Linux Gaming News Archives

The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot's Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users.

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.

FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines.

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux.

Miguel de Icaza who founded GNOME and of Mono / Ximian / Xamarin fame is now talking up the greatness of the Godot game engine and the opportunities that are presented with code proposed for mainlining to introduce "LibGodot" to make it easy to embed Godot scenes into other apps.

OpenRazer 3.8 is out today as the newest update to this collection of community-developed, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. OpenRazer allows for Razer device customization and support under Linux to make full use of these gaming peripherals outside of Windows / macOS. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic UI, OpenRazer allows a nice Razer hardware experience on Linux.

For the widely-used SDL hardware/software abstraction layer that is commonly used by cross-platform games, the upcoming SDL 3.0 release now has the logic to be able to prefer using PipeWire directly rather than PulseAudio when successfully detecting the presence of PipeWire.

A new release of Lutris is now available, the open-source game manager that's popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for managing games from Steam, GOG, a number of retro game consoles and emulators, and other sources from one convenient UI.

The Simple DirectMedia Layer software/hardware abstraction layer commonly used by games and other cross-platform software is out with a new SDL 2.30.2 stable release as well as a new SDL3 preview release.

No, nothing to do with April Fools' Day, but the Steam Survey results are out for March 2024 and they put the Steam on Linux use inching up -- back closer to the Linux gaming highs of around 2%.

A new version of Flax Engine 1.8 has been released, the open-source game engine that's available for free for non-commercial and education use but with a 4% royalty for commercial games.

CodeWeavers' Elizabeth Figura has been working on the NTSYNC driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel in order to help the performance of various Windows games running on Linux by the likes of Wine / Valve's Proton (Steam Play). The third iteration of that driver was posted overnight as it seeks to go into the mainline Linux kernel.

Following several days of discussions from both sides of the table over whether SDL 3.0 should revert its Wayland over X11 preference in light of some aspects of the Wayland ecosystem support not being in good shape, for now at least SDL 3.0 is sticking to the Wayland support by default. It may be revisited though closer to release to see how the upstream support is for users of this hardware/software abstraction library widely used by cross-platform games.

With the SDL library that's widely-used by cross-platform games with the current SDL 3.0 development code it prefers Wayland over X11, but a new pull request would temporarily revert that on the basis of the Wayland ecosystem still not being up to par.

Sam Lantinga released an SDL preview release today of SDL3 for helping to encourage developers to test out the new SDL 3.0 API.

Announced back in 2021 by the Linux Foundation was Amazon Lumberyard becoming the Open 3D Engine and the Linux Foundation fostering the Open 3D Foundation for evolving this new open-source game engine. Three years later there is now a commercial game announced for the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).

DXVK 2.3.1 has been released for this Steam Play component that implements the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan. Notable with DXVK 2.3.1 is VK_NV_raw_access_chains support for more efficient shader code generation on NVIDIA GPUs.

Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0.

FEX as the open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems continues making good progress not for only enjoying Linux x86 binaries on ARM but also Windows games by way of Steam Play / Wine.

In time for weekend Linux gamers, Valve and their CodeWeavers partners today rolled out their first public beta of Proton 9.0 as their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux with ease under the Steam client.

The FEX emulator 2402 release is now available for this open-source project allowing x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) platforms, including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play software.

When hearing of "Orange Pi Neo" this weekend from sources at FOSDEM 2024, I just assumed it was yet another Orange Pi single board computer... But then to hear it's a handheld game console from Orange Pi again gives off the impression of some low-power ARM device. It turns out though that the Orange Pi Neo is a forthcoming AMD Ryzen powered handheld gaming console.

While all major feature development for the Simple DirectMedia Layer "SDL" is currently focused on SDL 3.0 for this library commonly used by cross-platform games for various hardware/software abstractions, SDL 2.30 released on Thursday as a new point release in the SDL2 series.

Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software.

While SDL 3.0 remains under development as the next major release for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by games and other software for cross-platform handling, SDL 2.30 RC1 was released today as the newest of the SDL2 series.

Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game.

Lutris 0.5.15 has been released as the newest version of this open-source game manager that allows managing games from within Steam, GOG, various retro game console / emulator solutions, and other sources.

ScummVM 2.8 is out this New Year's weekend to end out 2023 by getting more games running on this open-source software that started out re-implementing LucasArts adventure games and other game titles.

With a set of input driver patches set to be merged today for the Linux 6.7-rc6 kernel, the XPad driver is adding support for Razer's Wolverine V2 Xbox controller.

Ahead of the holidays the open-source developers working on the Godot game engine have released Godot 4.3 Dev 1 as their first test release to this next feature release.

The Nintendo HID open-source driver is being extended with the Linux 6.8 kernel to support the Nintendo Switch Online "NSO" controllers.

Unvanquished has been a promising open-source first person shooter game in development for over a decade. It started out putting monthly alpha releases and quite a brisk development pace but in recent years the releases have been much less frequent. This year started out with Unvanquished 0.54 being released and in now approaching the end of the year is seeing a new point release.

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M.

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community.

The year began with Godot 4.0 making its much anticipated debut and now this open-source game engine project is ending out 2023 with Godot 4.2 as the second revision to the Godot 4.x engine.

While more applications continue enabling Wayland support and getting into a shape by default, the PCSX2 open-source PlayStation 2 emulator recently moved in the opposite direction: disabling Wayland support for their distributed builds.

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced this morning the launch of the TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen1, their first all-AMD powered Linux gaming laptop.

This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more.

OpenRazer as the community-driven, open-source project providing driver support for Razer peripherals on Linux is out with a new feature release.

Lutris 0.5.14 is out today as the newest feature update to this Python-written open-source solution for managing your games on Linux whether they be native titles or via Steam Play / Wine as well as integrating into popular gaming services like Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and EA App. With Lutris 0.5.14 this centralized Linux game launcher has picked up some additional capabilities.

The PXN V900 gaming racing wheel is supported now by the mainline Linux kernel as of last night with the latest merged changes for the v6.6 kernel.

Back in July of last year the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) engine launched as part of the Open 3D Foundation and initially was a spin-out of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine. Out this week is O3DE 23.10 as the newest half-year update to this project.

Polychromatic continues evolving as the open-source management software for Razer peripherals on Linux that makes use of the independently-developed OpenRazer kernel drivers for improving the customization experience around Razer mice, keyboards, and other devices on Linux.

A new version of FEX-Emu has been released, the open-source project aiming to be "the greatest x86/x86_64 emulator on Linux" that includes the ability to run Steam and Steam Play Windows games on AArch64 Linux systems.

After Steam on Linux usage topped to nearly 2% in July with the phenomenal success of the Steam Deck and with greater marketshare than Apple macOS, in August it took a dip and now the September numbers are out and points to a second consecutive month of the Linux percentage receding.

A new version of the sdl12-compat library is now available, which serves as an SDL2 portability layer for allowing old SDL 1.2.x games and applications work on modern SDL2 systems.

With the AMD performance uplift on the Linux 6.6 kernel due to the EEVDF scheduler code, the workqueue enhancements for chiplet-based processor designs, and other improvements, many Phoronix readers have speculated over AMD Linux gaming performance improvements with this in-development kernel.

The sdl12-compat project is an interesting effort to allow for aging software and games targeting the SDL 1.2 APIs to work atop this compatibility layer so it in turn runs atop the SDL2 libraries. With the sdl12-compat 1.2.66 release more games and other software are now successfully working on this library.

There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel.

A new release of Box64 is now available, the Linux x86_64 emulator for running programs and games on non-x86_64 architectures like ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V.