You Won’t Believe This Linux Gaming Optimization

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Many of you have asked me why I chose Ubuntu 24.04 for this video and recommended Arch and Arch based distros like CachyOS. So that I don't have to answer each of these comments individually, I wanted to answer them here in this pinned comment. First of all, thanks for commenting! I never thought that so many people would not only watch my videos, but also take the time to comment. I chose Ubuntu out of habit because I've been using Ubuntu since I was at school and I've kind of grown up with it. And to be honest I like it. I also use Debian in my main job. I have to admit I have little experience with Arch. But I will definitely use it more often in the future after so many people mention Arch in their comments. I want to understand all the hype behind it. Nevertheless, I don't think Ubuntu is a bad choice for this PC. The hardware is 7 - 9 years old, so a few months old packages and kernel shouldn't matter. The used Mesa version 24.2.2 was released just 18 days ago. With such old hardware, I think a stable basis is better than a rolling release.

[@Shadowofthedark847]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming might wanna use Garuda Linux since CachyOS kernel is quirky with different hardware.

[@naterest5033]

recommendation, if you can (I don't have RE4 remake myself), switch to using DirectX11 (DXVK) instead of DirectX12 (VKD3D). Should help out at least a little.

[@LowSpecLinuxLaptop]

Xubuntu since 2012 it's fine

[@ShayneHartford]

This is fine, but as this is a KZbin video made to compare performance directly, changing variables such as the base distro from Arch (HoloISO) to Ubuntu introduces extra variables, and old versions absolutely matter. You're testing Wayland, Ubuntu is not an option.

[@WellSwolen69]

Gentoo will compile things slow but it is ludicrously good on old hardware if you have patience in installing stuff through emerge.

[@UltimatePerfection]

sudo run fast

[@stephencrompton4352]

sudo apt get RAM

[@gnarlin4964]

@@stephencrompton4352 sudo apt purge bloat

[@TheRadioactiveBanana32]

sudo apt upgrade computer

[@gripen777]

sudo pacman -S free-ram

[@Fettsaeure]

Just sudo steam maby better performance compared to non root user

[@KoopstaKlicca]

I don't have a low-end pc anymore so this doesn't really apply to me currently. But channels and videos like this allowed me to play games when I had a low-end computer growing up (I'm talking about a pc with integrated graphics from a retail store lol), so I'm going to always support the cause. As an extension for my younger self, thank you

[@robotron1236]

I built a pretty good gaming rig with an old ($30) 14 core xeon and an RX590. I had an 8 core ryzen CPU/mobo that I was supposed to use, but I ended up not building it because the 14 core Xeon was actually more powerful. The Ryzen is collecting dust in a drawer and I'll probably finish the build and give it to my son soon. Being able to hot swap drives and boot anyone else's windows drive on it was a HUGE bonus too and I can even do it in a QEMU VM. Swapping windows drives from one PC to another doesn't usually work, but because this is a server CPU, it works every time.

[@Misterj05]

I also have RE4:R low framerate issues upon switching to Linux and figured it was just my newer hardware mixed with something in Proton, but now I'm definitely thinking it's something in Proton that needs to be ironed out.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Interesting, I thought it was due to the old CPU I used in this video in combination with Proton. On my main PC with “modern” hardware it actually runs very well. Modern means i3 12100f + RX6600

[@saschapurner9579]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming Modern enough :-)

[@TheJason13]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming I had a 4-core Intel cpu that ran very well when nothing else was open (weird...) but when i opened Brave or anything remotely intensive on the system, it would stutter pretty bad. I upgraded to a Ryzen 5 (still DDR4 platform) and a bigger tower cooler and the only game i play runs buttery-smooth with Wayland. X11 had screen tearing, but Wayland took care of that :)

[@Clanps]

It's probably denuvo tbh 😂 that will tank your fps

[@AffectionateLocomotive]

​@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming yo that's what I am literally building 😅😅 igot the cpu,mobo and ram. Gonna get the r9 270 cos it's around 50$

[@MSThalamus-gj9oi]

I had a lot of problems with games stuttering on Linux. I eventually traced it down to running under x11 with multiple monitors. The problem went away when I disabled all but my main monitor, and when I gamed under Wayland instead (extra monitors or no). YMMV, of course. (Kubuntu 24.04, Steam, mostly tested in Wolcen with Proton Experimental, i7 6700K, RX 7600 XT, 32 GB RAM, Samsung Evo 870 SSD. I don't think other hardware had too much bearing.)

[@Vitis-n2v]

The reason for that is that composited x11 redraws all monitors together which means if you mix different refreshrates it will drop all monitors to the lowest refreshrate or sometimes even half of that. Some ways to combat that is fullscreen unredirection, disabling compositing or using single monitor as you already figured out. Although single monitor can still have that issue if you run vsynced window in the background let's say 60fps youtube video. Afaik Wayland redraws each monitor on it's own which is why it doesn't face that issue although wayland has it's issues as well

[@stalker6617]

Do you have ghost monitors in Wayland?

[@MSThalamus-gj9oi]

@@stalker6617 I haven't run into that problem, no, but I never ran into it with x11 either. Everyone's experience with Linux is different. That's part of the fun/"fun", depending on how you look at it!

