Linux Gaming

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Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

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Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.

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founded 2 years ago
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A bootstrapper for Sober (Roblox client for Linux). - Wookhq/Lution

What is Lution?

Lution is a third-party bootstrapper (like Bloxstrap) for Sober. It enhances your experience with Roblox on Linux with QoL tweaks/extra features.

And the best part, ALL OF YOUR BLOXSTRAP MODS WORK.
Well, so far, atleast they have been tested to work 100%.

Showcase video linked below...

The only drawback is that you will have to build the software yourself from scratch...
Which is why, if you can, help out the developer and ship packages for your distro.

Have an awesome day ahead!

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So far all of my Linux gaming has been without mods, but I would like to play Grim Dawn with all of the community tools and QoL mods that make the game a great experience. Does anybody know of any good guides to get Grim Dawn and all of its mods going on Linux? Is this something that I will need to do in a sandboxed setup like Bottles?

I own GD on GOG and Steam (bought it twice to support the devs).

EDIT: I could not find a definitive guide, so I am using this post to collects instructions for the different mods into one place.

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My main desktop, that I use to game on, is approaching 5 years old. It's a System76 Thelio Mira, and has been starting to show its age. I recently upgraded the CPU to the best I could get, without swapping motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. I upped the memory to 64 GB, and the last upgrade I could easily to is to replace my old NVidia GeForce RTX 2060.

I've been trolling for an Intel Arc B580, mainly for the bang-for-the-buck performance. They have been selling for a lot over MSRP, but that seems to be common for all. I finally was able to get one a Microcenter for $329, the cheapest I've seen in months.

I use PopOS! on my desktop, and have been waiting for at lest the Beta release of Cosmic to upgrade, so am currently running on 22.04 LTS.

Installing was very simple. I followed the few steps on Intel's website:
https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html#ubuntu-22.04

I powered off, swapped GPUs, and booted up, and it booted right up successfully. I then purged all the NVidia software/drivers, and rebooted without issue. Nothing further was needed.

I don't play AAA games much. My son plays Minecraft, and Jurassic World Evolution. I had installed Witcher 3 as a test right before swapping the cards.

The only hiccup in Steam was I needed to disable the Shader Pre-caching, then re-enabled (to force it to re-do it on the new GPU). Everything is butter smooth, without any other consideration. The whole system runs cooler too. I then installed Tiny Glade, which is known for stressing GPUs. It runs very well.

I've read some games do weird things on this card, but I have yet to have any issues at all. So far I am extremely pleased. I even got OpenWebUI/Ollama running on this card (that's another post).

Anyways, not sure if anyone is interested, but figured someone may be on the fence with that oddball card.

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I installed tinytopia using steam on Linux, but it installs a pre release beta instead of the final version. It looks like the dev actually build a Linux version when in early access but then neglected the platform.

In this case it can be ok as it's not too different from the final windows build (physics of gravity looks off sometimes) and I can run at 60fps at ultra settings on my laptop, while if I run it from windows it's a slideshow with the same graphics settings but I'm wondering: Is it possible to tell steam to ignore the native build and use the windows one with proton?

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Driver support

The Vulkan extension VK_KHR_maintenance5 is now required. DXVK has been relying on guarantees made by this extension since version 2.5, so in order to remove some maintenance burden, fallbacks that would allow older drivers to run were now removed.

Please check the driver support page on the Wiki for details.

Note: These changes will primarily affect Windows users on AMD Polaris and Vega GPUs, for which AMD has effectively discontinued driver support. On Linux, these older GPUs will keep working on RADV when using Mesa 25.0 or newer.

Due to a growing number of compatibility issues with the AMD Windows driver in general, supporting it is no longer a priority.

Binding model changes

Descriptor management was largely rewritten and modernized. On newer AMD and Nvidia cards, VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer is now used by default, which significantly reduces CPU overhead compared to the legacy binding model and may thus improve CPU-bound performance in games such as Final Fantasy XIV, God of War, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Watch Dogs 2 and others.

This feature remains disabled on older GPUs due to severe performance regressions in some cases, specifically on Nvidia Pascal or older, as well as AMD RDNA2 or older when using AMDVLK or the AMD Windows driver. RADV is unaffected by these issues.

Note: A small hit to GPU-bound performance is expected in some cases, in exchange for more consistent overall performance. Users can override the default behaviour with the dxvk.enableDescriptorBuffer option. Enabling Resizeable BAR on supported systems is strongly recommended.

Memory management

Memory defragmentation is now enabled by default on Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake GPUs. On older Intel GPUs, this feature remains disabled as it may cause rendering issues for unknown reasons, see #4395.

On discrete GPUs, DXVK will now enforce the driver-reported VRAM budget as much as possible, and dynamically evict unused resources to system memory when under memory pressure. This should improve performance in many Unity Engine titles on VRAM-constrained systems, and may allow for higher texture quality settings to be used in some games. Temporary slowdowns and stutters are still expected when exceeding VRAM capacity.

Note: This feature currently does not work as intended on AMD GPUs due to kernel driver issues.

Legacy feature removal

The state cache was introduced in Version 0.80 to reduce shader compilation stutter, and has been largely unused since the introduction of VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library in DXVK 2.0. In order to reduce maintenance burden, particularly with pipeline-related changes in this release, this legacy feature was now removed.

