| 1 | BATTLETECH LINUX BETA LOADING TEN TIMES FASTER THAN ON WINDOWS \r |
| 2 | 10? OH, THE IRONY... \r |
| 3 | \r |
| 4 | [linux_gaming] 2018-10-09_11-00\r |
| 5 | \r |
| 6 | o Reference: 2018-10-09_11-00_BATTLETECH_Linux_beta_l\r |
| 7 | o News link: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9ld2i1/battletech_linux_beta_loading_ten_times_faster/\r |
| 8 | o Source link: https://steamcommunity.com/app/637090/discussions/0/1693788384146305062/?ctp=13#c2747650363470418004\r |
| 9 | \r |
| 10 | \r |
| 11 | ive always noticed that stuff loads much faster on Linux\r |
| 12 | compared to windows, can someone explain why?\r |
| 13 | \r |
| 14 | \r |
| 15 | ** zee220\r |
| 16 | ive always noticed that stuff loads much faster on Linux\r |
| 17 | compared to windows, can someone explain why?\r |
| 18 | \r |
| 19 | ** pwgen-sy100\r |
| 20 | Better filesystem's, better IO scheduling, better scheduling\r |
| 21 | in general, less chances of some stupid ass av to clog up all\r |
| 22 | the io is what I've found.\r |
| 23 | \r |
| 24 | ** breakbeats573\r |
| 25 | Unless you open calculator on Ubuntu. It's comical\r |
| 26 | actually.\r |
| 27 | \r |
| 28 | \r |
| 29 | ** zebediah49\r |
| 30 | Also what appears to be more aggressive caching, and less\r |
| 31 | bloat to burn through memory that would otherwise be\r |
| 32 | cached.\r |
| 33 | I've note looked too carefully at it, but Windows machines\r |
| 34 | usually appear to have a whole lot of free memory, and\r |
| 35 | relatively little cached.\r |
| 36 | Meanwhile, my laptop has 10GB of "stuff" just floating\r |
| 37 | around in memory in case I happen to want it.\r |
| 38 | \r |
| 39 | \r |
| 40 | \r |
| 41 | ** jhansonxi\r |
| 42 | Yesterday I updated a Win10 laptop that had been sitting on a\r |
| 43 | shelf for two years. I could have installed a dozens systems\r |
| 44 | with *buntu using a online install from a mini boot image,\r |
| 45 | with all major apps installed and updated, in the time it\r |
| 46 | took Win10 to finish its updates, update reattempts, and\r |
| 47 | dozen or so reboots. What's worse is that most of the Win10\r |
| 48 | updates were either for the OS or Office only. Any Linux\r |
| 49 | package manager updates nearly everything and Steam handles\r |
| 50 | most of the rest.\r |
| 51 | \r |
| 52 | \r |
| 53 | ** Batolemaeus\r |
| 54 | AV is the worst offender because it hooks into all I/O. But\r |
| 55 | there's also significant overhead in NTFS when dealing with\r |
| 56 | many small files. It's partially the cost of the much more\r |
| 57 | involved security model on NT (and ACL processing). That's\r |
| 58 | why compiling has an extreme performance penalty on Windows,\r |
| 59 | since it reads and writes many small files.\r |
| 60 | \r |
| 61 | \r |
| 62 | ** aaronfranke\r |
| 63 | In addition to what's already been said, EXT4 doesn't\r |
| 64 | fragment nearly as much as NTFS.\r |
| 65 | \r |
| 66 | \r |
| 67 | ** Craftkorb\r |
| 68 | Linux is pretty good when it comes to utilizing (otherwise)\r |
| 69 | free memory, using it to cache ("buffer") parts of your\r |
| 70 | drives. Just try to do an reading-intensive I/O task, like\r |
| 71 | find / -name stdio.h . The first may take a while, but then\r |
| 72 | just rerun the command. It's much quicker, because Linux\r |
| 73 | cached (in this case) the file structure the first time, and\r |
| 74 | now can just quickly grab it from there again for the second\r |
| 75 | time.\r |
| 76 | Want to see the caching of files (and not structures) in\r |
| 77 | action? Find any medium sized file (about a gigabyte in\r |
| 78 | size). Now, call md5sum path/to/the/file on it. Call it again\r |
| 79 | afterwards. It should be much faster.\r |
| 80 | Don't have such a file handy? You can generate a "large.file"\r |
| 81 | using dd if=/dev/zero of=large.file bs=4096 count=262144 . Do\r |
| 82 | note that by doing this, Linux will already have (all or\r |
| 83 | parts of) the file cached, the difference between both calls\r |
| 84 | should be much smaller.\r |
| 85 | A much more file-centric system basically requires a good I/O\r |
| 86 | cache to get good performance. Crucial for slow spinning\r |
| 87 | drives (or worse, magnetic drives), but still really\r |
| 88 | important for SSDs.\r |
| 89 | \r |
| 90 | \r |
| 91 | ** robot_rover\r |
| 92 | It’s because windows search and windows compatibility\r |
| 93 | telemetry are currently using 100% or ur hard disk time\r |
| 94 | \r |
