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I so badly want to ditch Windows on all my personal machines. Literally the only thing keeping me is gaming support. Steam on Linux has helped a lot, and I can

I so badly want to ditch Windows on all my personal machines. Literally the only thing keeping me is gaming support. Steam on Linux has helped a lot, and I can play a lot of previous generation titles on my Mint laptop, but AMD driver support is still lacking. It can't improve fast enough!

stymaar 10y ago
As a Linux user and gamer I can totally relate to this. In my own experience, the gaming problem is almost solved when you have Nvidia Hardware with proprietary drivers, but AND and Intel drivers are really behind in that space. Hopefully, with Vulkan gaining market shares, we shouldn't have driver problems in the future (but I don't expect this future to come soon, maybe 2 years or so).
frozenport 10y ago
Dual boot?
- exDM69 10y ago
  Running a virtual machine with PCI-e passthrough using IOMMU virtualization (e.g. intel_iommu in linux) is a popular option in gaming while using the Intel integrated for the Linux desktop. I recently saw someone get better benchmark (Futuremark) results with Win10 running in a VM on Linux than native Win10. I haven't tried this personally yet, but I do intend to.
  - cm3 10y ago
    And isn't this something that Nvidia artificially disables in consumer cards while AMD has no such limitation for passthrough?
    - wjoe 10y ago
      They have attempted to in the past, but all it takes is one extra switch on KVM to get around any restrictions for passthrough to Nvidia cards. I currently have that setup running myself and it works perfectly.
    - matxip 10y ago
      I'm currently passing though a GTX 760. It was apparently a hassle in the past, but the bypasses are basically built in to the tools now. Nvidia is calling the blocking behavior a "bug", but the have no intention to act on it.
      - throwaway2048 10y ago
        It is not a bug. The windows driver contains KVM signatures, aswell as signatures for Hyper V extensions, and if they are enabled the driver fails to run. However if you modify the signatures in KVM and in HyperV devices, everything works fine. This is clear cut NVIDIA malfesence.
        matxip 10y ago
        That's why I put it in quotes. It's pretty clear the original intent was to push people to get Quattro cards for using in VMs. My impression is that they gave up on the idea for normal users and are trying to play it off while suggesting they aren't going to fuck with people any further.
        matxip 10y ago
        I should also specifically note that you don't need to manually change the signature anymore. It's built in now.
        cm3 10y ago
        This should be documented and spread more widely. Nvidia seems to use the same tactics as Intel in market segregation and also some semi-related bullying tactics.
  - pizza234 10y ago
    It's not a stable solution, and there are two problems with this kind of things. The first is that it's pure, unsubstantiated, guesswork. You'll spend countless hours changing obscure undocumented parameters hoping that things will work. I tried, and it's not a fun thing to do, because you don't learn anything substantial. Second, this type of operations have a sky-high level of brag factor. People will tell on their blogs/posts that they succeeded in "making XXX work and that it's stable", but they don't tell you that their computer explodes (so to speak) two minutes after they start XXX. Again, I know because I've worked on similar things, and the patterns are the same. You may be lucky, but if you aren't, it's a lot of time wasted (it always looks like the "final solution" is behind the corner!).
    - cm3 10y ago
      The guys from LinusTechTips have used Unraid (a paid KVM+BTRFS based NAS+VM appliance) to do this with a 7 or 8 GPU machine. See 7 gamers one PC on YouTube. It seemed to be simple to set up, once you have configured the BIOS.
      - eumoria 10y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOaCkbt4lI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOaCkbt4lI is the video. It took them a bit of work but stability is possible.
    - fpgaminer 10y ago
      Yeah, it can be a bit guessworky, but that's only because it's bleeding edge stuff. The corners are being sanded down and things are getting better rapidly. I've been happy with the amount of work that I've put into my setup versus the results. And my setup is definitely not one that causes my computer to explode. In fact, I've never had my host machine fail. The VM only bugged out once. This is after long sessions of CS:GO, Overwatch, Game of Thrones, StarCraft 2, etc.
    - matxip 10y ago
      I was pretty apprehensive about the concept, but hopeful enough to get a new mobo/CPU just to give it a shot. It does definitely seem to good to be true. I went for it, and it actually ended being significantly easier and better performing than I expected. I did have to take a few days and learn a bit about qemu, but I'd expect that much. I will say that older motherboard (perhaps some new ones too) might not have firmware that fully support what's being done here. It's hard to say which, but you can see what people have had success with if you search around (Asus z170a works for me). This is a little light on details but is a good resource for the steps involved: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
