS to be less than in Windows with D3D, but I'd expect Nvidia numbers to be about the same. A 40% is massive and shouldn't probably be blamed on the driver... I have read before porters saying they don't have as much money and time to optimize as much as the Windows devs, and that's acceptable for a small to medium difference, but almost half the speed...

It's nothing to do with the driver, it's the app being ported.

For an example, one thing recently mentioned on the mesa-dev list was the threading models in these games. DX11 allows any thread to submit API calls, while OpenGL requires each thread to bind to the current context first - a very slow operation. So part of Feral's process of porting a game is to create a separate thread that's just in charge of calling into GL, and the rest of the game calls into that - but that means that there is necessarily going to be added overhead/synchronization locking that the game doesn't have on DX11 and that can easily show up as a "CPU cap" in the frame rate. I'm sure it could all be handled better if they had years to re-architect the engine to work better with OpenGL, but since there's a limited budget and they have to get these ports out quickly it is what it is.

These kinds of issues where the APIs don't map cleanly to one another is the main problem with the performance in these games right now. One of the main reasons to hope for Vulkan is that it really should be a much better map towards the DX12 API, and so presumably a lot of these porting issues (and therefore performance issues) should go away once those DX12->Vulkan ports start happening. A DX11->Vulkan port, however, is still likely to have many of the same issues.

[indepe]

Two points:

1. Gaming industry is moving to newer APIs like DX12 and Vulkan; the performance hit between Vulkan-on-Windows and Vulkan-on-Linux is much less than between DX-on-Windows and OGL-on-Linux

2. There is a decent chance that DX12 games will get ported to Linux using Vulkan as target rather than OGL, this won't happen immediately though, since any game supporting DX11 and DX12 will probably get ported onto OGL simply because the DX11/Windows->OGL/Linux frameworks & expertise already exist

.....

These kinds of issues where the APIs don't map cleanly to one another is the main problem with the performance in these games right now. One of the main reasons to hope for Vulkan is that it really should be a much better map towards the DX12 API, and so presumably a lot of these porting issues (and therefore performance issues) should go away once those DX12->Vulkan ports start happening. A DX11->Vulkan port, however, is still likely to have many of the same issues.

Which means that for Linux as a desktop OS, it is crucial to provide first-class support for Vulkan and its infrastructure, on all distributions as well as Wayland, and (much) better sooner than later. However it seems so far even David Airlie and his co-conspirators are working on that more as a plaything in their spare-time, except, apparently, for one engineer at Valve. (Unlike AMD and NVidia within their closed-source drivers.)

[ua=42]

What does amd have to do with this article?
Would you be happier if they were spamming it?
Considering nvidia is using one codebase, and have many more developer resources, it would be odd if the two platforms performed significantly different.
With amd, at least somewhat, taking the "correct" path, their driver can be written to take best advantage of Linux.

I think he was hoping for a flame war with AMD users, which is sad.
Even more sad is M5000 who comes on here to hate on linux. Good thing the block list works.

[indepe]

Even more sad is M5000 who comes on here to hate on linux. Good thing the block list works.

I suspect he is working for the marketing department...

[geearf]

For an example, one thing recently mentioned on the mesa-dev list was the threading models in these games. DX11 allows any thread to submit API calls, while OpenGL requires each thread to bind to the current context first - a very slow operation. So part of Feral's process of porting a game is to create a separate thread that's just in charge of calling into GL, and the rest of the game calls into that - but that means that there is necessarily going to be added overhead/synchronization locking that the game doesn't have on DX11 and that can easily show up as a "CPU cap" in the frame rate. I'm sure it could all be handled better if they had years to re-architect the engine to work better with OpenGL, but since there's a limited budget and they have to get these ports out quickly it is what it is.

These kinds of issues where the APIs don't map cleanly to one another is the main problem with the performance in these games right now. One of the main reasons to hope for Vulkan is that it really should be a much better map towards the DX12 API, and so presumably a lot of these porting issues (and therefore performance issues) should go away once those DX12->Vulkan ports start happening. A DX11->Vulkan port, however, is still likely to have many of the same issues.

Good points, I lack the knowledge there to argue, but I wonder, would Vulkan really map better to D3D12 than OGL to D3D9/11?

[tenplus1]

Ubuntu gamers should also remember that Unity desktop may look nice but hogs the GPU when in use, for gaming I prefer Xubuntu (without composite) or Lubuntu as it gives more FPS.

[liam]

I think he was hoping for a flame war with AMD users, which is sad.
Even more sad is M5000 who comes on here to hate on linux. Good thing the block list works.

Not for me, unfortunately
I add names to it, and they show up on the blocked/ignore list, but no joy in the forums.