Additionally, the d3d9.forceSwapchainMSAA option was removed. This feature was not really useful since most games either use additional render targets or provide a built-in MSAA option themselves anyway. For games that do not provide built-in MSAA, users are encouraged to use Gamescope to run these games with a higher render resolution instead.

Bug fixes and Improvements

  • Added support for planar video output views. (PR #4872). This is required for video playback in JR EAST Train Simulator.
  • D3D11 shaders will now zero-initialize all variables and groupshared memory by default in order to work around game bugs resulting in undefined behaviour. The d3d11.zeroWorkgroupMemory option was removed accordingly.
  • Optimized D3D9 StretchRect in certain multisample resolve cases encountered in Source Engine. (PR #5023)
  • Fixed an instance of invalid Vulkan usage in Modulus, and possibly other Unity Engine games that use the D3D11 video API.
  • Implemented support for the ID3DDestructionNotifier interface.
  • Vulkan devices that lack the required feature support to run DXVK will no longer be listed as DXGI / D3D9 adapters. This may fix crashes in case an outdated graphics driver or an unsupported integrated GPU are present on the system.
  • Trying to build DXVK in a MinGW environment with AVX enabled will now result in a compile-time error. We cannot support AVX builds due to toolchain issues, nor is it expected to be beneficial.
  • Astebreed: Fixed crash when changing graphics options. (PR #5034)
  • GTR - FIA GT Racing Game: Worked around a game issue that would cause it to not start. (PR #5072)
  • LEGO City Undercover: Worked around a game issue that would cause the intro video to be broken. (#4997, PR #5000)
  • Star Trek: Starfleet Command III: Worked around resource leak in GOG build. (PR #5056)
  • Test Drive Unlimited 2: Worked around alt-tab issue causing input loss. (PR #5057)
  • Wargame: European Escalation: Worked around gamma issue when the game detects an Nvidia GPU. (PR #5055)
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I've recently been playing more games with controller support on Steam and have had some issues getting them to work.

I have a DualShock 4 Controller (for a PS4) and it works fine for some proton games with controller support (Rainworld and BG3 for example) work fine out of the box. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Balatro both work with the default settings but only on Wayland (Hyprland). The games that work only on Wayland display Xbox button glyphs, leading me to believe that they are using Steam Input. I have in the past been able to play games with no controller support using Steam Input to emulate keyboard inputs on x11.

I am now trying to play LEGO Lord of the Rings which has Xbox Controller support but not Playstation Controller support and as such would require Steam Input. I would be happy to get it working on either x11 (i3) or preferably Wayland (Hyprland) but so far the closest I have gotten is being able to select my controller as an input device in the settings (by a button press being detected), this did however not allow me to perform any menu inputs and I was not able to reproduce it after restarting the game.

Overall my experience with my controller has gotten slightly worse over the past years (x11 only, I have barely used it when on Wayland) and I was wondering if anyone in this community had experience with non Xbox/Steam controllers in Steam that they would be willing to share.

A few of side notes:

  • The controller works fine for Steam in big picture mode and it is an official Play Station controller from Sony.
  • My Steam is installed via flatpak on the device using x11 and the device using Wayland.
  • Both devices are setup with EndeavourOS (arch based).
  • I run most of my non native games on Proton Experimental.

If I missed some important details that could help resolve my issues or explain why the controller behaves so different on the two devices I'm happy to answer questions :)

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Interesting video showing almost no difference in performance between gaming distros and Windows 11 LTSC. What is your opinion on this?

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I installed Garuda Dr460nized on a Surface Pro 5. WiFi drivers were missing, but manual install from USB helped.

However, performance is a nightmare. Sound stutters, even Steam itself doesn't run well.

Any ideas? I know people run games like Left 4 Dead on Windows on these systems.

I'm absolutely new to Arch, and haven't touched Linux in years. However, I was able to confirm the iGPU is detected and a driver is installed.

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cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/27451562

Seemingly for the first time, the Bazzite gaming-focused Linux distro has appeared on the Steam Hardware Survey. Well done to the Bazzite team for making such an amazing distro for gaming (and now just general usage as a while too)! Been my main choice for going on a year now for my general use distro, and I haven't looked back.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=linux

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Embark | Dusty @NAMA

Hey guys! There are no plans to drop support for SteamOS/Proton/ Wine and/or Steam Deck, despite us not officially supporting the platform. We will do our utmost best to maintain your ability to play!

Embark | tvandijk

Just to add to what Dusty just said, we're working pretty closely with CodeWeavers to QA every release we put out there since about Season 5, and I don't see a reason to stop that. It's not exactly a collaboration, but we do catch issues with SteamDeck early because at the very least they do a pass on the game before we release a patch. Do we miss some things once in a while, absolutely. It's not our primary platform after all, but we understand there is a pretty passionate and growing playerbase on SteamDeck. Please keep reporting issues here, to our support, or report them to the Proton devs directly, and we will investigate what we can do to fix things...

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Only thing that happens is that I get a black screen. Not sure what's happening, no error, nothing.

Disabled secure boot and stuff in UEFI.

Any suggestions? I feel stupid.

Edit: I'll leave it here for whomever might come next: use Ventoy to create the USB, not Rufus, and then boot in grub2 option. It's installing now, at least. Let's see...

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