- riledhel 10y ago
  I find it easier to do windows host + linux VMs
witty_username 10y ago
I don't know how the performance compares but everything else is fine. I use a APU, which is a CPU with an integrated GPU.
eumoria 10y ago
I am in the exact same boat. My laptop is Xubuntu and my work computer is as well. My home gaming rig is Windows 10 because Linux just doesn't compete yet with the proprietary optimizations that the hardware manufacturers and game developers use on the platform. Also my wireless card doesn't have Linux support but I would throw that in the trash the moment Linux gaming can even get to 80-90% of the Windows gaming performance. If this were Slashdot we couldn't even have the discussion without being swamped by fanboys claiming completely false things about Linux gaming. I've been trying over and over again for about 15 years playing all different types of games on different types of hardware and roughly speaking I would say an average of 20-50% performance hit on 3D rendered games but it is getting much MUCH better. It does work but I didn't spend the, honestly, stupid amount of money on my home PC to have it perform worse than it can just based on the software I choose. There's a billion reasons why this is the case so saying one specific thing or manufacturer is going to fix it but AMD pushing support is a wonderful thing. I can't wait until I can finally get rid of Windows completely. Really what I would love is a gaming focused Linux distro that actually works.
- neverminder 10y ago
  > Really what I would love is a gaming focused Linux distro that actually works. I think SteamOS was supposed to be that distro, but at some point it just kind of... ran out of steam?
  - eumoria 10y ago
    ha! yea, I tried it early in development and it was a bit of a mess I should give it another shot that it's a little more mature. Their whole steambox/steamcontroller thing seems to have flopped but I'm sure it's better than it was on initial release.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      I think that it was just ahead of its time, and people didn't really "get it", and it wasn't marketed with the right message or marketed enough. The next PlayStation and Xbox seem more like gaming PCs than consoles, and it looks like the market is trending toward a shared experience across all devices in the future. I really hope that SteamOS continues and sees wide adoption, but I also agree from my experience mining btc on Linux years ago that drivers need to improve, as does the hack factor. As a sysadmin then, I struggled for hours to get the AMD + OpenCL stuff working right. Not sure if it's better now, but no way would the mainstream accept that type of experience to play games.
matxip 10y ago
You should seriously look into running a VM with pcie passthrough if you've got a desktop. There's a lot of talk about complexity and dead end edge cases, however, having now done it, I can honestly say it was significantly easier than I was expecting and absolutely stable and fast thus far. I can't speak to edge cases (conversely, I can vouch for the Asus z170-* motherboard line), but my impression was that there is less and less of them as motherboard BIOSs advance. It seems to be an area where things are developing fast. You'll find a lot of out-of-date resources telling you things like, for example, most nvida cards will not work or require effort to get working. The reality now is that it just requires a single argument in qemu to bypass the nvidia issue. In my opinion, it's a significantly better solution than dual booting and basically indistinguishable from normal Windows performance-wise for gaming. Link you might want to check out: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
- yurymik 10y ago
  Is there a way to dynamically reassign GPU between host/VM(s)? Not everyone can afford several high-end GPUs, so it'd be really nice to use it on host OS up until the moment you run gaming VM, and then switch host to lower/embedded GPU.
  - matxip 10y ago
    This will be considered suboptimal by some, I'm sure, but the solution I went with is to reserve the dedicated GPU for the VM and use Intel integrated for Linux, in my case from a skylake i5-6600. Aside from that, you can get a cheap, low power second GPU (if you're using an AMD CPU for example). This is fine for me since I'm gaming on the VM, and not really doing much graphically intensive on Linux. The idea of getting another high end card seems pretty absurd when you're putting windows in a VM specifically to deal with those situations. I recognize some people have special use cases, but they're just that, special use cases. Really, overall, I don't consider it to be too bad of a trade off for what you get.

