The Linux version of CS2 is almost there... Counter Strike 2 benchmark on Linux vs Windows

[@A1RM4X]

I made a typo in my notes: the 1% low difference is 3% (2.77 exactly). It is even better than in the video! Thanks for correcting me @Komuzan

[@TerminalzPain]

Just imagine how good things will get when Linux has a much bigger chunk of the Desktop OS marketplace, and with the way MS is going it's not going to be that long away :D

[@Ud4cznik]

Honestly I'm a bit worried that this situation can also lead to some bad phenomenons in the linux world. What could happen if all corps start messing around linux and try to shrink our freedom just for their own profit? I don't know if that's even possible but we have canonical in here and we know them very well.

[@LinuxEmulation]

@@Ud4cznik Someone would just fork any linux distro and keep the freedom. I don't see how would that happen with linux.

[@kawaiihikari0]

Not gonna happen

[@hacktheplanet.]

Linux will never have a bigger chunk of the desktop workspace. MacOS and Windows will always own that monopoly. Your average user wants to turn on his PC and just click and go. Driver support, game support, hardware support will always be dominated by Windows.

[@justarandname633]

one thing to mention about running the game on linux, it appears to have a memory leak, when I start a game im running the game with 300+ fps after a few rounds I can barely hold 100 frames and I need to restart the game during the match to get my frame up to 300 again

[@Szwagi]

My experience is very different, but I'm also completely GPU bottlenecked. 7800x3d+1080Ti, I get 420fps on Windows 10 and only 220fps on Linux in the exact same spot. When using Proton to run the Windows version of the game I get 340fps, but can't play online like that. They should just use dxvk like they did in CS:GO since their Vulkan implementation is pretty bad.

[@feschber]

Idk what changed but for me the frametimes feel a lot more consistent in linux now. And latency has noticeably improved as well.

[@A1RM4X]

Nice!

[@tomaskaunas]

But what about playing in faceit? Do u guys think they will allow linux users to play in their platform?

[@rch5395]

U can use -vulkan in launch options to run the game using vulkan I'm windows.

[@fr0zert]

on Linux it is actually not vulkan(native), but DXVK pipeline, so windows gona have better perfomance in any way, until valve decide to make native vulkan rendering for source2

[@adriano760]

i get insane stutters on linux cs2 on windows 11 it's smooth. Arch linux rtx 3060ti kde wayland

[@СЛАВАНАУКРАЙНА]

87 % only.. So basicly huge things are missing. There might be significant improvements with Vulkan, potentially leading to a large performance gap between Linux and Windows versions. However, there might be a delay in optimizing for Vulkan due to the critical need for a robust anti-cheat system and numerous bugs in the Dx11 version. The good news is that the game is playable. However, Faceit client may not support Linux soon, limiting servers to Valve and community ones.BTW Mine 7900xt performs comparably to your 4090, which is quite nice. But i wait for antilag2 in MESA :)))) LEts go @KISAK

[@SneakyPancake17]

I run Fedora 40 on my desktop at home. CS2 runs like HOT ASS on it, both X11 and Wayland. On maps with water (Anubis, Ancient, etc) I can barely pull 100fps on a 7800x3d and RTX 3070. The framerates aren't terrible, but my 1% lows are atrocious, which makes the game stuttery and unplayable.

[@MehmetErul-o3m]

what about input lag, response times ?

[@cuysaurus]

Did Valve fix Linux CS2?

[@magicalfrog2811]

Dude your English sounds more German than any German speech I've ever listen to. But still, great content, danke! Edit: really helpful comparisons! I'm surprised that I can even understand! Thanks again, for printing important stats clear and big!

[@ifzwy]

its french accent lol you dont even heard a german word i bet or you must be deaf to say that lmao

[@emmieeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

is literally french lmao

[@magicalfrog2811]

@@emmieeeeeeeeeeeeeee oh come on it's 200% German! Are your ears decoration?

[@emmieeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

@@magicalfrog2811 i study linguistics, speak multiple languages (including german,) and the guy is literally from canada. i think i know what i'm talking about LOL

[@magicalfrog2811]

@@emmieeeeeeeeeeeeeee then i guess it's either you failed your major or my ears are decoration, although knowing him is from Canada doesn't make you a linguist. Any other proof?

[@scanysquirrel]

ça pourrait être intéressant de test sous Windows mais avec Vulkan

[@A1RM4X]

Fait! Exactement les mêmes résultats avec ma machine Dx11=Vulkan sur ce bench.

[@scanysquirrel]

@@A1RM4X OK bien vu, j'espère que NVidia va bien continuer à bosser sur les drivers, car on a vu des cartes AMD plus performantes sous linux.

[@magnificoas388]

ptin

[@konusanadam]

Try to use atlas os as windows. with win 10 & win 11 and cachy os. i think it will be better comparison. Thanks for your effort ^^

[@czKyoutube]

Linux is the future of pc gaming

[@Ud4cznik]

What's crazy about it the most, is that linux can run a totally foreign code (which are almost all current AAA PC games) just fine.

