Optimizing Linux Gaming Performance

all right so first of all let me tell you guys what this video is not going to be about just to save you some time this video is not going to be a step-by-step straightforward guide on how to improve your linux gaming performance there are a lot of very good videos about that already and i'm going to put some of them down below so be sure to check them out if you're interested in you know that kind of videos this video is also not going to be about kvm pass-through and gaming in a virtual machine with your real you know graphics card passed to windows and a virtual machine unfortunately i don't have an integrated gpu on my ryzen machine and i also don't have a second gpu kicking around but if you do have two gpus maybe one for gaming another one for the host operating system you know just to draw the interface this might be an optimal solution for you and while yes i am aware that single gpu passthrough is also a thing but it requires you to shut down all the graphical applications and your x11 server in order to launch a virtual machine and at this point you might as well just dual boot because it will be less of a pain but that being said in this video we're only going to focus on the performance in linux itself be that native games or windows games running through wine no virtual machine shenanigans today [Music] yeah all right so about a couple of months ago i made a video where i compared the gaming performance on windows 10 ame and the vanilla windows 10 and i also threw my arse linux installation in there and what do you know the linux box actually showed some pretty good results now obviously these results were still a little bit worse than windows and some of you guys mentioned in the comments that there are some optimization tweaks and programs that actually help improve performance on linux even further to kind of you know match it with windows performance especially for amd graphics cards now unfortunately i don't have an amd gpu but that being said we still have some things to try today now see if maybe some of those tweaks are going to improve the linux you know gaming performance and maybe match it with the one of windows so here are the five optimization method slash tweaks that we're going to try today first one you know the most obvious one is trying to switch to a more lightweight window manager slash desktop environment so instead of resource heavy and bloated a gnome i am going to try to switch the open box today and you know run my games on that see if that improves situation at all next thing we're going to try today is zen mod kernel this is a custom linux kernel that contains a bunch of optimizations you know memory tweaks resource allocation stuff you know cpu i'm not even gonna pretend that i understand anything that's written on this page but it should be good so you know we're gonna try it farrell's game mode farrell is a game developer that has developed games like shadow of the tomb raider and ryzen tomb raider both of those games run natively on linux and basically what game mode does is it activates a bunch of you know gaming and performance centered optimizations on demand so basically if you want to run a resource-heavy application or a game you can activate game mode and it's supposed to run better pharaoh's game mode is also integrated into feral's own games on linux such as as already mentioned shadow of the tomb raider and it's also integrated into apps like lutrus so really the only game that we're going to be activating it for explicitly today is doom eternal last but not least we're going to be trying garuda's performance tweaks package in arch linux now garuda is actually a gaming focused distro that is based on arch and i actually wanted to make a separate video about this distro on this channel but after downloading it and you know trying it out i couldn't really make a single game run on wine and the whole district just felt you know unnecessarily bloated luckily we don't have to install the whole distro to try out the gerudo's performance tweaks because they're included as a separate package in arch user repository so that's what i'm going to install now i also want to talk about some caveats you know some things that you maybe should keep in mind if you want to switch from windows to linux and you also want to run all your favorite games first of all nvidia's proprietary technologies such as ray tracing and dlss are not going to work on wine games now i know a lot of you guys will agree with me when i say that ray tracing is pretty much a gimmick it looks cool but it's not something that you would really notice in the game when you're just running around the map and it pretty much cuts your performance in half so this is not something i'm interested in but dlss on the other hand is a pretty cool thing so for those of you who don't know dlss is a proprietary nvidia technology that renders your game at a lower resolution and then uses some machine learning ai dark magic shenanigans to upscale and make it look like it was rendered at a native resolution now i know it doesn't sound like much but actually it looks pretty convincing and it can seriously improve performance on budget cards and on high resolutions now because of the proprietary nature of those technologies as already mentioned we're unlikely to see the implementation of them on wine at least you know in the foreseeable future however the support for dlss 2.0 has been introduced into proprietary drivers for nvidia on linux so we might see the support for dlss on native games you know sometimes in the future now the second thing that i want to mention is the fact that there is currently no way to undervolt nvidia card on linux now once again for the uninitiated undervolting is basically a process of editing your voltage curve for your gpu and making it run at the same frequency but at a lower voltage which essentially gives you the same performance but makes your card run quieter cooler and consume less power there is literally no reason why you wouldn't want to undervolt your card whether you have nvidia or amd gpu but on linux when it comes to nvidia cars this is just not an option now there is an application on linux that is called green with envy which lets you overclock your card or change the power target but it doesn't let you undervolt the card so that's a shame now the third thing might be obvious to some people but i still want to mention it and that's the fact that a lot of games are much harder to run on linux than they are on windows now i know linux gaming has come very far in the past decade and a lot of games especially steam games are very easy to launch you know you just download the game you click play and it just works it's just it's magic you know but at the same time some games are still a pain in the ass and they require you to tinker with different wine versions wine tricks proton packages etc and if you take a look at proton hq or wine hq which are you know forum kind of websites where people discuss the compatibility issues for different games you'll see a ton of reports of crashes performance issues glitches games just not working at all so it isn't all hunky-dory now i don't want to discourage anyone from trying linux and i don't want to you know trash talk about wine developers linux developers but at the same time you have to have realistic expectations you know if you come from windows with this attitude that you know you think everything will just work you know like on windows you'll probably be very very disappointed so just keep that in mind all right so let me