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DirectX and Win32 are Windows APIs.

Are you saying Linux has "games" because it excels at ... emulating them?

What's the point of using/running Linux then when you have a much higher chance of running games successfully natively? What about dozens if not hundreds of games that use a kernel level anticheat? Pretty much none of them work in Linux.

What's the point of native Linux APIs then?

That's weird.

Wine + DXVK are so good, Linux is GREAT.

No, it shows how horrible Linux is when not a single vendor outside of Valve wants to touch it. And everyone who tried to port games to Linux went bankrupt.

2 comments

Proton does such a good job that it is difficult to justify the cost of porting games when they already run on Linux in Proton. That said, Feral Interactive is still porting games to Linux and they have not gone bankrupt:

https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/?platform=linux

Proton often runs games better than the native ports, so there is not much of a loss if there are fewer native ports. Furthermore, in a number of cases, Windows games actually run better on Linux in Proton than on Windows.

Elden Ring is a fantastic example, as on day 1, it performed about 15% better on Linux in average FPS, and had substantially less stutter if I recall correctly.

World of Warcraft is another great example. It is well known to get about 20% better performance on Linux than on Windows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2_LlSaYNUo

Minecraft is another such game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytgDMgYL0eo

If you use AMD GPUs, it is more often the case that Linux will outperform Windows in games, since Valve wrote the shader compiler used for them on Linux and it is fairly amazing:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

Nvidia is working on improvements for the performance of Windows games running on Linux too. A recent driver release mentions a few such improvements:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/237587/

Not all games perform better on Linux than on Windows, although Valve has people actively working on changing this:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog

Another fun one is AMD's Linux drivers support emulated ray tracing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6qbcKT7YY . This game won't even start on a newer/faster GTX 1080Ti

Though speaking of a 1080Ti, that's a GPU you don't want to run on Linux because it lacks some Vulkan features for good DX12 translation: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/465

Are you sure that the game will not run on a 1080 Ti? I recall Nvidia implemented Ray tracing in a compute shader for a number of 10/16 series cards:

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/ray-tracing-gtx-gpu-driver,news...

I ran Quake II RTX on Linux on a GTX 1080 Ti with RTX on back when I still had one. Of course, the performance was bad, but it ran. Some sites have benchmarks:

https://www.thefpsreview.com/2019/06/08/quake-ii-rtx-perform...

The RADV driver apparently did the same for ray tracing on Vega.

I also no longer have one to try. It's pretty easy to find a video on YouTube of someone trying to start the game and failing with a GTX GPU. The specific Vulkan extension it's asking for is VK_KHR_ray_query.

Looks like it was added to Vulkan spec in 2020, so after the Quake 2 RTX. It was implemented for GTX for about 2 versions and removed? https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listreports.php?extension=VK_KHR_...

From this comment that mentions downgrading to that driver version removes another required Vulkan extension for the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/kdzitt/comment/m114...

You can't claim that Linux games running on Windows counts against Linux, but ignore that Windows games also run on Linux. You can't have it both ways.