[@escape808]

LOL

[@ViolenceDoesntWork]

I played CSGO in linux years ago and it ran just as well as Windows.

[@bearfm]

@@Ud4cznik "foreign code"?

[@Ud4cznik]

@@bearfm Unfamiliar - that's a right word.

[@nawaMLG]

Evil airmax be like "Let's start straight into it without any context"

[@Malxer]

I want to switch to Linux but most esports that have an anticheat / including cs2 with faceit, cant be played on linux and its the one thing preventing me to make the jump. I really want to ditch windows. I wish this is fixed in the near future.

[@supperEisMan]

In my personal experience the game unfortunately is unplayable in online matches right now. It keeps randomly freezing completely and kicking me of servers. If it runs it does work well enough but the constant freezes are unbearable. I tried multiple driver versions (nvidia), wayland/xorg, all kind of vuhdo command line arguments but the result is always the same. Whenever hud elements show (MVP banner, scoreboard or anything that is not displayed constantly) there is like a 20% chance of the game freezing completely. Sometimes it fixes itself within a few seconds but most of the time I get timed out and have to reconnect. Sometimes when reconnecting the game renders one frame and then freezes again which is really frustrating.

[@Perd0uille]

It got fixed

[@MrAlanCristhian]

Another improvement that we have is the EEVDF scheduler on the kernel. That in theory improve the 1% low difference.

[@idcrafter-cgi]

How does Windows with Vulkan compare? -vulkan launches it in Vulkan on Windows.

[@Mortos592]

Wondering the same

[@EfeDursun125]

@@Mortos592 vulkan gives lower fps than dx11

[@A1RM4X]

Re did the test on Windows 10 to confirm: performance is the same on Dx11 and on Vulkan with my hardware.

[@aksGJOANUIFIFJiufjJU21]

@@EfeDursun125 lower fps for like 10 c degrees difference I would probs take vulkan

[@EfeDursun125]

​@@aksGJOANUIFIFJiufjJU21 no, dx11 is faster because it is single threaded, vulkan searches best avaiable cpu core to push process

[@Karti200]

To be honest - it is a bit sad that with all how Valve is Pro Linux... they kinda forgot to get CS2 working on it without issues :/ At least i know that it wasn't just me who had problems with it (Arc A770 16GB + Ryzen 5 4650G on 1440p monitor) I was getting so many weird graphical glitches or random drops and freezez more sad - because CS:GO since day 1 had its Linux version running on OpenGL (and later in years also option to use Vulkan) and i remember how CSGO run much ebtter (at least for me) on Linux than on Windows

[@n.m4497]

With Wayland wine and NTSync, Linux should run the same or better than Windows. And Linux keeps only improving every week. Crazy

[@Komuzan]

The 1% lows percentage is off. It is more like 3% difference.

[@A1RM4X]

YOU ARE RIGHT! I MADE A TYPO IN THE CALCULATION! Thanks!

[@Winnetou17]

@@A1RM4X Also, smaller mistake, but still a mistake - Windows 10 is 14.6% faster (not 11%). Linux is 12.7% slower (also not 11%, but close enough). I wanted to signal the difference between "faster than" and "slower than". When you say that X is faster than Y by a% that is not the same as Y being slower than X by a%. For example, if Linux had 280 FPS, then you would say either that Windows is 100% faster than Linux or that Linux is 50% slower than Windows. Seeing Linux at half the FPS and they saying that "Windows is 50% faster" is totally wrong. I hope my explanation makes sense.

[@A1RM4X]

@@Winnetou17 Yep, mistake were made during my copy pasta of data. FPS numbers are OK, percentages are all over the place. Will do better next time.

[@A1RM4X]

I don't feel like redoing the whole video as the take aways are still valid. So it will stay like that.

[@Winnetou17]

@@A1RM4X Yeah, it's ok, don't stressè about it

[@olnnn]

One thing that's still not great in cs2 on the linux side is any map with water on it -something about players running in water causes the game to get horrible microstutters. It's worst if trying to play arms race on the shoots map. (Vulkan renderer in this game in general whether windows or linux seems to suffer more from cpu bottlenecks than dx11 one for whatever reason, I guess they haven't spent as much time optimizing it) Of course the other issue with CS2 is that people playing it competitively is mostly exclusively reliant on third party kernel-level anti cheat like faceit that only works on windows.

[@A1RM4X]

Fair points.

[@EfeDursun125]

dx11 always sends the process to core 0 but vulkan searches for the best available core to send the process, which is cpu time consuming

[@psygreg]

some pro players are already requesting those anticheat companies to develop for Linux though. specially because there is definitely more performance that can be squeezed out of a Linux system, so playing on Linux would be a competitive advantage

[@MarMBxxbalxver]

Is it possible to play cs go legacy on Linux? I was trying to do everything that I found in KZbin tutorials, but I can only open cs 2

[@DTDSasquatch]

Thanks so much for this update. At @6:05 you mentioned that you only used the highest test run (of 3) for the comparison. To be honest, I'm more interested in the lowest of each. When everything is running smoothly, I can focus on the game and not care about the performance. It's when the FPS drops and microstuttering occurs that I am more concerned about. Either way, I think it might be time for me to take this Windows 10 SSD back out of my system, and return my Linux SSD back to its rightful place.