[@binja_]

@@Vitis-n2v I'm on NVIDIA using i3wm and have two monitors of different refresh rates (144hz & 75hz) on the same X screen. Setting the environment variable '__GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE=DP-0' (DP-0 is my main monitor's X ID) in /etc/environment, and disabling 'Allow Flipping' and 'Sync to VBlank' in NVIDIA X Server Settings fixed most of my issues with vsync and incorrect refresh rates. Also, NVIDIA X Server Settings kind of hates remembering my options and I ended up needing up manually editing the /etc/xorg.conf file. Maybe this will help someone?

[@UAVXP]

Such a simple use case results in a load of crap on linux

[@dishtroyer142]

“Low budget”, “Linux”, “Gaming” Im your target audience 😂😂

[@cubeskywalker4953]

Very strange... unfortunately I am relatively new to Linux as a whole, and I don't have any idea why you got that performance boost. Computers are just weird like that sometimes 🤷‍♂. Never the less, it is an improvement and just shows that Linux gaming has not yet reached it's maximum potential. Which I think is kind of exciting!

[@benjaminmeier-schellershei7015]

Because Linux doesn't eat all your ram and doesn't run as many processes in the background, compared to windows

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

@cubeskywalker4953 That's a very positive way of looking at it, I like it!

[@tacokoneko]

the moral of the story is that Xorg is the best display server and Valve's mesa is the best graphics driver. You can get both of those with another distro called "VaporOS" however there are actually 3 or 4 completely different VaporOS and you have to just know which one is the right one and also you have to just know how to compile it. holoiso is easier

[@glenni83]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming So, there is a pattern in things atm. Where games has a 50% regress. Ive been tracking those games, then its not much to do with atm. But if you are on budget pc, I highly recommand CachyOs. If there is 0.1 performance of anything to gain, its optimized. Packages will be cherry picked for your hardware etc. Right now, most distros are dead to me due to Cachyos, and how good it is. Been on the Os for 13 months now, doing benchmark stuff each week for most noticable distros. No one can even touch Cachyos atm, when it comes to performance. Its Arch btw.. But its Arch on steroids. Then its as userfriendly as it can be. You install it, then there is nothing for you to do. Install gaming package, change the kernel scheduler to gaming. Then strap your self in. both the gaming package and the kernel change is 2 mouse clicks.

[@JohnDoe-ip3oq]

The biggest problem with Linux, which there are videos on, is dx12 raytracing having zero optimization and a 40% performance drop. This is because proton is optimized for rdna2 in the steam deck, and the developers code for who's funding them. Mention this fact even when there's videos, and Linux enthusiasts get upset and never investigate it for themselves, and ask the poster to provide explanations for them when this is not something that can detailed in text format. They should watch the videos about this topic. Wine and proton are not on par with dx12 raytracing, so any game using it will perform worse. That said, Linux is very well optimized for any game that runs in spec with the steam deck, better than Windows. The problem is when you go beyond steam deck functionality, there is no optimization. Not to mention the whole distro issue of LTS vs rolling release, and the issues that causes running outdated code. The whole release structure is insane compared to Windows just updating a few files, and Linux downloading the whole distro. Which is what flatpak and immutable is about solving. Oh, also Wayland vs Xorg. You need to use a NEWER distro that uses Wayland for gaming, and I will never recommend gnome to Windows users. Use KDE.

[@michaelplaczek9385]

I noticed split_kernel_lock set to 1 (or 0, I forgot) helped tremendously for God of War

[@BluesM18A1]

Something that might give you more insight: Of all the games you have mentioned benchmarking on here, RE4 is the only game that uses Denuvo anti-tamper to my knowledge, which is notorious for causing performance issues that could happen on any machine and any OS. What exactly Denuvo does to slow things down isn't very well known, but what I have figured out is that it finding ways to speed up the game's access to RAM might help, and that supposedly Denuvo uses the stack non-linearly.

[@xgamer25125]

Considering Wayland makes it worse and Wayland has protocols to make it more secure and prevent apps from accessing bit they don't own (as many Anticheats do) this might indeed be the culprit.

[@muha0644]

Simple test: download a pirated version of the game and check the fps

[@IgSt-f2b]

You can try to disable split lock, on Intel CPUs it causes lower fps in games. sudo sysctl kernel.split_lock_mittigate=0

[@ameen272-amin]

what does split lock do? im curious

[@IgSt-f2b]

@@ameen272-amin It prevents system deadlock in multi threading and should increase the performance of Linux, but in games it can cause bad performance.

[@ameen272-amin]

@@IgSt-f2b Thanks! does it improve the minecraft java experience?

[@IgSt-f2b]

@@ameen272-amin Maybe.

[@ameen272-amin]

@@IgSt-f2b it did!

[@cookie_of_nine]

I was able to improve CPU performance in RE4:Remake by turning off hyperthreading. In my case I have a ThreadRipper 2950x (16C 32T) under the same Ubuntu 24.04, and I could spare the threads. Your machine is maxing out all it's available cores, so I'm not sure it would help you as much, plus Intel vs AMD.