| 95 | \r |
| 96 | ** JackCourtney\r |
| 97 | Not a game, but GIMP loads so much faster on linux than windows\r |
| 98 | \r |
| 99 | ** 8bitcerberus\r |
| 100 | Pretty much all of them, GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Scribus,\r |
| 101 | Kdenlive, Blender, etc. Faster than Windows and way faster\r |
| 102 | than OS X. Blender is probably the closest I've seen between\r |
| 103 | the 3 OSes, but it's still measurably faster on Linux, the\r |
| 104 | others though, there's no contest.\r |
| 105 | \r |
| 106 | \r |
| 107 | ** pooerh\r |
| 108 | Yeah that's probably mostly because you have gtk libs in\r |
| 109 | shared memory from either other open apps or even your entire\r |
| 110 | DE, while GIMP is the only thing that needs them on Windows.\r |
| 111 | \r |
| 112 | ** one_is_the_loneliest\r |
| 113 | Don't Windows apps typically bundle their own deps, so\r |
| 114 | you'll end up with several of the same dep in memory at a\r |
| 115 | time?\r |
| 116 | However, libraries are typically pretty small, so I'm\r |
| 117 | guessing it doesn't explain most of the difference, but\r |
| 118 | it's certainly a contributor.\r |
| 119 | \r |
| 120 | ** pooerh\r |
| 121 | Whole UI libraries like gtk or Qt are pretty big\r |
| 122 | actually, which is why they usually start slower on\r |
| 123 | Windows than on Linux. Most Windows apps are written\r |
| 124 | using either Win32 API or .net and these aren't bundled\r |
| 125 | with apps, these usually start up pretty quickly.\r |
| 126 | \r |
| 127 | ** one_is_the_loneliest\r |
| 128 | Huh, I just figured that Windows apps would bundle\r |
| 129 | their UI libs, but I guess that makes sense.\r |
| 130 | \r |
| 131 | \r |
| 132 | \r |
| 133 | \r |
| 134 | \r |
| 135 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 136 | Now, maybe they're not comparing fresh load to fresh load, but\r |
| 137 | it wouldn't at all surprise me if it was true when comparing\r |
| 138 | second+ load to second+ load as Linux has always shined very\r |
| 139 | brightly when it came to caching games to RAM better than\r |
| 140 | Windows. Secondary loads in most of the games I've seen load\r |
| 141 | faster than on Windows.\r |
| 142 | \r |
| 143 | ** pdp10\r |
| 144 | Both the Linux storage I/O subsystem and the Linux\r |
| 145 | filesystems themselves are known to be faster than Windows\r |
| 146 | NTFS.\r |
| 147 | On the majority of modern games you don't see much of a\r |
| 148 | difference, though, because the assets are packed into\r |
| 149 | ordered binary files and then memory-mapped. In a way, the\r |
| 150 | devs are working around something of a Windows weakness by\r |
| 151 | doing that (though it's a performance win in general).\r |
| 152 | That's a common pattern -- developers architect the game to\r |
| 153 | work around Windows weaknesses, and of course don't take\r |
| 154 | advantage of the strengths on Linux/POSIX. In principle\r |
| 155 | someone could go the other direction, and design for some of\r |
| 156 | POSIX/Linux strengths; I've pondered the topic in posts here\r |
| 157 | before but neither I nor anyone else has a coherent thesis on\r |
| 158 | the topic yet.\r |
| 159 | \r |
| 160 | ** s0v3r1gn\r |
| 161 | The largest differences between EXT4 and NTFS that affects\r |
| 162 | the I/O are the maximum cluster size and the\r |
| 163 | “allocate-on-flush” method of allocating disk space.\r |
| 164 | The latest version of NTFS substantially increased the\r |
| 165 | maximum cluster size and both the cluster size and the\r |
| 166 | “allocate-on-flush” method are substantially less\r |
| 167 | impactful on loading times on SSDs than they were on HDDs.\r |
| 168 | The largest difference in load times is probably caused by\r |
| 169 | Windows memory management being far more zealous in\r |
| 170 | purging garbage.\r |
| 171 | \r |
| 172 | ** piotrj3\r |
| 173 | This. On loading screen there is a lot of memory\r |
| 174 | allocation and thread creation and so on and this is\r |
| 175 | where linux is faster.\r |
| 176 | \r |
| 177 | \r |
| 178 | \r |
| 179 | ** Tom2Die\r |
| 180 | I've pondered the topic in posts here before but neither I\r |
| 181 | nor anyone else has a coherent thesis on the topic yet.\r |
| 182 | I have faith that some day when you mature a bit more and\r |
| 183 | become a PDP-11 you'll find the answers you seek.\r |
| 184 | \r |
| 185 | ** pdp10\r |
| 186 | And drop 20 bits from the word?\r |
| 187 | \r |