stymaar 10y ago

As a Linux user and gamer I can totally relate to this. In my own experience, the gaming problem is almost solved when you have Nvidia Hardware with proprietary drivers, but AND and Intel drivers are really behind in that space. Hopefully, with Vulkan gaining market shares, we shouldn't have driver problems in the future (but I don't expect this future to come soon, maybe 2 years or so).

frozenport 10y ago

Dual boot?

exDM69 10y ago
Running a virtual machine with PCI-e passthrough using IOMMU virtualization (e.g. intel_iommu in linux) is a popular option in gaming while using the Intel integrated for the Linux desktop. I recently saw someone get better benchmark (Futuremark) results with Win10 running in a VM on Linux than native Win10. I haven't tried this personally yet, but I do intend to.
- cm3 10y ago
  And isn't this something that Nvidia artificially disables in consumer cards while AMD has no such limitation for passthrough?
  - wjoe 10y ago
    They have attempted to in the past, but all it takes is one extra switch on KVM to get around any restrictions for passthrough to Nvidia cards. I currently have that setup running myself and it works perfectly.
  - matxip 10y ago
    I'm currently passing though a GTX 760. It was apparently a hassle in the past, but the bypasses are basically built in to the tools now. Nvidia is calling the blocking behavior a "bug", but the have no intention to act on it.
    - throwaway2048 10y ago
      It is not a bug. The windows driver contains KVM signatures, aswell as signatures for Hyper V extensions, and if they are enabled the driver fails to run. However if you modify the signatures in KVM and in HyperV devices, everything works fine. This is clear cut NVIDIA malfesence.
      - matxip 10y ago
        That's why I put it in quotes. It's pretty clear the original intent was to push people to get Quattro cards for using in VMs. My impression is that they gave up on the idea for normal users and are trying to play it off while suggesting they aren't going to fuck with people any further.
        matxip 10y ago
        I should also specifically note that you don't need to manually change the signature anymore. It's built in now.
      - cm3 10y ago
        This should be documented and spread more widely. Nvidia seems to use the same tactics as Intel in market segregation and also some semi-related bullying tactics.
- pizza234 10y ago
  It's not a stable solution, and there are two problems with this kind of things. The first is that it's pure, unsubstantiated, guesswork. You'll spend countless hours changing obscure undocumented parameters hoping that things will work. I tried, and it's not a fun thing to do, because you don't learn anything substantial. Second, this type of operations have a sky-high level of brag factor. People will tell on their blogs/posts that they succeeded in "making XXX work and that it's stable", but they don't tell you that their computer explodes (so to speak) two minutes after they start XXX. Again, I know because I've worked on similar things, and the patterns are the same. You may be lucky, but if you aren't, it's a lot of time wasted (it always looks like the "final solution" is behind the corner!).
  - cm3 10y ago
    The guys from LinusTechTips have used Unraid (a paid KVM+BTRFS based NAS+VM appliance) to do this with a 7 or 8 GPU machine. See 7 gamers one PC on YouTube. It seemed to be simple to set up, once you have configured the BIOS.
    - eumoria 10y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOaCkbt4lI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOaCkbt4lI is the video. It took them a bit of work but stability is possible.
  - fpgaminer 10y ago
    Yeah, it can be a bit guessworky, but that's only because it's bleeding edge stuff. The corners are being sanded down and things are getting better rapidly. I've been happy with the amount of work that I've put into my setup versus the results. And my setup is definitely not one that causes my computer to explode. In fact, I've never had my host machine fail. The VM only bugged out once. This is after long sessions of CS:GO, Overwatch, Game of Thrones, StarCraft 2, etc.
  - matxip 10y ago
    I was pretty apprehensive about the concept, but hopeful enough to get a new mobo/CPU just to give it a shot. It does definitely seem to good to be true. I went for it, and it actually ended being significantly easier and better performing than I expected. I did have to take a few days and learn a bit about qemu, but I'd expect that much. I will say that older motherboard (perhaps some new ones too) might not have firmware that fully support what's being done here. It's hard to say which, but you can see what people have had success with if you search around (Asus z170a works for me). This is a little light on details but is a good resource for the steps involved: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
riledhel 10y ago
I find it easier to do windows host + linux VMs

witty_username 10y ago

I don't know how the performance compares but everything else is fine. I use a APU, which is a CPU with an integrated GPU.