[@dreuschyteingen]

try cracked version of re4 ur fps gonna be higher

[@robotron1236]

cuz it removes deuvo, really miss empress, too bad she stopped doing them. She's the ONLY person who knows how to crack denuvo.

[@AhmadWahelsa]

@@robotron1236 hopefully delusional going to do denuvo release maybe next year, he recently cracked the online-only SW Battlefront 2015

[@leonel2867]

​@@robotron1236she isn't a girl or just one person. Its just a cracking group

[@gg-gn3re]

@@robotron1236 too bad people buy these games. Not buying them when they release for 1 month would make companies stop adding them.. maybe even 1 week. but people will never be able to handle their buying habits

[@spoonikle]

Well done and thanks for not simply stopping when you found something that worked and making up an explanation. You did your due diligence and did not draw any false conclusions. I greatly appreciate your efforts 😊

[@ocdkirby]

VKD3D has a very high cpu overhead, which explains the performance dip on Linux compared to windows. The reason Desktop mode gets more performance is partly due to X11 (and configuring your Xorg device to allow tearing will get more fps), but also because of lower CPU load since steam big picture isn’t also running. Think of using desktop mode like a more extreme version of disabling the overlay for more performance. It’s funny how stats work inversely in Linux gaming and as long as your gpu is semi decent your cpu will be the bottleneck.

[@bengineering3d]

I use CachyOS with RC kernel, KDE, and X11 and beta open nvidia drivers. If you like tinkering with settings CachyOS has the best kernel manager and you can build your own kernel with all the options you choose. I prefer stable releases but betas and Release Candidates are more stable for my setup.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Several people have already mentioned CachyOS here. I will definitely try it out. Thanks :)

[@miavelvet]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming i can't decide between garuda and cachyos so it would be very cool if you compared them! Thanks for your work btw subscribed

[@BloomDevelop]

I’m using cachyos too. At least it did perform well for a Thinkpad p43s (intel + nvidia gpus) running on latest (rust based) cosmic desktop :D

[@Tomatgurka]

Did you try Feral Gamemode? While most of its optimizations have been built into the kernel over the year it still fixes performance issues in some games, especially if your CPU is behaving weirdly.

[@nainmain]

I have had opposite effects from Feral Gamemode

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

​@@nainmaindid you try configuring it or were you running it stock?

[@nainmain]

@@ThePlayerOfGames default on arch and nobara, had same problems.

[@cw.only.channel]

Great video. Thank you

[@OnthimGaming]

It could be several things, KDE is best for gaming performance, so default Ubuntu desktop can be slow since it's uses GNOME under the hood, another thing is vkd3d version, some versions can be incompatible due to driver not being fully compliant with vkd3d requirements. And lastly, wine version with fsync enabled or disabled as it can affect the performance in game severely

[@Shadowofthedark847]

Gnome and KDE both are quite resource efficient, seems like a big with DXVK, Mesa or Proton

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

@Shadowofthedark847 I am also in the team "vkd3d or proton are probably the problem". Since the game is quite new, it makes no sense to try older Mesa and Proton versions. That's why I tried ProtonGE and an even newer Mesa version.

[@Shadowofthedark847]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming yup, it HAS to be a quirk with either the hardware or Proton/DXVK. I believe it to be a quirk more on the software side which will eventually be ironed out.

[@themakabrapl2248]

​@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming​You should have tested each step against some other game to see if they help in general or just in RE4R

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Good point, I actually did that. I installed and tested God Of War after all the optimizations on Ubuntu because that also ran pretty badly on this PC. Unfortunately there was no improvement and I didn't want to make the video unnecessarily long.

[@vladislavkaras491]

Quite interesting solution! Thanks for the video!

[@thefunbuns1]

Wait so did you try using gamescope on Ubuntu wayland session?

[@FlameSoulis]

While testing Guild Wars 2 on KDE Plasma in Manjaro, I noticed very heavy tearing on my 120hz laptop. Switching to X11 fixed it. No other game presented this issue with Wayland, let alone GameScope. A friend then installed Linux Mint, which uses Cinnamon on X11... and no issues at all with GW2.

[@etterathe]

Can you try nobara os? It's distro from the same person who created proton-GE and I bet you will see much better performance improvements - it has a lot of kernel level and system tweaks for gaming and most up to date drivers. Its my daily driver for desktop and everything runs butter smooth.

[@Mr.Gottfried]

1:58 brutal flashbang 😵

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

I'm sorry, I hope your eyes have recovered. I usually work in well-lit environments, so I hadn't noticed it. In future I will be more careful not to suddenly switch from dark images to very bright ones.

[@SweetBeanz]

Now do the flashbang dance 💃 🕺 📸

[@jmvr]

​@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming if you do, I'd say use some crossfade transition, so it'll be smoother than just a sudden flash of light

[@JohnDoe-jk3vv]

Stop using your Pc inside a cave with 100% screen brightness

[@DarkusObscurius]

Well, you can use point release distro, but for GAMING nothing compare rolling release distros, point release distros shoud be used just in servers and production machines IMO, for laptop/desktop (specially for gaming) rolling release is vastly superior (specially nowdays with BTRFS and timeshift, there's no reason to not use rolling).