[@DAnaselo5]

Your hair looks nice today ;)

[@kawaiihikari0]

Um if you want a fair comparison use windows 11… as they added better gaming performance capabilities

[@LoorHenz]

That... That little bit of context drives me crazy🤣🤣🤣🤣 Great comparison A1R, see you friday!

[@BombataIsReal]

Am I gonna have problems with an amd gpu?

[@A1RM4X]

No

[@LoorHenz]

I play a lot of CS2 and i played both Windows and Linux (CachyOS and Mint) recently. Gameplay is super smooth on both distros and had 0 problem enjoying the gameplay... I could say i felt Linux a bit smoother than Windows? But maybe i was biased, i dont know. However, even on competitive side, i see no problems in running Linux to play CS2 today :D

[@JARHEAD上帝]

@@LoorHenz how much fps u got on cachy os? i am thinking to install cachy os for gaming

[@not1but2and37]

How's the sound quality? I have onboard sound, and it sounds muddy compared to Win10/11.

[@LoorHenz]

@@not1but2and37 no differences whatsoever, but i use an external sound card (komplete audio 1 by Native Instruments)

[@not1but2and37]

@@LoorHenz oic. thanks for responding. btw, i'm using Pop!_OS

[@xDraga]

my cs2 runs well when it does but randomly it seems like my gpu usage drops middle of the game which causes rly bad/low fps. i use corectrl to set cpu to performance mode and for better gpu fancurves. steam is installed as a flatpak. Any clue what could be causing the random low gpu usage?

[@AarshParashar]

Does it now natively works wit Wayland?

[@A1RM4X]

Yes

[@pix2276]

What was the kernel on the cachyos bench?

[@A1RM4X]

6.9.3-1-cachyos-bore

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

I've been using the Linux version since it released, with the "-sdlaudiodriver pipewire" launch command but I think I can get rid of that now Been playing competitive under Pop!_OS just fine, I'm the one that sucks not my machine 😂

[@Komuzan]

With Win10 soon beeing out of support for regular people, it would be Win11 vs Linux. Win11 performance should be worse than Win10, so maybe it is at the same level even now.

[@ZAKKORD]

I wish they've added 3D Cache support driver for Ryzen, right now its stuck on perfomance cores.

[@wbubiak]

What are your pc specs?

[@alone-vf4vy]

Finally!

[@Ud4cznik]

5:39 Ooof... What happened during the rendering process here? :D

[@A1RM4X]

This bench is hurting my capture card on the second pc too -)

[@tykers.]

Do you notice if desktop environment matters at all? I find that X11 gives more frames than Wayland, any reason you chose Wayland?

[@A1RM4X]

Those questions require way more than a simple answer here... With NVIDIA GPU, since drivers 555 beta and KDE with kwin supporting explicit sync, Wayland is a better option for gaming at every level.

[@tykers.]

@@A1RM4X Interesting. On my Nvidia system, I tried a few different combinations and still thought that KDE on X11 gave the best and most responsive feeling. This was on the current beta drivers. Do you have any thoughts about overall input lag or have you tested at all?

[@A1RM4X]

@@tykers. Plasma 6.1 has the explicit sync patch for activating the nvidia drivers correctly, is that what you are using? If not you can´t really appreciate the beta drivers. Kwin needs to be patch with explicit sync to get the full benefits of the beta nvidia drivers on Wayland.

[@tykers.]

@@A1RM4X Nevermind just saw your video on KDE/Gnome. Gonna watch now.

[@jorgemarioandrade]

You could make a video of Apex Legends in cachi os but helping with the texture loading problem

[@Ud4cznik]

The texture loading problem also happens on Windows. The update that arrived with the current season broke a lot of stuff on the server side of the game. It's not only a Linux problem.

[@Ud4cznik]

I was recently playing apex with a friend of mine that uses Windows. The game behaved pretty much the same on his side as for me on linux.

[@jorgemarioandrade]

@@Ud4cznik when you take a weapon the game freezes for 3 seconds only on Linux it happens affects the game

[@A1RM4X]

Most of the current issues are related to the current state of the game (Apex Legends). Last patch created a mess. There is nothing that can be done on the user side at this point.

[@jorgemarioandrade]

@@A1RM4X The only issue is the 3-second freeze when picking up a weapon, but everything else runs smoothly. Thanks to you, I switched to Cachy OS and discovered Arch Linux, which is amazing. Apex Legends is my favorite game. Keep up the great work! Greetings from Guatemala.

[@hunter_arg4721]

Cool!! I will continue playing in Windows 💪

[@A1_Oxyde]

The problem with Linux is that it won't never be a competitive option for gaming unless everyone switch to AI anticheat. Most competitive games are going with the intrusive AC route that won't be able to run on Linux, until there's a solution for that, Linux has no future in competitive gaming unfortunately

[@AarshParashar]

What was your driver version on Linux?

[@A1RM4X]

Latest New Feature Branch Version or beta of the Nvidia drivers (today I run 555.58.02).