311
Windows:
Linux:
"Ignore the cat pic"
How???
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
311 points (96.1% liked)
Linux Gaming
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I'm not exactly playing anything new but I've been playing Grounded (the first one) on Window for like 2 months. My computer was so hot it was warming up my entire room.
I switched to Linux due to other Microsoft issues and decided to give it another shot. Man, my computer doesn't really get warm at all. Like yeah I can see the temp monitor change a little bit but not much. There's no hot air pouring out of my PC. I'm not sweating sitting next to it.
I've made no changes to any game settings (other than using proton) or hardware changes. It's an insane difference.
I love Vulkan so much. Having everything precompiled ahead of time is probably a big contributing factor on why your machine is running cooler. It's just pulling from the shader cache instead of doing on the fly computation for shaders.
That makes sense. I'm still new to all this so I'm kinda learning as I go.
The long and short of it is that Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs are extremely explicit. As the game developer, you tell the GPU exactly what resources are being used, when they're available, and how work is synchronized. Once you've built those command buffers, the driver mostly just submits them to the hardware "fire and forget" style basically.
Older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11 were much higher level. You described what you wanted to draw, and the graphics driver figured out resource transitions, synchronization, and a lot of the scheduling behind the scenes. That made them easier to use but also added CPU overhead and made performance less predictable.
Oh wow, wonder why that is! Microslop is only here to slowly but surely make your computer a slave to their system, Linux along with pretty much all FOSS are here to keep your computer yours (some exceptions sadly exist)
Ignores the post, read the cat
I will ignore everything but the cat. I demand more pics of the cat.
:3
I will not ignore the cat.
I will not ignore the cat pic, in fact I enjoyed it, tyvm.
Same. This is now a cat thread.
Does the cat use Arch, BTW?
Fun fact: cats use arch all the time, btw
How is there not an Arch-derived distro that uses a cat in the shape of the Arch logo for their logo?
Nyarch? Except its a catgirl
I did think of that one after. It's still not a cat arching it's back, like the pictures above, though. Those cats are so close to being in the shape of the Arch logo that someone should make a cat Arch logo.
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How much did you do to optimize on both systems beyond the in-game settings?
Most Linux benchmarks I see have a completely stripped down version of Linux and a bloated version of Windows with tons of running background services just to get similar performance.
And those stutters are a much bigger problem than the 6fps gain.
bloated version of Windows
So Windows
Really needed that cat pick today. Also always cool to see Linux kicking butt
Impressive.
Very nice.
...
Now... lets see Paul Allens cat.
Didn't valve test this sort of thing over a decade ago and found Linux to easily get better performance?
Yes.
Kind of.
Its... why they spent that decade making Proton, and now basically have an OS based off of it.
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Ignore the cat pic? Why did you add it?
In many games it does, but I'm not sure this comparison is a good example of that, as it shows persistent CPU stutter on Linux. With those spikes, Windows would be the smoother experience even if the average frametimes are slightly better on Linux.
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I feel like people don't believe me when I tell them this is the case. Always glad to see evidence.
Irrelevant cat picture to get people to read the post works every time.
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