Linux Gaming

[MurphCID]

How is gaming on Linux? Is it getting better as Steam drops more and more titles on Linux? How about drivers for video cards to allow excellent frame rates? What is the opinion of the forum?

[Hoser Rob]

I'm not that much of a gamer but if I was I would still have a Windows partition. Many Linux drivers and game versions aren't as well optimised as they are in Windows.

[ugly]

Yeah, I keep my old Windows install for games.

Linux gaming does seem to be improving. There are hundreds of games, so you could get by only on Linux. But there are still many, many games that are Windows-only.

A lot of Linux games are more of the 'indie' games that usually don't have the AAA graphics. So, most of the time, I find that the performance on Linux is just fine because the games don't push the hardware like AAA games do.

I've only actually tested one AAA game on both Windows and Linux. It was The Witcher 2. That game has an option to select recommended settings based on the detected hardware. On Windows, the game recommended 'high' and on Linux the game recommended 'medium'. And when I set the settings to high on Linux, I found the game performed noticeably worse than in Windows (although I didn't do an FPS comparison).

[Portreve]

The highest end game I play, every third blue moon or so when I get the urge, is Diablo (or Diablo II). Usually I don't really play games, and honestly I've never been that much into them, even as a child.

[rado84]

How is gaming on Linux? Is it getting better as Steam drops more and more titles on Linux? How about drivers for video cards to allow excellent frame rates? What is the opinion of the forum?

FPS doesn't depend so much on the driver as it does on the optimization made by the game devs. Altough regarding my favorite game (American Truck Simulator) it depens on... the freaking file system. When installed on EXT4 FS - very poor performance, often and huge FPS drops. When on NTFS - very smooth performance to the point I keep forgetting I'm playing it on Linux.

[trytip]

i can play The Talos Principle reasonably well if i adjust graphic settings. don't have many games for linux but this one i play quite often in arch linux and linux mint and game plays the same in both arch and mint with my 2007 desktop

[xenopeek]

Mid 2016 there were 2,400 games for Linux on Steam. Mid 2017 there were 3,100. Today there are almost 4,700. So from mid 2016 to mid 2017 on average 60 new games for Linux arrived on Steam per month. In the past year that number has more than doubled to 135 new games for Linux per month.

It may depend a bit on the genre you enjoy as to how the numbers are for you. I have a biased view as I don't do Windows so never look at what games are available for that. I don't know what, if anything, I'm missing I browse the catalog only looking at Linux games and I find plenty of games to enjoy (I'm mostly into RPGs).

Developers will generally spend most time optimizing for Windows but any games that use Vulkan instead of Direct X/OpenGL will come a lot closer to running par with Windows.

[Hoser Rob]

How is gaming on Linux? Is it getting better as Steam drops more and more titles on Linux? How about drivers for video cards to allow excellent frame rates? What is the opinion of the forum?

FPS doesn't depend so much on the driver as it does on the optimization made by the game devs. Altough regarding my favorite game (American Truck Simulator) it depens on... the freaking file system. When installed on EXT4 FS - very poor performance, often and huge FPS drops. When on NTFS - very smooth performance to the point I keep forgetting I'm playing it on Linux.

I think that's probably some (ahem) undocumented feature in NTFS, which is actually a proprietary standard. Which is why if you have problems with an external NTFS files in Linux it's recommended that you use Windows tools to fix them, not Linux ones.

[trytip]

... Developers will generally spend most time optimizing for Windows but any games that use Vulkan instead of Direct X/OpenGL will come a lot closer to running par with Windows.

forgot to mention i had to hack a file to get my Logitech Dual Action Gamepad to work with The Talos Principle. well mostly renaming and figuring out which is what that i should use. still can't get gamepad to work with Limbo even though jstest-gtk has no problem working with controller.

[MintBean]

Linux gaming is going from strength to strength. Nvidia and AMD drivers are rapidly improving and in many instances are now on par with Windows performance... of course it depends on the quality of the Linux porting of a game, although with the increasing prevalence of cross-platform graphics APIs this is ceasing to be an issue.

There are a ton of games available, but if you're a game junky who needs all the latest titles, Windows has by far the biggest selection.

[whm1974]

I'm game only on Linux as I haven't use Windows in years. So far I haven't had that many issues. Currently Nvidia has the best drivers and performance although AMD is being to catch up on driver support.

[nlsthzn]

Gaming on linux has never been better (and I expect to be able to make that statement everyday as it keeps on getting better).

Some peeps are starting to use Flatpak and Snaps to encapsulate Windows games with there required Wine files and that may be a game changer (Feral Interactive might get competition from the community now).

[MurphCID]

I just downloaded from Steam one of my favorite time wasting games of all times: Master of Orion. And it is supposed to work on Linux so I am excited.

[MurphCID]

I just purchased a Dell G7 15 with the 1060 card and 16gb of ram. Not my first choice, but the specs were nice, and it seems to work well.

[vishgaur]

No games that I play. In past I played several games but started to think confused I was doing lol They all are same. Like shooting games, all similar. Strategy, all similar. Racing, all similar. Adventure, all similar. Simulation, all different classes have thousands of games and each set of class has similar games again.

So, blah. Not even as a kid I played too many games (until I was 14 though).
Linux is surely boring for kids as they are not at all productivity lovers They need fun and there's no harm in fun at that age as later on you will never get a chance to have fun.
I'm 26 now, only thing I play is PES mobile and I have great collection . But due to your post I am bound to go and install something on Linux like openarena shooting game, heard a lot about it and tbh it seems to be the only game on whole linux repository that I think is going to be NOT boring.

Overall, gaming is a big turndown aspect on Linux Mint. Let the platform grow. Devs can't make huge games for a platform that is still growing and may undergo huge changes that may cause game devs to rewrite the whole game, that would be awful.

[Moem]

Steam does have a selection of linux games. Those work well, but the selection is limited compared to windows...

Steam will now let you play Windows games on Linux, so there's that.

[rambo919]

Similar does not equal the same.... except perhaps with shooters some rts and space 4x..... everyone keeps doing the same thing only more "modern" because it's "safe"... safe is boring

[MurphCID]

Similar does not equal the same.... except perhaps with shooters some rts and space 4x..... everyone keeps doing the same thing only more "modern" because it's "safe"... safe is boring

Agreed. But I am a boring gamer, I still like the Civilization series of games. Also I wonder if Mint would work on an HP Omen X laptop?

[rambo919]

There is something entrancing about the Civ series yeah.... tried Europa Universalis a few times but just never managed to like em.... last time I got angry at a foreign army fighting with my force I sent to rebuff it and then waltzing right through it to raid a province....what?

[deepakdeshp]

Similar does not equal the same.... except perhaps with shooters some rts and space 4x..... everyone keeps doing the same thing only more "modern" because it's "safe"... safe is boring

Agreed. But I am a boring gamer, I still like the Civilization series of games. Also I wonder if Mint would work on an HP Omen X laptop?

Which version and flavor of Mint do you want to try?Best way is to make a live usb and run it through its paces on your laptop to judge if Mint will work on it,