What is often overlooked
Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there’s no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.
Ntsync is great and there will be performance improvement. But not exactly
massiveXDA was not always this sensationalist. With that said, I always welcome performance improvements.
XDA will write articles these days like:
- How this wallpaper has proven how I’ve been using computers wrong for 30 years
- These gloves improved my typing speed 300%
- I painted my NAS red and you won’t believe the improvements
I painted my NAS red and you won’t believe the improvements
Orks approve
I painted my NAS red and you won’t believe the improvements
Okay this just unlocked a random memory. Back when I worked at a call center, on a slow day a lady called about a product that we no longer directly supported, and she went on a huge tangent about how everything she buys is bright red to remind her of the fires of hell. Bright red purse, bright red clothing, bright red phone, bright red computer, etc. she also told me quite a bit about a children’s book series she wrote about a Christian dog
My old ass remembers when XDA was a place where you learned how to put Android on your windows phone
That was the XDA forums, I never found their site very usefuly, but maybe that’s just me.
every time i’ve tried to decypher something from the XDA forums i feel like i’m looking into a different dimension, i’m guessing it’s because most of the people there are non-western and thus it’s quite literally true (india has a ton of native english speakers after all, whose version of english is quite different), but boy does it hurt my brain.
Same thing with telegram, the way people write and behave makes me uneasyThat too, and I’d hazard a guess the people posting on XDA have strong imbalance of social/communication skills compared to their technical expertise.
Oh I know, but for a long time that was the only reason to visit the site.
Yeah the forums are a treasure for old phone hacking
seriously. their stuff now is borderline clickbait! so. many. listicles.
Not borderline, they’re literally a clickbait farm now. There’s an almost daily release of the exact same articles rehashed (e.g. “these are the main Docker containers I run on every server” title changed up a little and it’s literally always the same 4-5 containers).
Or hacked up your own android rom because even knowing jack and shit you could.
It should still fix minor stuttering that some gets get on Linux, which will be pretty huge.
What’s massive is the need for clicks
The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too.
These don’t sound massive to you?
You won’t see those because most probably you are already using one of other *sync
Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.
I don’t think that’s overlooked at all. 99.9% of people using WINE/Proton aren’t going to have any idea what fsync is, and almost nobody not using
proton-cachyosis going to use it. fsync, itself a workaround, is niche within what’s already a niche.From what I found online, Steam enables esync by default, and fsync if your kernel supports it.
Lutris has both options nowadays in the runner settings. Idk if they’re both enabled by default, but in my case they’re enabled. ymmv there.
In short, LXDE was the measured as the fastest desktop environment for gaming, while XFCE with compositor disabled came in second fastest out of the ones tested. If you need the maximum performance XFCE may be a good compromise between looks vs performance. You can use the “Disable desktop effects” option in Lutris which may reduce the overhead of the desktop environment further.
any idea how this would compare to starting steam directly from a display manager using gamescope as the compositor?
I’m imagine gamescope is the best-case, since there’s no other apps or visual effects.
What are the kernel requirements? Is it something any random Debian user is likely to have, or do you need to be compiling it yourself?
From the article:
Futex2, often referred to interchangeably with fsync, did make it to Linux kernel 5.16 as futex_waitv, but the original implementation of fsync isn’t that. Fsync used futex_wait_multiple, and Futex2 used futex_waitv. Applications such as Lutris still refer to it as Fsync, though. It’s still kind of fsync, but it’s not the original fsync.
So since Jan 2022, it’s been in the stable Linux kernel. For Debian and its derivatives, it would be included beginning with Bookworm.
So basically, both esync and fsync are enabled by default for almost everybody.
Assuming that most non-technical users (who wouldn’t research and enable it) are probably using Wine/Proton through Steam: yeah.
Fsync maybe not but AFAIK esync is widely used. On some protondb pages there’s a hint to disable esync, not the other way round. And while esync is not as performant as fsync, it is still much better than vanilla
It’s worth noting that the new sync implementation shouldn’t cause any of the compatibility problems esync and fsync ran into, so it’s a worthwhile upgrade from a stability viewpoint even if a user won’t see huge performance gains.
99.9% of people using WINE/Proton aren’t going to have any idea what fsync is
Speaking, although I’ve heard the term thrown around a lot. Can I get a layman’s overview?
I think it’s pretty well described in the article of the post
You’re right, it is.
You can try all you want, but you will never get me to read the articles before commenting.
I remember hearing that Ntsync isn’t even faster than fsync in general use, just in some rare corner cases
This is true and expected, the point of NTSYNC was to be a more faithful emulation of Windows synchronization primitives, so increased compatibility and correctness. If it’s ever faster than esync or fsync it’s just a bonus. It’s on par generally, though.