[@matyasmarkkovacs8336]

Rolling releases are not so stable and reliable than point releases. Unless you have very recent hardware, newer kernel doesn't really give any benefit.

[@mathman0569]

@@matyasmarkkovacs8336 rolling releases when updated often are stable enough for most people, though for new users I'd recommend against it. Rolling distros get new packages and versions faster, which can help, though no always. Stable releases are great on servers, but on computers one uses often, rolling distros are nice. Like try getting wine to work properly on debian, they ship an old version and it's just a pain any time I need to help someone try to fix it, while on arch it just works

[@rpgmafia8363]

have you tried a performance optimised OS like cachyOS ?

[@Calvinatorzcraft]

Is the steam overlay functional in RE4 on steamos desktop mode? There's been a bug going around with valve's overlay library loading that can cause problems in a few games (although usually the fps dip is only after 30 minutes), and maybe you stumbled into a situation where the overlay fails to load, try launching with overlay disabled and LD_PRELOAD="" %command% launch options

[@StarOnCheek]

Could the game be running on the integrated GPU instead of discrete?

[@DarpaProperty]

This makes the most sense!

[@ladyattis]

Most games IIRC are going to be running with XWayland or XOrg proper since I don't know if many game engines and platforms have made inroads into improving Wayland support since XWayland is right there which makes the matter irrelevant until either XWayland devs decide to limit the use cases for it or Wayland comes with more features to make all the old XOrg functionality easy to access in a protocol.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Wayland support is being merged to WINE 9.x piece by piece. However, I do not know exactly what the current status is. In rare cases, it can make a difference whether a software runs in XWayland or X.Org

[@thejackimonster9689]

I think for most games this is related to Wine not supporting Wayland yet. So all Windows games which go through Proton/Wine are automatically running via XWayland or in an Xorg session. But there's already ongoing work to change that in the future. So if the necessary patches land, most games will run in Wayland without an X server.

[@Alice-om3wt]

I know steamOS uses gamescope under the hood to apply opimisations. You can set up your games to launch through it in steam using the parameters or manually pipe it into the gamescope command. (gamescope )

[@Alice-om3wt]

Sorry I got it confused with gamemoderun by ferel interactive but I believe gamescope does optimisations too

[@Vagrant-Paladin]

You say it is CPU related, but what is the CPU doing? Which processes or threads are causing the load? Go back to basics: What is the CPU clock speeds and how does it compare to the other games? Are all the cores working? Can you see higher IO load while running this game compared to other games? Is the recording causing issues? Check memory (paging stats) while the game is running too.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Good points! Of course I checked the clock speed and which process is causing the load, but the difference in IO load and paging stats could definitely shed more light!

[@forser7724]

I'd love to see the difference between Windows, Ubuntu and CachyOS with the BORE scheduler. Though RE4 might just have some incompatibility with Proton at the moment.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Maybe I'll make a follow-up video since some people have already mentioned CachyOS here. I think that Proton uses certain CPU instructions for certain translations which this old CPU cannot do in hardware. I have already tested the GPU in another video with an i3 12100 and the performance was very good. But that's just a guess, of course.

[@forser7724]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming Could be. I used to run with a heavy cpu bottleneck up until recently (i7 2600k and rx5700xt) and I've encountered a couple different performance issues. The more notable ones were that sometimes the scheduler decides a background task is more important (Switching to CachyOS fixed that), both the CPU and GPU show 100% usage but the GPU clocks down because it doesn't get enough work (forcing the min frequency to = max in Corectrl helps) and Proton versions above ProtonGE 9.5 ran worse. Also quick fyi if you want a more user friendly experience in CachyOS install the "pamac" GUI package manager.

[@forser7724]

​@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming Two more things I thought of: The i3 6100 doesn't seem old enough to lack any important instructions. Maybe one of the vulnerability mitigations in Linux is slowing it down, they can tank performance in specific applications. Look up "CachyOS General System Tweaks" and look at "Disabling Mitigations" and "Disabling Split Lock Mitigate". Another thing I thought of is that maybe Ubuntu is trying to hand some things off to the 6100's iGPU and making the performance worse, but I think this is less likely.

[@forser7724]

Two more things I thought of: The i3 6100 doesn't seem old enough to lack any important instructions. Maybe one of the vulnerability mitigations in Linux is slowing it down, they can tank performance in specific applications. Look up "CachyOS General System Tweaks" and look at "Disabling Mitigations" and "Disabling Split Lock Mitigate". Another thing I thought of is that maybe Ubuntu is trying to hand some things off to the 6100's iGPU and making the performance worse, but I think this is less likely.

[@forser7724]

​Third try at replying, thanks youtube. Two more things I thought of: The i3 6100 doesn't seem old enough to lack any important instructions. Maybe one of the vulnerability mitigations in Linux is slowing it down, they can tank performance in specific applications. Look up "CachyOS General System Tweaks" and look at "Disabling Mitigations" and "Disabling Split Lock Mitigate". Another thing I thought of is that maybe Ubuntu is trying to hand some things off to the 6100's iGPU and making the performance worse, but I think this is less likely.

