8 ms·

There was an interesting thread on Reddit [1] the other day which did a breakdown of the state of gaming in terms of native games and games that can be run easi

by Zhyl 8y ago

There was an interesting thread on Reddit [1] the other day which did a breakdown of the state of gaming in terms of native games and games that can be run easily via Steam Play (aka 'Proton', Valve's in-built WINE+DXVK layer). The results were quite interesting and, as one of the replies pointed out in another breakdown, Linux now competes with (and in some ways beats) gaming on macOS in terms of size of catalogue. Granted there is a ways to go to beat Windows in this space, but the progress over the last 6 years generally and the last 6 months specifically is astounding. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9qopag/5000_linux_games_on_steam_and_a_few_other_numbers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9qopag/5000_l...

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
Beating macOS at gaming sounds like a punchline, that's just not impressive, macOS has only ever been an afterthought for gaming.
- de_watcher 8y ago
  Yes, you've got to try very hard to be worse than MacOS that is openly sabotaging OpenGL and Vulkan efforts.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Lack of OpenGL and Vulkan support never mattered on game consoles. Even with Switch's adoption of Vulkan, most games are actually using middleware that makes use of NVN. If a platform is relevant to professional games developers, they will target it, regardless of which APIs and OS it requires.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      Consoles give very strict contracts that you can rely on to not change for the whole lifetime of the console. In contrary macOS changes stuff every year apparently based on what a fortune teller says for Steve Job's ghost. That means that early on, yeah it's as bad as Mac, but it gets way better over the lifetime of the console.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        All the middleware that matters for professional game studios has supported Metal since for at least one year now.
        monocasa 8y ago
        Yeah, no. There's talks of Blizzard for instance dropping support for Mac. Dice has a blog post that's messaging concern. It looks like a bunch of engines are going to limp on MoltenVK which kind or imposes a weird impedance mismatch and gives weird perf issues soemtimes that you probs wouldn't see with a native Metal backend. And that's before getting into the release of Metal 2. There's a non zero amount of work to support it, and it's not clear how long Apple is going to support Metal 1. And all of that is before all sorts of other crazy stuff with Apple changing their app signing requirements, messaging that they're going to require all apps to be signed by Apple in some future macOS release (but won't tell you when that is).
        pjmlp 8y ago
        > All the middleware that matters.... Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, ... I wasn't talking about in-house solutions, rather engines that many AAA studios buy in order to actually focus on the game itself. As for the rest of your remark, it comes up in places like HN, but not at all when attending local game developer meetups, developer articles on Making Games, Gamasutra, Connection, IGDA, or many other professional publications.
        monocasa 8y ago
        I mean, my day job is supporting an application across Win/Mac/Linux. Even ignoring the graphics, Apple is easily the hardest to support. I don't really care if you haven't read a magazine article on it. And to pretend like FrostBite doesn't matter is ridiculous.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        It doesn't matter for developers that want to support OS X, as it is mostly focused on game consoles and Windows. Whereas the ones I listed do support those systems, Apple platforms, Android and GNU/Linux.
- ponow 8y ago
  Maybe so, but in some circles Macbooks are the most prevalent computer, and these Linux advances are thus hugely relevant.
gnufied 8y ago
Runs 5000 games run on Linux vs runs well on Linux. Unfortunately - Linux still has some way to go. Generally, you get lower FPS on Linux(could matter for competitive gaming). There are graphical glitches and artifacts even on well supported games(I am looking at you Dota2). It is far more likely for game to be entirely broken via an update on Linux than Windows and it can take quite awhile to get the fix.
- VadimPR 8y ago
  Competitive gamers lower graphics, especially on Dota2, and the game runs great on Linux - especially on good drivers like nVidia.
  - klohto 8y ago
    Competitive games are not only Dota
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    And to be fair, competitive gamers are a miniscule part of the the market to the point of being irrelevant.
- moocowtruck 8y ago
  this is the truth! I've been a linux user since 95' more migrating to windows on the desktop now that I'm getting older. I've tried gaming in linux throughout the years (even very recently). And this is a big issue, first getting games to work is actually most times a PITA, and one slight update can break what you had going.. It's difficult to invest in a game if you never know when it might break on your OS.
dazzawazza 8y ago
As someone who has just released[1] a first access game across Windows, macOS and Linux: 10 years ago developing on linux as a game developer was way worse than windows and MacOS, now there is no real difference at all. I speak as a long time UNIX user, Linux was terrible for C++ devleopment, debugging and asset creation/viewing (compared to the others) making gamedev tougher than it needed to be. 10 years ago linux's OpenGL drivers were behind even MacOS and way behind Windows OpenGL which was behind DirectX by quite some way. Now Linux's drivers are fairly good although it's still a nightmare upgrading radeon drivers and NVidia's drivers seem to be fickle. This leads to a lot of bugs from users and supporting various distro/hw/driver combinations. Libraries like libSDL(2) were less mature 10 year ago, multi monitor, input and sound support were patchy because the Linux landscape was fragmented and buggy. Now libSDL2 is pretty much spot on. Mutli-monitor is doable (not as good as macOS but as good as windows), input is pretty good and sound is OK (but most people use FMOD which is superb). Where Linux falls behind is deployment. No I am not going to ship my source for you to compile. itch.io and Steam go a long way to make it easy to deploy and crucially update the game. It's still a PITA to deploy a compiled app on Linux with unclear glibc versions and amazingly it's worse than MS DLL hell of MSVC redistributable shambles. It's not impossible to overcome but it's a PITA for a small market. Not a good position to be in. I support macOS and Linux as well as Windows because I believe in plurality but I can see why many chose not to. Don't think that using Unity or Unreal make anything easier either. In many ways they are worse than a well written custom engine. [1] https://executionunit.itch.io/smith-and-winston https://executionunit.itch.io/smith-and-winston
- moocowtruck 8y ago
  even with snaps or whatever that thing ubuntu has?
  - dazzawazza 8y ago
    Not everyone is on Ubuntu. I currently have eight VMs each with different distros. Mostly it's for testing library compatability on install and input weirdness. That's a lot of testing.
shmerl 8y ago
macOS can't really be considered a proper gaming competitor to Linux, since it runs on very limited hardware. You can't use it for demanding games, unlike Linux.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/
  - shmerl 8y ago
    That doesn't sound like a gaming targeted computer to me. More like an attempt to make a workstation one. Is it even modular? And pricing is crazy. You can build a powerful rig for Linux gaming using way less money.
kayoone 8y ago
tbh i always thought that it's ahead of MacOS for a long time, since Gaming on OSX was always rather terrible.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Still has more games than Linux, eg Blizzard games, call of Duty, Company of Heroes and a bunch of other AAA titles. You can get a bunch of games working on either with Wine.

