Linux for gaming?

[Kc7vwc]

I know almost nothing of Linux, but I'm curious & I'd like to increase my skill set. I use my system mostly for gaming & everyday use. 

I'm just getting fed up with how much bloat Windows has anymore. I miss the days of an OS just managing my hardware & nothing else. 

So I found an ISO for a Ubuntu Gaming distro, that's supposed to include Wine, play on Linux & Steam built in. 

Right now I'm only playing Overwatch, Diablo 3, world of tanks/warships & Rocket League. 

 

None of these games have native Linux support that I know of, so how feasible is this?

i5 4690k & msi gaming 5

Gtx 970

16gb

M.2 SSD, sata3 SSD & 1 hdd

 

If I have to, might dual-boot and use Windows only for gaming, but that's a pain.

[NTDaws]

You know, I would wait till Windows dies and we don't have a choice but to move to Linux. Or Hackintosh.

[Techicolors]

Wine doesn't always work. you can try to run those games but it's unlikely they'll perform as well if they were running on windows. 

 

you can try running a VM but the trade-off is that your hardware is not used to its fullest in a VM environment. 

[Coaxialgamer]

Short answer : no

long answer : don't do it . even when the games work at all ( forget about wine , it rarely works for modern games ) , they run terribly . You're stuck on bloated opengl because dx isn't available on linux

 

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

Rocket league is on linux. there is a search filter for linux games on steam. Left4dead, Doom3, minecraft, CSGO & dying light are also on linux. I highly recommend Warsow for a quake style FPS. Your system is over-spec'd for games available on linux.

 

here are requirements for rocket league:

 

System Requirements

Windows

Mac OS X

SteamOS + Linux

 

• MINIMUM: 
  • Processor: 2.4+ GHz Quad core 
  • Memory: 2 GB RAM 
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 260 or ATI 4850 
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection 
  • Storage: 5 GB available space

• RECOMMENDED: 
  • Processor: 2.5+ GHz Quad core 
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM 
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 660 or better, ATI 7950 or better 
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection 
  • Storage: 5 GB available space 
  • Additional Notes: Gamepad or Controller Recommended

[Mira Yurizaki]

13 minutes ago, Technicolors said:

you can try running a VM but the trade-off is that your hardware is not used to its fullest in a VM environment. 

That's not always true: http://www.zdnet.com/article/yes-virtualization-is-faster-sometimes-than-native-hardware/

 

A VM is just partitioning up the hardware to create a... well... virtual machine. Like how partitioning up a hard drive creates virtual hard drives. The problem is finding a VM and a host OS or a hypervisor that let's you virtualize the GPU. As far as I know, VirtualBox (which is everyone's go-to free VM manager) doesn't do this properly if at all.

[Sintezza]

Well Nvidia cards like the GTX970 work perfectly in Linux.

And if you walk trough the steam liberary you will find allot of games that are exaly ported to linux.

Most of those games play realy realy well, so in manny cases you might not even need a windows emulator like POL or Wine.

Only for those games that are not ported to linux yet, you will need to use POL or Wine, and in most cases that should work okay.

Gaming on Linux is growing, and if Vulkan is going to be a succes.

Then we will see it even grow faster.

[/dev/God/Haruhi]

I'd say completely disregard people giving a flat out "No" with the reason being "everything runs like junk" for that no because that is far from truth. That said, the answer to your question is "It depends", because it is actually a hard question, subjective on the games you play, how much you actually game, and how much time you spend on which games, and the actual hardware you have, which should not be an issue due to being more than powerful.

 

Based on that list first thing is that you will have to dual boot, due to Wine not having DX11 compatibility, ruling out Overwatch. But dual booting with SSD's is not bad, in fact POST is slower than booting the OS itself for myself. On the good side, Rocket League has native support (yay!) and both Diablo III and World of Tanks/Warships should run more than fine with wine. Thing to note with Wine/Playonlinux (and a bit with Linux in general too for gaming) is that you lose performance, and that it will vary from game to game. Not a problem with the platform itself, but a problem with the platform not having the years in game development that has Windows, which will get sorted eventually seeing how things are developing.

 

For your case it may not be as much set in stone as some other people is when they ask about Linux, it will probably be weighting how much you are tired of all the Windows junk, it's way of getting in your way and it's boneheaded decisions vs the learning curve of changing to a new OS at first (which is not as steep as people believe) plus later the dual boot. As for picking a "gaming distro" if you decide to go down that route, pick one that suits your needs and that it has a desktop environment that you enjoy using (live USBs are your friend there), most if not all of the distros packs those three programs so installing them after the base install should be straightforward.

[JefferyD90]

On ‎10‎/‎26‎/‎2016 at 11:56 AM, M.Yurizaki said:

That's not always true: http://www.zdnet.com/article/yes-virtualization-is-faster-sometimes-than-native-hardware/

 

A VM is just partitioning up the hardware to create a... well... virtual machine. Like how partitioning up a hard drive creates virtual hard drives. The problem is finding a VM and a host OS or a hypervisor that let's you virtualize the GPU. As far as I know, VirtualBox (which is everyone's go-to free VM manager) doesn't do this properly if at all.

VMware is the way to go. Virtual box is for peasants.

[brobear]

On 26/10/2016 at 5:35 PM, Kc7vwc said:

If I have to, might dual-boot and use Windows only for gaming

That's exactly what I'm doing and it's not that bad.