[@oglothenerd]

I feel like an easy way to optimize anything on your computer is to install Gentoo, and to compile everything with -O3. 😆 Also, running Wayland seems to increase performance too. I have a laptop that I sometimes use which runs at least 10x faster on Wayland than on X11.

[@syeduroojkamal4986]

the optimisation was actually crazy 🤣

[@saikirannarayanaswami1618]

Have you tried turning Freesync off and on again? Also while using an older kernel. Helped for me with Elden Ring and other Wine/Proton games

[@igorthelight]

Any reason to choose Ubuntu instead of POP_OS which have better drivers and less Snap packs? ;-)

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Pop!_OS 24.04 is still an alpha and Pop!_OS 22.04 might have a slightly newer mesa and kernel version by default, but I doubt that a few months of newer drivers will make a big difference on 7 - 9 year old hardware... Pop!_OS 22.04 unfortunately has a rather old GNOME version that lacks some gaming related improvements, including the experimental VRR of GNOME 46. I think the distro has a much smaller effect on the gaming performance than many people think. Just recently @TheLinuxEXP compared Tuxedo OS (Ubuntu based) with gaming distros and there was almost no difference.

[@igorthelight]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming Fair point!

[@haraldjaudas8669]

@@LowBudgetLinuxGaming This distro made a big difference on my 14 years old hardware (i7-950 with 20 GB, radeon r9 380x). I have Pop!_OS 22.04 with KDE on my computer, because you can use any desktop-environment you like on that distro. You can use the Kisak-Mesa-ppa like in Ubuntu and the standard kernel-version of today is 6.9.3.. Think again if you believe pop!_OS is not optimized enough for gaming-performance. You need newer drivers even on old hardware, because you need modern vulkan-support, if you are using dxvk with proton. I am using Lutris to manage my games by the way. Look, Tuxedo OS is also made by a company like System76 (Pop!_OS). It is great and fast, even optimized for gaming. No wonder there were no differences.

[@achaziel]

I know it's a tedious solution that potentially won't do much, but have you tried CachyOS? I keep hearing it's among the single best distros for gaming out there. bazzite to my understanding is more geared towards handhelds.

[@cheebadigga4092]

Interesting. Maybe the "SteamOS Game Mode" thing is something that works best with an acutal Steam Deck and the game would run the same on an actual Steam Deck whether or not you run it via the Desktop or the Game Mode. Valve must've made some kernel optimizations for the Steam Deck which also come with HoloISO which in return seem like to only apply when running pure KDE and not the Game Mode on your system. Maybe the kernel does something different using Game Mode which then turns off all or some of those optimizations? Any kernel, Arch or Steam Deck developers here? :D Edit: Maybe try on pure Arch Linux since SteamOS/HoloISO is based on it? At least then we could exclude HoloISO itself as the optimization and focus on what Arch and/or the compination of Arch and KDE does instead, should pure Arch perform the same as HoloISO? Just asking :D

[@timoteostation]

Most of the games I run on Linux perform better on Wayland, perhaps related to the dedicated Xorg server (Xwayland) for each non-Wayland application. I'm using Arch Linux with KDE now, but previously I was using Fedora and noticed these performance differences between Xorg and Wayland. Games I've played and tested a lot on Linux: Skyrim Special Edition, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, Sword of Convallaria, Albion Online, Horizon Chase Turbo, Tree of Savior (Papaya Play server, outside of Steam), Mega Man X DiVE Offline, Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition. All of them performed better on Wayland, specially on KDE Plasma. In these cases I've always used the latest Proton-GE version on Steam, or the latest Wine-GE on Lutris. League of Legends was also a game I played a lot on Linux (and it also performed better on Wayland), but this new anti-cheat engine is a problem.

[@MrFrambooise]

what are your specs? Nvidia AMD?

[@timoteostation]

@@MrFrambooise AMD Ryzen 7 3700U on a laptop.

[@wazuma]

so much efford, love it. keep it up.

[@UAVXP]

Too much effort for a shitty software, I'd say

[@nathanl2966]

@@UAVXP Hey! RE4R isn't THAT bad.

[@oggilein1]

I'd love if you took an indepth dive into Linux gaming on a laptop with Iris Xe graphics (or any other laptop with no dedicated gpu), I've been doing a fair amount of gaming on my little i7-1165G7 but I'm sure there are optimizations I've missed and games I haven't tested so if you have this kind of hardware at your disposal, that'd be an awesome video to see

[@uncrunch398]

Ideal would be preempt = never if you have more cores than you ever use, probably always if all are always in high demand. But never may be too risky in case of runaway processes. Alternately you could pin your highest priority app to a set of cores and exclude everything else from them and give your highest priority app the highest priority setting.

[@Talking_Ed]

You should try arch not just because it's better but since you choose which packages to install it's easier to understand what is making games run better or worse!

[@two_motion]

Did you try with disabling Steam shader pre-cache?

[@asunavk69]

I would recommend cachyOS/nobara, holoISO pretty much as good as dead..

[@DragoMorke]

You might want to try game optimized distros like cachy os, nobara or pika os (4 is in beta).