by Zhyl 8y ago

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago

Beating macOS at gaming sounds like a punchline, that's just not impressive, macOS has only ever been an afterthought for gaming.

de_watcher 8y ago
Yes, you've got to try very hard to be worse than MacOS that is openly sabotaging OpenGL and Vulkan efforts.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Lack of OpenGL and Vulkan support never mattered on game consoles. Even with Switch's adoption of Vulkan, most games are actually using middleware that makes use of NVN. If a platform is relevant to professional games developers, they will target it, regardless of which APIs and OS it requires.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Consoles give very strict contracts that you can rely on to not change for the whole lifetime of the console. In contrary macOS changes stuff every year apparently based on what a fortune teller says for Steve Job's ghost. That means that early on, yeah it's as bad as Mac, but it gets way better over the lifetime of the console.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      All the middleware that matters for professional game studios has supported Metal since for at least one year now.
      - monocasa 8y ago
        Yeah, no. There's talks of Blizzard for instance dropping support for Mac. Dice has a blog post that's messaging concern. It looks like a bunch of engines are going to limp on MoltenVK which kind or imposes a weird impedance mismatch and gives weird perf issues soemtimes that you probs wouldn't see with a native Metal backend. And that's before getting into the release of Metal 2. There's a non zero amount of work to support it, and it's not clear how long Apple is going to support Metal 1. And all of that is before all sorts of other crazy stuff with Apple changing their app signing requirements, messaging that they're going to require all apps to be signed by Apple in some future macOS release (but won't tell you when that is).
        pjmlp 8y ago
        > All the middleware that matters.... Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, ... I wasn't talking about in-house solutions, rather engines that many AAA studios buy in order to actually focus on the game itself. As for the rest of your remark, it comes up in places like HN, but not at all when attending local game developer meetups, developer articles on Making Games, Gamasutra, Connection, IGDA, or many other professional publications.
        monocasa 8y ago
        I mean, my day job is supporting an application across Win/Mac/Linux. Even ignoring the graphics, Apple is easily the hardest to support. I don't really care if you haven't read a magazine article on it. And to pretend like FrostBite doesn't matter is ridiculous.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        It doesn't matter for developers that want to support OS X, as it is mostly focused on game consoles and Windows. Whereas the ones I listed do support those systems, Apple platforms, Android and GNU/Linux.
ponow 8y ago
Maybe so, but in some circles Macbooks are the most prevalent computer, and these Linux advances are thus hugely relevant.