I use Linux for everything, and if I want to play I reboot to windows. SSDs are compulsory because boot times without that half suspend half hibernate thing that windows now does are unbearable. My advice is to get a cheap 250GB SSD and have it dedicated to gaming.

 

This also helps productivity as you don't have that temptation while doing work.

 

Gaming on Linux is getting better and better everyday, but until the death of DirectX we are not going to get the best experience.

I'd also forget about virtualization and wine, as it's a huge hassle to get working and after all you're using windows --- sort of.

[Kc7vwc]

Update: have a "gaming" distro of Ubuntu installed. Seems fine- it downloaded some updates while installing. Steam installed, as did Rocket league. 

But, it takes 3-5min for Rocket league to launch, even pulling from an SSD. The sound kicks in after 30sec or so, but video doesn't respond for minutes. And then when it does, it's so choppy it's like I'm using the iGPU (which is disabled in BIOS currently) & getting 10fps tops.

Looking around, I found preferences to scan for additional drivers. It shows 3 drivers for my Gtx 970, but it's using the open source one. Trying to click the nvidia/tested driver & applying just reverts back to the open source. 

The system info shows the video as gallium something, along with a string of letters. 

 

So please educate a noob on 'installing' or changing the drivers, and why is the performance is so poor. 

(At work. Can provide details if needed after)

[Guest acdcman200]

On 10/31/2016 at 9:41 AM, Kc7vwc said:

Update: have a "gaming" distro of Ubuntu installed. Seems fine- it downloaded some updates while installing. Steam installed, as did Rocket league. 

But, it takes 3-5min for Rocket league to launch, even pulling from an SSD. The sound kicks in after 30sec or so, but video doesn't respond for minutes. And then when it does, it's so choppy it's like I'm using the iGPU (which is disabled in BIOS currently) & getting 10fps tops.

Looking around, I found preferences to scan for additional drivers. It shows 3 drivers for my Gtx 970, but it's using the open source one. Trying to click the nvidia/tested driver & applying just reverts back to the open source. 

The system info shows the video as gallium something, along with a string of letters. 

 

So please educate a noob on 'installing' or changing the drivers, and why is the performance is so poor. 

(At work. Can provide details if needed after)

You generally want to run the following in terminal to ensure you have the latest driver. 

 

First update your system fully.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt full-upgrade

< maybe reboot here>

 

Next install the PPA for the driver 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

 

Next update your packages with the new ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt full-upgrade

 

<reboot here>

 

Go to the advanced menu now select the newest version of the property driver available. If you have not already install the microcode driver for your Intel CPU. You be asked for your sudo password enter it to authenticate. Reboot once finished and report back.

 

Also a fair warning, Ubuntu has some issues. I personally prefer an Arch based distribution. [Antergos is basically arch with an installer.]

[Kc7vwc]

23 hours ago, acdcman200 said:

(snip)

Did all that. On reboot, endless login loop. Enter password, screen flickers & powers off/on, back to login screen. Guest login does the same. 

 

Honestly, no idea what or why I'm doing there, so probably back to M$ until Linux is more casual friendly. Took me 5min to find the f*ing terminal. 
Thanks for the tips everyone. 

[Bigun]

I may get disemboweled for this statement, but unless the game was designed to run in Linux, buy and install Windows.  This is only the beginning of your Linux gaming troubles.

[/dev/God/Haruhi]

21 hours ago, Kc7vwc said:

Did all that. On reboot, endless login loop. Enter password, screen flickers & powers off/on, back to login screen. Guest login does the same. 

 

Honestly, no idea what or why I'm doing there, so probably back to M$ until Linux is more casual friendly. Took me 5min to find the f*ing terminal. 
Thanks for the tips everyone. 

Thing that I've noticed with *buntu and it's variants right now is that NVIDIA drivers are not exactly behaving for quite some people, which, depending on your hardware either will default back to nouveau in basic mode, vesa or whatever it can. It does seem something with the distro itself, IDK exactly what, if packaging, or some specific config, but doesn't seem to behave. Not NVIDIA's fault since the drivers run smooth on Arch. Quite funny how you hit a harder roadblock than when I started with Arch.

 

I have to point out that when you start with something new, it is to be expected to hit some walls, that why I suggested dual booting so you can learn at your own pace. It is casual friendly, but unfortunately this is a bit of a "Who came first the chicken or egg" problem where the support on Linux is far lower than Windows because far less people use it, because... you get the gist.  If you decide to give it another try for whatever reason, try with Manjaro, you should have no problems with it in that regard (it does have an option in the live usb to boot with the propietary drivers, so you can see if it works out of the box). Or maybe try it in a laptop where you will not be playing heavily, that may be a better way for you to get used to it.

 

12 hours ago, Bigun said:

I may get disemboweled for this statement, but unless the game was designed to run in Linux, buy and install Windows.  This is only the beginning of your Linux gaming troubles.

Why would you? I am the first to say "use the best for the situation given" But given the current status of Windows with Windows 10 if someone wants to jump off that boat I completely understand because I was there. Troubles? To an extent yes, but let's not forget that everything in the beginning does have some of it, and depending on what you play they are, or they are not. I do enjoy indies and they lately have a good record on having from decent to really good Linux releases. But compared to the trouble that it is Windows 10 it is well worth it. And I'm not talking about the privacy concerns, since that can be subjective, just considering the problems and asinine design decisions that are purely objective and make Windows 10 by far a really bad experience (and certainly not the "user experience" MS is selling).