Speed comparison Linux <> Windows Client

Hi,

i really like playing under Linux because thats my working platform and i dont like rebooting into the dread world of Windooze. Unluckily most Linux games/game-clients are still outperformed by their win counterparts.

As i am lagging like hell in well decorated places and under certain spell related graphics effects i am considering downloading the win client. Does anyone have an idea how much of an performance improvement to expect in general?

cheers,

Armar

 

This depends heavily on drivers. The world of linux drivers is very dynamic, so what is true today may not be tomorrow.

 

I suppose there is no graphic performance test like the Bioware products had? You know running a certain game scene at highest resolution with all effects turned to 100% and after this gives you a performance/frame score? They had it for example in all the Bioshock games.

It would really help to get performance scores for different hardware under the supported hardware.

If one of the devs should read it: It would be cool if there would be some method to score different hardware setups under different OSes (i can test Linux and Windows 8 for example) and be able to publish the results either on the forum or on the wiki. And "you" need it anyway before officially releasing the game.

Is there any Unity 4 gfx performance test one could use?

// Armar

 

I started playing sota because of it's linux support and unfortunately, did find a significant performance improvement under windows... however, my hardware is old. GTS 250. Ubuntu drivers are no longer friendly to it and sota won't even run. I'm sure there is a way to get it working but I know the performance isn't going to justify the effort. I may try again when I upgrade this kit.

meanwhile... windoze.

 

I have run SotA on this same machine in both Windows and Linux (using Linux currently). Windows has better framerates (10-20fps average) and takes less memory, but both are playable. Of course this means that if you're "barely there" as far as system requirements on Windows, Linux may or may not be playable. I just bought this PC last year and it is very powerful, so Linux is playable.

 

I play only under Linux, and I'm here exclusively because Portalarium did support my platform from day 1 and it keeps working on it.

I have no hard data on performance difference, but I'm aware it may be from negligible to significant, depending on many factors. Drivers, framework, specific optimizations (memory access tend to be better under linux, disk I/O under windows), and hardware support (nVidia good, AMD bad) all play a role.

With my setup (in sig), I can play well even in Ardoris at fullhd. In 4K, however, it's always unplayable.

 

I have to deal with Windows sometimes at work and I can tell you that disk IO is much faster on Linux (Ext4 vs NTFS). Also, the newer AMD drivers are supposed to be a lot better (than the old AMD drivers), although I haven't personally tried it.

 

I have also never played on Windows, but Windows users have reported the same stuttering and lag in highly decorated areas so I don't think it'll help too much switching. Chris did say that the game is CPU and disk I/O limited more than it is GFX when they had that 'performance' release a few months back.

If you have AMD hardware the key is to get on the latest Mesa and kernel.

 

A bit late - but perhaps still of interest. I changed my gaming-rig a few month ago from windows to linux after some stupid cat and mouse play with windows 10.
On my Notebook i am on Linux for over a year now. I can not afford the update hassle windows 10 comes with. Could fill a book with all the wired stuff i have seen.

And i noticed only a negligible performance step back. System at this time was about Nvidia 1080, I7 4Ghz, 32GB DDR4, Quad SSD RAID 0...
In fact some things improved to a point were i would say it runs over all better than under windows. All things related to the Network are noticeable better.
For example Bank-Sync, Network-connection/lags, launcher/updates. For me that outweighs the few frames i am missing.
Especially that SotA is a MMO... good network is the bread n butter.
What i can say - for unity graphics - do not underestimate the CPU. I theory an AMD Ryzen would be a perfect choice - Linux in general can handle multiple cpu cores way better than windows. In its heart in think windows would work best with a 10 or 20 Ghz dual core. And that is why intel is doing what they are doing.

 

What?! You mean Portalarium cut out the in-game map and there's still decreased performance? I guess I should try the game on Windows. Must be amazing.

 

they didn't cut out the in-game map. they need a different plugin for each OS and they haven't got the linux one working yet.

 

Plugin? To show an image in a window?
Or to get the 'zoom functionality' working on that image? Because I'd rather see a plain image I can't zoom into than nothing at all. :/
...Maybe with 'zoom feature coming soon in linux' written across it...

 

to load the data for the window from an external site. port doesn't run sotamap.com

 

It's not an image, it's a website.

 

type /debug into your game client it will list your frame rates along with several other types of data at the top of your client so you can compare the two versions. If you walk around with the debug open you can see how frame rates dramatically change depending on how much decor is on lots you are nearby in towns.

 

Avoid the AMD proprietary drivers for now if you are using Linux 4.10 kernel and Radeon RX400-500 series....

Radeon RX400-500 Series problem

I'm currently just using the drivers from Ubuntu and they seem to work fine. I have a lot of problems in most towns now, but hunting scenes I get up to 61fps on Fastest setting. I don't know what kind of comparison can be made, performance wise, with Windows, but I hate Windows and don't mind taking a small hit to not have to deal with that OS.

User Specs:
OS: Linux 4.10 Ubuntu 16.04 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz (4) System RAM: 15990
GPU: Gallium 0.4 on AMD POLARIS10 (DRM 3.9.0 / 4.10.0-30-generic, LLVM 4.0.0) GPU RAM: 8142
SotA.EarlyAccess.LIVE.Linux.64.645.Date.08.03.17
STORAGE: 240gig SSD

 

So wait, 8 gigs worth of disk usage and they don't include the map files in the game's resources? That sounds like a terrible waste of bandwidth. And think of the dialup!

 

of course not, they're changing all the time. governors update their pots, volunteers with access update lot claims in npc towns or find new resource nodes in adventure scenes that hadn't been flagged...

 

Re SotA-Map - this map is a workaround. Initially SotA was supposed to only use the in-game maps you can find/buy. As people complained the private project SotA-Map was integrated. From the developers' comments I believe they want to go to an internal solution which should be better integrated and have a local copy of the data. But this will come eventually later

 

If you're on Linux then this isn't an issue.