[@bacalhau_seco]

those distros dont really have better perfomance but they do save you time by having all the gaming stuff preinstalled. And ig cachy does have a patched kernel which can be faster on certain tasks

[@spicynoodle7419]

Gaming-only distros are dumb

[@DarkGT]

Next you can try to tackle other ridiculous options like zRam compression and different file system. Make your own fine turnings in the kernel next? At least on Android the mesa drivers don't bring performance, maybe try an older version of the gpu driver and not newer.

[@stickfigure31]

I'm curious if just running a simple stacking window manager like IceWM or TWM instead of a fat DE like gnome or kde would help at all. I had a slightly different problem. Until I upgraded to 64gb of ram, running a large custom mod pack for Kerbal space program used 13gb (spiking randomly to 15gb) out of my 16gb of ram and running any DE it lagged horribly. I ended up playing it under lwm (light window manager) where the fps was a lot better. I also noticed a boost with other games that weren't even bottle necked by the ram, but they already ran decent on my 144hz monitor in a fat DE on my system and lwm's interface was a bit of a pain (middle clicking opened an xterm window then you had to launch a program from cli). Currently I game under xorg IceWM on Debian 12 (during installation Debian asks what DE you want I just selected install X11 and unchecked all the DE then on first boot signed in on the tty and did sudo apt install icewm. Because IceWM is still lighter then gnome/kde (though not as light as lwm), but by default it comes with a very windows 9x-7 like start menu so it felt like a nice middle ground.

[@UltimatePerfection]

@@stickfigure31 I have IceWM for heavy apps and games installed, though normally I use KDE.

[@Munkhbayarkhavtgai]

Have you tried in steam launch option type gamemoderun? It can increase fps by 10 %

[@zerotwo_.002]

Did you check if the GPU is achieving its max tdp profile? I have had a issue wbere my nvidia laptop GPU would max out at 28 watts instead if its usual 125. But that issue was always random and got fixed with an update

[@brucewayne2955]

I have a feeling it might have to do with Capcom's RE Engine & their DRM. Might be good to try other games that used the RE Engine like Street Fighter 6, Dragon's Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Rise, Dead Rising Remaster, etc

[@JoséM.Alvarez-u4e]

sounds like that wierd thing that sometime happens when you do fullscreen (some technomagic flux I do not understand), try going windowed

[@ebattleon]

Have you tried using AMD's Linux drivers instead of Mesa?

[@Karti200]

Linux Mint with XanMod kernel enjoy :D running my 12600HX Mutant (ali) + A770 like that for year already runs great

[@ShamanKing-dn8mc]

Try with Nobara Os

[@wtfisgoingon535]

The main key is that Plasma is just superior when its come to gaming than Gnome.

[@l.f.velasco]

I'm not sure, but maybe steam big picture disables the desktop environment (or window manager) ?

[@Juurus]

I could only install Bazzite on an empty drive. Same issue with Fedora. Seems like the installer refuses to destroy whatever is on the drive even if it was an empty partition.

[@Moody0101-o7p]

Personally, I just used bspwm instead of gnome with gamemode and they run now smoothly

[@insu_na]

Have you tried using the BORE scheduler for your kernel? It's an extension to eevdf

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Not yet, but I will install CachyOS next weekend and then I will try the BORE scheduler as well. Thanks for mentioning it

[@millennial_weeb2382]

​@@LowBudgetLinuxGamingGonna post the update?

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

@@millennial_weeb2382 I haven't had time yet, unfortunately it's not always so easy to find time for my hobby alongside 2 children and a full-time job. I'm currently working on a video about my DIY handheld running Batocera. After that I want to try out CachyOS and various schedulers. But to be honest, I don't expect much, as the CPU is already mostly 1 - 4% utilized at idle. This means that 96 - 99% is free and waiting for tasks. I can't imagine that a different scheduler will make that much of a difference.

[@Randy-nb6fw]

make sure the compositor is being blocked when opening the game or just disable compositing entirely. try gamemode and some optimised kernels like zen or liquorix.

[@da_pwo]

i noticed that the game is using vkd3d to run, which is for converting directx 12 to vulkan, but it isnt as polished as dxvk, maybe see if the game has an option to run with dx11 proton uses dxvk to run it

[@Skidam]

try nobara!

[@wilville3752]

I think you didn't disable the compositor. It can cause absolutely terrible cpu spikes when gaming

[@leovi2]

This is my guess from looking through ryujinx pull requests for switch emulation, some companies for some reason make very weird ways to make their games look and play the way they want and ryujinx sometimes needs to make new parameters to their vulcan or texture codes to make the game look correct, is might be that capcom is doing something weird under the hood that windows just deals with but mesa doesnt really like.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Sounds plausible. My guess is that Proton/Wine uses some CPU instructions that the 6th gen Core architecture can't do in hardware. I tested the GPU from this video in combination with an i3 12100 and the frame rate was very good, even better than in Windows. Here is the video if you are interested: kzbin.info/www/bejne/infXpaeFiNSAmNksi=sEx6EIY4rXJVuFMN

[@thejackimonster9689]

I think the difference between SteamOS and Ubuntu could be just related to the use of a newer kernel. But that's a guess. Otherwise no idea why it performs better in KDE Plasma than in gamescope. Maybe it was running fullscreen and KDE Plasma disables the compositor automatically in that case? I just imagined gamescope wouldn't have a lot of overhead as well.

