Arch Linux

filipbekic01

Member

Registered: 2015-08-10

Posts: 41

FPS in games and system performance

Hello everybody,

Question one: If i have proper AMD Radeon graphic driver, in my case "radeon", will i have some amount of frames per second in games (steam) as on Windows platform?

Question two: Will my applications run faster than on Windows (like Sublime, MySQL Workbench, Chrome/Chromium etc.)?

I am still not sure if Linux is more for "background/server" applications or desktop one.

Last edited by filipbekic01 (2015-09-18 16:54:59)

3d12

Member

From: Minnesota, USA

Registered: 2015-05-09

Posts: 6

Re: FPS in games and system performance

As I understand it, your graphics would be at the same FPS as long as the game is programmed to run natively in Linux. If you are emulating a Windows environment (via WINE or another wrapper) you will likely experience framerate drops just because you're running more software at the same time as your game. As an analogy, imagine running your game in a VM inside of Windows.

As for your second question, some programs may be optimized better for your hardware, and Linux is famous for the customizability of programs to work with your hardware, so I'd assume as long as you've made the proper optimizations you'll get better processing speeds for your programs than an un-optimized binary in Windows would. But for the same out-of-the-box software, without any personal optimization tweaks? The performance increase would likely be negligible, if at all.

Linux isn't "for" one or the other, it can be what you want it to be. Although most people will say their use for Linux is "the best," it's really up to you if you want to configure it for desktop use or leave it as more of a CLI/Server type environment. What do you want to use it for, and why do you think Arch isn't the answer for you?

filipbekic01

Member

Registered: 2015-08-10

Posts: 41

Re: FPS in games and system performance

Thanks for reply. I don't, im just asking, i'm curious. I use Arch for programming (Sublime, Workbench, Chromium are the most used programs on my PC, im web developer) and i play some games on Steam.

3d12

Member

From: Minnesota, USA

Registered: 2015-05-09

Posts: 6

Re: FPS in games and system performance

Of course!

Personally, I keep Arch on a separate PC which I can SSH into from wherever and get work done, and I keep Windows on my gaming PC. As much as all games theoretically "work" under Arch, realistically I don't have as much free time as I'd need to configure and optimize everything gaming/multimedia-wise to run in Arch. Your mileage may vary.

I guess in your case, if a second PC just for Arch is unrealistic and you're noticing severe performance drops running games in Arch, you could look into reformatting your HDD and dual-booting with Arch/Windows. But depending on your hardware, the performance drop may not be that bad.

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: FPS in games and system performance

As far as I know, 3D performance of the open source AMD driver (radeon) isn't as good as of the closed source driver (catalyst).

TheChickenMan

Member

From: United States

Registered: 2015-07-25

Posts: 354

Re: FPS in games and system performance

I also think that Windows tends to have more bloat running in the background which you just don't know what it's doing. It's hard to quantify but even a "heavyweight" Linux setup seems to me to run things generally faster and better because of this alone.

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If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
Niels Bohr