eumoria 10y ago

I am in the exact same boat. My laptop is Xubuntu and my work computer is as well. My home gaming rig is Windows 10 because Linux just doesn't compete yet with the proprietary optimizations that the hardware manufacturers and game developers use on the platform. Also my wireless card doesn't have Linux support but I would throw that in the trash the moment Linux gaming can even get to 80-90% of the Windows gaming performance. If this were Slashdot we couldn't even have the discussion without being swamped by fanboys claiming completely false things about Linux gaming. I've been trying over and over again for about 15 years playing all different types of games on different types of hardware and roughly speaking I would say an average of 20-50% performance hit on 3D rendered games but it is getting much MUCH better. It does work but I didn't spend the, honestly, stupid amount of money on my home PC to have it perform worse than it can just based on the software I choose. There's a billion reasons why this is the case so saying one specific thing or manufacturer is going to fix it but AMD pushing support is a wonderful thing. I can't wait until I can finally get rid of Windows completely. Really what I would love is a gaming focused Linux distro that actually works.

neverminder 10y ago
> Really what I would love is a gaming focused Linux distro that actually works. I think SteamOS was supposed to be that distro, but at some point it just kind of... ran out of steam?
- eumoria 10y ago
  ha! yea, I tried it early in development and it was a bit of a mess I should give it another shot that it's a little more mature. Their whole steambox/steamcontroller thing seems to have flopped but I'm sure it's better than it was on initial release.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    I think that it was just ahead of its time, and people didn't really "get it", and it wasn't marketed with the right message or marketed enough. The next PlayStation and Xbox seem more like gaming PCs than consoles, and it looks like the market is trending toward a shared experience across all devices in the future. I really hope that SteamOS continues and sees wide adoption, but I also agree from my experience mining btc on Linux years ago that drivers need to improve, as does the hack factor. As a sysadmin then, I struggled for hours to get the AMD + OpenCL stuff working right. Not sure if it's better now, but no way would the mainstream accept that type of experience to play games.

matxip 10y ago

You should seriously look into running a VM with pcie passthrough if you've got a desktop. There's a lot of talk about complexity and dead end edge cases, however, having now done it, I can honestly say it was significantly easier than I was expecting and absolutely stable and fast thus far. I can't speak to edge cases (conversely, I can vouch for the Asus z170-* motherboard line), but my impression was that there is less and less of them as motherboard BIOSs advance. It seems to be an area where things are developing fast. You'll find a lot of out-of-date resources telling you things like, for example, most nvida cards will not work or require effort to get working. The reality now is that it just requires a single argument in qemu to bypass the nvidia issue. In my opinion, it's a significantly better solution than dual booting and basically indistinguishable from normal Windows performance-wise for gaming. Link you might want to check out: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

yurymik 10y ago
Is there a way to dynamically reassign GPU between host/VM(s)? Not everyone can afford several high-end GPUs, so it'd be really nice to use it on host OS up until the moment you run gaming VM, and then switch host to lower/embedded GPU.
- matxip 10y ago
  This will be considered suboptimal by some, I'm sure, but the solution I went with is to reserve the dedicated GPU for the VM and use Intel integrated for Linux, in my case from a skylake i5-6600. Aside from that, you can get a cheap, low power second GPU (if you're using an AMD CPU for example). This is fine for me since I'm gaming on the VM, and not really doing much graphically intensive on Linux. The idea of getting another high end card seems pretty absurd when you're putting windows in a VM specifically to deal with those situations. I recognize some people have special use cases, but they're just that, special use cases. Really, overall, I don't consider it to be too bad of a trade off for what you get.