[@ichbestimmtnicht]

german accent detected. :D -> I have the best results with xfce...

[@netcatvr]

immer diese deutschen :3 Ich benutz leider kein AMD, aber mit nvidia und deren neuen dkms drivern, auf arch läuft alles richtig nice (RTX2080 super im laptop) >= 200 fps

[@gg-gn3re]

disable steam overlay on all games in interface disable all of the hardware acceleration (yea it actually is terrible the way it's implemented), and CPU usually is idle enough to do all the tasks in steam) and disable all fancy graphics and etc in it too

[@sw11500]

Its gonna be a long time until this info matters to me. I can hardly get linux going at all i dont even wanna try games yet

[@millennial_weeb2382]

Why can you "hardly" get Linux going? What issues are you experiencing?

[@PantherBassMusic]

Same issue, I have an HP Z220 with Xeon E3-1225 V2 and GTX1650. CachyOS, in desktop mode run very well, in gaming mode games crash every time in loading screen... And CPU max 3.4Ghz in the game, but it's 3.6Ghz...

[@cleitonsilva3755]

How did you installed Resident Evil 4 Remake on Linux without that problem with DRM? I have a NVIDIA card, i reinstalled the game and the error 0x2000000 continues to show on my screen, you know anything about this? Is the only game that i can't run on Linux.

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

It worked out of the box. I played it on Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, CachyOS and the Steamdeck. It's also Steamdeck verified, so it should work. Maybe try ProtonGE.

[@JohnnyThund3r]

lol... this is the stuff Linux people need to see more of... I hate when people say things like this "Don't happen" because they do happen and it's just weird, hopefully you can figure it out and file a bug report somewhere because we really do need more people testing Linux like this. So thank you!

[@Tucanazo69]

Try with Nobara Steam edition

[@randomland-e5x]

Disable the compositor on plasma X11

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Good point, I had actually forgotten that. I tried it off camera at least with KDE Plasma + Wayland, and the performance was exactly the same. I'll test it with Plasma + X.Org and the compositor disabled. If there's a significant difference I'll pin it as a comment.

[@5Hydroxytryptophan]

KWin disables compositing on fullscreen applications. This should not have any impact on performance.

[@randomland-e5x]

@@5Hydroxytryptophan I didn't know disabling compositor was automatic

[@Durayne]

@@randomland-e5x Its an option. If you start your game with Lutris, you can select it. I currently still use Xorg, and disabled compositing over the menu of KDE (dont neeed fance desktop interactions). On Wayland there is afaik no option on KDE for that as compositing is more directly baked into how wayland itself behaves as far as I understood. Question is then, does disabling compositing during fullscreen under wayland work as expected -> that I dont know.

[@5Hydroxytryptophan]

@@Durayne You can't disable it on Wayland, as compositing is necessary.. the DEs are Wayland compositors, the effects are disabled though. BUT, on Wayland we use "fullscreen unredirect", which bypasses the compositor entirely and does use DRM. This is true for all fullscreen Wayland surfaces, as long as the compositor supports it. Mutter and KWin have implementations for that.

[@nuldorvamoysenor2091]

A wizard did it.

[@Randy-nb6fw]

everybody already said this probably but ubuntu has old software, arch has new software

[@cyberbillp]

Just to point out the obvious details for the TLDR crowd..... He's optimizing with the goal of squeezing out every once of performance from some potato hardware. On my modern machine, RE4 is pegged at 144 fps @ 2560x1080 and runs flawlessly on Linux Mint. In case you care.....

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

Thanks! I thought I made that clear in the intro, but unfortunately a lot of people seem to have missed that 😅

[@MrLazini]

is it possible RE4 runs on XWayland and this slows things down?

[@peterjansen4826]

The translation layers (both wine and dxvk) on that weak CPU (2 cores) probably explains much of the worse performance on Linux for this particular game, especially how inconsistent that FPS (and the framerendertime) is. In that case simply having a better CPU would give you roughly the same performance as on Windows, maybe -5-10% FPS but with an equally as smooth FPS-line and framerendertime-graph. I have no idea why the performance got less bad on KDE than on whatever Steam uses on Wayland, my thought was the same as yours: the game performing better with X11 than with Wayland. But you showed that that is not the case so it must be something which Steam did to the system. You could check which environmentvariables are used by Steam, that could make a difference. Check it for both the system (etc) and the user. Maybe they set some environmentvariable which helps. A longshot but that could explain it. One possible explanation could be that Kubuntu has the amdvlk-driver installed and uses that while SteamOS just uses mesa. I have noticed a similar performance-difference when I played Deus-ex Mankind Divided. I had amdvlk installed and the game automatically used that (probably a Steam-error, not a game-error) instead of mesa, so I told the game to use mesa (setting it via a launchoption in Steam) and the FPS changed from incredibly bad (horrible stutter) to perfectly playable. The simple fact is that amdvlk is required for some games (probably not technically required but demanded by the developer or porter (Feral) like Rise of the Tomb Raider) so you must have it on your system for some games but mesa usually gives a better performance than amdvlk. Don't ask me why but this is a sad fact for AMD. I highly recommend to set the mesa driver for Steam in your etc-directory and only set it to amdvlk in Steam via a launchoption if that game requires it. For other launchers you can simply use Lutris and set the toggle there.