tell you about my hardware and software setup and then i'll show you the results my desktop rig has undergone some significant upgrades and modifications yes unfortunately the pandemic hasn't really had a positive effect on my financial decisions i'm running ryzen 5900x with 32 gigs of ram running at 3600 megahertz cl 18 and an nvidia rtx 3080 now i know these cpus and gpus are you know a meme because they're so hard to get but if you know where to look and if you don't mind waiting a couple of weeks or months you should be able to get them just fine now some of you guys might say well what's the point of benchmarking such high-end hardware because you know most of us don't have it well don't worry i'll be crippling my performance significantly by using a 4k monitor so the fps that i'm going to show you guys today is probably what you would get on the mid-range nvidia gpu from last generation on a 1080p monitor when it comes to software set of things i'm running windows 20 h1 deep loader with ame scripts just you know just to have baseline performance to compare to and as for my linux setup i'm running arch linux with the kernel version 5.10 and the latest proprietary nvidia drivers at the time of filming now without further ado let's get into the results i'll be testing three games today shadow the tomb raider because this game runs natively on linux metro exodus because this game has a built-in benchmark which makes the results more consistent and doom eternal because it's a vulcan game and that way we can see how the tweaks affect those games that utilize vulkan api let's start by establishing a baseline and comparing the fps figures on windows and linux starting with shadow of the tomb raider on windows we get 85 fps on average and 75 fps for 95 percent and on linux oh well i guess my job here is done the game already runs better than linux than it does in windows thank you for watching this video and bye just kidding we'll see if we can improve those figures even further by using some tweaks but for now let's move on to wine games on metro exodus benchmark we get 72 fps on average and 40 fps for one percent and on linux we get 10 to 12 fps lower with 65 fps average and 30 fps one percent figures pay attention to that second number because even though average gps is a good way to assess overall performance the percentile figures sometimes they're called one percent or 99 are a great way to see how smooth the gaming performance will be and whether there will be some stuttering as you can see on linux will drop to 30fps which can cause the experience to be less smooth than on windows finally on new internal on windows we get 171 fps on average as well as 109 fps one percent figures and running it on linux we once again lose some fps resulting in 146 fps on average and 103 fps for one percent not too bad but there's definitely some room for improvement so let's start by switching to open box and here with shot of the tomb raider we don't really see any improvement whatsoever the fps stays the same on metro exodus on the other hand ditching gnome gains as two additional fps on average which is nice but the one percent figure remains the same on doom internal switching to open box results in higher fps on average but lower one percent figure do keep in mind though that doom internal doesn't have a built-in benchmark so i'm pretty much running around the same spot and capturing fps while i'm doing it it's not ideal and we will see some inconsistent figures throughout this video next thing we're going to try is enabling game mode and since shadow of the tomb raider already has game mode built in and lutris which i'm using to launch metro exodus also has it enabled by default we won't see any performance improvement with those games i tested them anyway just in case and it's the same no improvements on doom internal enabling game mode makes us lose some fps compared to just running an open box but in turn increases one percent of ps figure bringing it to the windows level which is nice now it's time for the zen mod kernel and i will say that on arch linux you need to compile it from sources you'll also need to change some options in a package build file to optimize the build for your cpu then mod kernel also includes the recent few text patches that enable fsync in proton and wine this basically makes it so that the windows games utilize your cpu more efficiently you do need to enable f-sync manually in lutrus and you can also export this environment variable if you're launching your games in terminal so installing the zanmod kernel improved our fps in shadow of the tomb raider by exactly one point for both average and 95 figures not exactly the massive gains i expected but whatever helps we see no improvement in case of metro exodus however still the same 62 fps on average and 30 fps 1 in doom internal there is no improvement for the average fps but we get four more fps in the one percent department which finally elevates us from the windows peasants after installing all these tweaks you can finally say that the games run smoother linux well some games anyway finally i installed the garuda performance tweaks package to see if we can improve our performance further and that's where things took an unexpected turn i had to switch to my thinkpad with the internal graphics because the results on desktop were just too good and after installing garuda's performance tweaks on my laptop i was now able to play cyberpunk at 60fps in 1440p no just kidding installing the performance tweaks package actually made the results worse especially in percentile figures but lost one percent in shot of the tomb raider and things only went downhill from there with one fps less once again in new maternal and two additional fps lost in the one percent figure in metro exodus i couldn't believe my eyes so i uninstalled the package and tested the games again and yep the results went back to normal so if anything some tweaks that are supposed to improve your gaming performance actually make it worse and here are the final results by installing all of the aforementioned tweaks we gained one additional fps in shadow of the tomb raider but the performance was already pretty impressive to begin with and definitely nothing to scoff at in doom internal installing the tweaks got us a 10 to 13 fps improvement once again nothing groundbreaking or game changing pun intended but we did get our one percent figure to be higher than on windows which is nice finally in metro exodus all the optimizations and tweaks got us 2 fps improvement for our average figure and no improvement whatsoever for the 1 number to be honest i'm a bit disappointed by the results i don't know what i was expecting but i kind of secretly hope that throwing all of those optimizations and my linux installation will give me like 20 more fps on average that being said your mileage may vary and maybe on your hardware those tweaks will let you better results so keep that in mind so yeah this was a pretty disappointing video to make you know i have wasted a lot of time time that i could otherwise spend laying in my bed wallowing in self-pity consuming german beer but nevertheless thank you guys for sticking around and as usual i want to thank my patrons ray peria devin mero mitchell valentino and tim with the grug avatar thank you tim for joining in so yeah thank you guys a bunch for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one goodbye

Channel: Wolfgang's Channel

Views: 131,252

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Id: CKuK-MHfp2k

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021