gnufied 8y ago

Runs 5000 games run on Linux vs runs well on Linux. Unfortunately - Linux still has some way to go. Generally, you get lower FPS on Linux(could matter for competitive gaming). There are graphical glitches and artifacts even on well supported games(I am looking at you Dota2). It is far more likely for game to be entirely broken via an update on Linux than Windows and it can take quite awhile to get the fix.

VadimPR 8y ago
Competitive gamers lower graphics, especially on Dota2, and the game runs great on Linux - especially on good drivers like nVidia.
- klohto 8y ago
  Competitive games are not only Dota
- paulie_a 8y ago
  And to be fair, competitive gamers are a miniscule part of the the market to the point of being irrelevant.
moocowtruck 8y ago
this is the truth! I've been a linux user since 95' more migrating to windows on the desktop now that I'm getting older. I've tried gaming in linux throughout the years (even very recently). And this is a big issue, first getting games to work is actually most times a PITA, and one slight update can break what you had going.. It's difficult to invest in a game if you never know when it might break on your OS.

dazzawazza 8y ago

As someone who has just released[1] a first access game across Windows, macOS and Linux: 10 years ago developing on linux as a game developer was way worse than windows and MacOS, now there is no real difference at all. I speak as a long time UNIX user, Linux was terrible for C++ devleopment, debugging and asset creation/viewing (compared to the others) making gamedev tougher than it needed to be. 10 years ago linux's OpenGL drivers were behind even MacOS and way behind Windows OpenGL which was behind DirectX by quite some way. Now Linux's drivers are fairly good although it's still a nightmare upgrading radeon drivers and NVidia's drivers seem to be fickle. This leads to a lot of bugs from users and supporting various distro/hw/driver combinations. Libraries like libSDL(2) were less mature 10 year ago, multi monitor, input and sound support were patchy because the Linux landscape was fragmented and buggy. Now libSDL2 is pretty much spot on. Mutli-monitor is doable (not as good as macOS but as good as windows), input is pretty good and sound is OK (but most people use FMOD which is superb). Where Linux falls behind is deployment. No I am not going to ship my source for you to compile. itch.io and Steam go a long way to make it easy to deploy and crucially update the game. It's still a PITA to deploy a compiled app on Linux with unclear glibc versions and amazingly it's worse than MS DLL hell of MSVC redistributable shambles. It's not impossible to overcome but it's a PITA for a small market. Not a good position to be in. I support macOS and Linux as well as Windows because I believe in plurality but I can see why many chose not to. Don't think that using Unity or Unreal make anything easier either. In many ways they are worse than a well written custom engine. [1] https://executionunit.itch.io/smith-and-winston https://executionunit.itch.io/smith-and-winston

moocowtruck 8y ago
even with snaps or whatever that thing ubuntu has?
- dazzawazza 8y ago
  Not everyone is on Ubuntu. I currently have eight VMs each with different distros. Mostly it's for testing library compatability on install and input weirdness. That's a lot of testing.

shmerl 8y ago

macOS can't really be considered a proper gaming competitor to Linux, since it runs on very limited hardware. You can't use it for demanding games, unlike Linux.

Godel_unicode 8y ago
https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/
- shmerl 8y ago
  That doesn't sound like a gaming targeted computer to me. More like an attempt to make a workstation one. Is it even modular? And pricing is crazy. You can build a powerful rig for Linux gaming using way less money.

kayoone 8y ago

tbh i always thought that it's ahead of MacOS for a long time, since Gaming on OSX was always rather terrible.

Synaesthesia 8y ago
Still has more games than Linux, eg Blizzard games, call of Duty, Company of Heroes and a bunch of other AAA titles. You can get a bunch of games working on either with Wine.