Formerly known as [email protected] / server shuts down end June 25
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I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn’t set up properly. If I hadn’t then games wouldn’t run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.
The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that’s the driver for this old card just doesn’t work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.
My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.
Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.
I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it’s still not supported properly by all vendors.
The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren’t tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.
Not surprised. Many of these high end GPUs are bought not for gaming but for bitcoin mining and demand has driven prices beyond MSRP in some cases. Stupidly power hungry and overpriced.
My GPU which is an RTX2060 is getting a little long in the tooth and I’ll hand it off to one of the kids for their PC but I need to find something that is a tangible performance improvement without costing eleventy stupid dollars. Nvidia seems to be lying a lot about the performance of that 5060 so I might look at AMD or Intel next time around. Probably need to replace my PSU while I’m at it.
There is nothing worse than playing multiplayer and having somebody who is cheating. Viable and promising games have been ruined by people cheating.
But I don’t see an easy way around the issue but these are the usual solutions:
Personally I’d prefer that multiplayer games obtain consent to install anti cheat and should certify through auditing that the anticheat software is inactive and nonintrusive when the game is not running. Perhaps operating systems could even provide hooks and hard guarantees that this is the case.