[@mrcrackerist]

maybe test the command line tool gamemoderun?

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

I found out that really low frame rate on my games was due to my GPU operating at low power state. I didn't want to force my Nvidia GPU to be always high so using Feral gamemode I set the config of that to be such that whenever I run a game with gamemode %command% it sets the GPU power to maximum performance. This lets the GPU be on adaptive all the time until I explicitly tell it to be high. Solved low FPS in NMS. Death Stranding, Forever Winter (as far as you can), CS2, and more

[@millennial_weeb2382]

Oh, so that's why I always see gamemode run %command% in ProtonDB. Always wondered what that did. Never needed to use that command since I don't have Nvidia.

[@exaq]

why not use arch or something? holoiso and ubuntu are very outdated

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

I've already received this question a lot, so I've answered it in the pinned comment.

[@matyasmarkkovacs8336]

How are they outdated? Just choose the latest Ubuntu. Arch is not reliable and user friendly at all.

[@millennial_weeb2382]

Gaming on Linux is constantly evolving, with a lot of the progress being made in the last 2yrs. You need the latest Kernel, Mesa and other software updates to actually benefit from the latest optimizations in Linux Gaming. Anyone using Linux Mint, stop. The number of ProtonDB reports I see from people with Linux Kernel 5.19 on Linux Mint is embarrassing honestly. Ubuntu is a terrible choice for gaming, even though they update every 6 months Ubuntu/Debian naturally has outdated packages, that don't get updates for stability purposes or are forever outdated. !Pop_OS is a good alternative, but I don't recommend it either(atm), because it's outdated as you've already mentioned, due to the Cosmic Alpha. I've ran into issues specifically because Pop_OS's base is severely outdated despite updated kernel & Mesa. Either run Arch(I don't recommend Arch, it's for advanced users), run Fedora or wait for SteamOS. And make sure your DE is KDE or Faster, GNOME is slower, can cause performance regression because its more bloated. KDE and other DEs are lighter.

[@viarnay]

Since the moment I tried Euro Truck Simulator 2 on linux I quitted windows because performed better

[@the100ways6]

Maybe you can try to boost steamdeck users with some settings?please?

[@arghyade6669]

You may try on Garuda Linux like Arch Gaming distro and may get better performence

[@VillageIDT]

Try disabling SMP.

[@kloklojul]

windows: double click linux: 3 year degree in computer scince for 13 fps gain

[@MrNagafen]

is there one game on linux ?

[@SerdceDanko]

Best thing about gaming in Linux is that with Steam you can pre-install damn shader caches, so you don't have to suffer through all the compilation stutters in modern games!

[@search_history]

i find it funny how you could have just installed anything that is a minimum distro like artix cause lets be real people who watch your channel are new but could have insatlled nobara which is quite well done

[@LowBudgetLinuxGaming]

I definitely should have tried Nobara or / and CachyOS in this video as well. That would have made the video longer and better.

[@AmirElfu]

Try lutris and gamescope.

[@pajeetsingh]

I can't get past 40-45 fps on Elden Ring and Sons of thr Forest no matter what. Someone Black Myth Wukong runs at 100+ fps at 1440p.

[@arduinoguru7233]

Try ArchLinux next.

[@AndRei-yc3ti]

Hey man I had the same issue, also on nvidia and for me logging onto wayland and turning off in game vsync solved the issue. Im on arch plasma

[@ExtraterrestrialIntelligence]

try disabling desktop compositor

[@robotron1236]

I use Arch and I can't get my (pirated Linuxrulez) version to run at all. Same thing with RDR2, but I have them both on PS4, so I don't really care.

[@eitanbirman1195]

It can be gamescope

[@SigmaOfMyParts]

guess none desktop mode inteoduces a fps cap in that game so it runs okay on steam deck

[@mariandecker3942]

Did you try out custom Proton versions? Some games do get fixed

[@millennial_weeb2382]

GE-Proton is not going to give anyone a 30% performance boost. Also why leave a comment & not watch the video? Doesn't make a lot of sense.

[@mariandecker3942]

@@millennial_weeb2382 you are right I got a 50% Performance boost in One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 Plus the cutscenes are fixed :)

[@venvanman]

I am curious, have you tried switching to the linux-zen kernel? It boasts about having better gaming performance up to 20%-30%

[@spicynoodle7419]

More like 2-3% and that's within the margin of error

[@venvanman]

@@spicynoodle7419 weird, so i guess having an unstable system when switching to zen is not worth it for that percentage then huh

[@millennial_weeb2382]

​@@spicynoodle7419There's zero reason to use the Zen kernel. Is basically desperately grasping at straws forsaking all security benefits from the official kernel. If you're having performance issues, you need to run a Linux Distro that has rolling release to ensure packages are not the problem(I.e Fedora-based). (Stop using Linux Mint for Gaming, with Kernel 5.19 which is outdated by 2yrs, jfc...) This will solve most peoples performance problems. And of your hardware is naturally weak, don't act as if its capable of something its not. You can't create more frames from thin air.