| 188 | ** Tom2Die\r |
| 189 | Wait, did they really? There must be a good reason,\r |
| 190 | but I'm not too familiar with older tech.\r |
| 191 | \r |
| 192 | ** pdp10\r |
| 193 | The short version is that the PDP-10 is a very\r |
| 194 | large 36-bit mainframe, and the PDP-11 is a\r |
| 195 | 16-bit minicomputer that only took up a couple of\r |
| 196 | racks originally -- a small fraction of the\r |
| 197 | physical size. Even thought the model lines sound\r |
| 198 | similar, they were very different product lines\r |
| 199 | that were used for different purposes.\r |
| 200 | PDP-11s were the second model of computer to run\r |
| 201 | Unix, and the place where most of Unix was\r |
| 202 | invented. Only PDP-11s ran Unix until the late\r |
| 203 | 1970s. Later, the most popular hardware to run\r |
| 204 | Unix were VAXes, the 32-bit replacement for the\r |
| 205 | venerable PDP-11s. DEC didn't really like it when\r |
| 206 | customers bought their hardware but not their\r |
| 207 | operating systems. Unix never ran on 36-bit\r |
| 208 | machines. The big tens are rather unique in\r |
| 209 | history.\r |
| 210 | However, the command-line syntax was quite\r |
| 211 | similar on all of the DEC operating systems.\r |
| 212 | Kildall used much of it in CP/M, and through that\r |
| 213 | path, much of it went into DOS. DOS also\r |
| 214 | inherited a bit of syntax from Xenix, which\r |
| 215 | Microsoft had licensed a year or two prior to the\r |
| 216 | IBM PC project.\r |
| 217 | Microsoft wanted to license Xenix to the\r |
| 218 | different OEM computer manufacturers, and sell\r |
| 219 | their apps for Xenix in addition to other\r |
| 220 | operating systems, prior to the IBM PC\r |
| 221 | opportunity falling into their laps. Microsoft\r |
| 222 | did continue to make apps for other operating\r |
| 223 | systems, most fervently MacOS, the home of Excel.\r |
| 224 | Word was on Xenix first, and only much later came\r |
| 225 | to the Mac and to the fledgling Windows.\r |
| 226 | Unix was originally invented for gaming and word\r |
| 227 | processing, and Microsoft Word was originally\r |
| 228 | made for Unix. History is stranger than you\r |
| 229 | think.\r |
| 230 | \r |
| 231 | ** Tom2Die\r |
| 232 | The odd thing is that at one point in time I\r |
| 233 | knew most of that, but it's the sort of trivia\r |
| 234 | that if one doesn't engage with it it just\r |
| 235 | vanishes from memory without notice.\r |
| 236 | \r |
| 237 | \r |
| 238 | \r |
| 239 | \r |
| 240 | \r |
| 241 | \r |
| 242 | \r |
| 243 | ** ihjyuhgyhhg\r |
| 244 | Can confirm, witcher 3 and GTA sa loading on Linux is\r |
| 245 | unbelievably faster than windows.\r |
| 246 | \r |
| 247 | ** sixsupersonic\r |
| 248 | Which is interesting considering those are windows games\r |
| 249 | running in wine.\r |
| 250 | \r |
| 251 | ** ihjyuhgyhhg\r |
| 252 | Exactly and also w3 runs at 24fps compared to 29fps on\r |
| 253 | windows. It was already amazing that game was working but\r |
| 254 | this. Linux is future.\r |
| 255 | \r |
| 256 | \r |
| 257 | \r |
| 258 | ** airspeedmph\r |
| 259 | Not surprised, I have an old X-Plane benchmark where you can see\r |
| 260 | also a striking difference in loading times (link at the\r |
| 261 | respective test):\r |
| 262 | [1]https://youtu.be/M5ygXe9fWR4?t=12\r |
| 263 | I also see very long loading times on Windows for Arma3, Rust\r |
| 264 | and a couple of others, so yeah, not surprised.\r |
| 265 | Edit TL;DW: X-Plane scenery and all loading in 00:56 min for\r |
| 266 | SteamOS and 02:33 min for Windows.\r |
| 267 | \r |
| 268 | \r |
| 269 | \r |
| 270 | \r |
| 271 | [1] https://youtu.be/M5ygXe9fWR4?t=12\r |
| 272 | \r |
| 273 | ** Leopard1907\r |
| 274 | Well , that is a known perk of Linux\r |
| 275 | Once upon a time PenguinRecordings ( a Youtube channel ) was\r |
| 276 | doing Linux game benchmarks.\r |
| 277 | He was always comparing load times on Linux vs Windows. Let it\r |
| 278 | be Feral ports or something else , always Linux was faster one.\r |
| 279 | \r |
| 280 | ** Two-Tone-\r |
| 281 | PenguinRecordings\r |
| 282 | I miss his benchmarks. :c\r |
| 283 | \r |
| 284 | ** Leopard1907\r |
| 285 | Yeah , i also miss.\r |
| 286 | His enthusiasm was really something else.\r |
| 287 | Right after doing Doom 2016 via Wine video , he gone mute.\r |
| 288 | \r |
| 289 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 290 | Yep, sad, wonder what happened to him. Sounds like it\r |
| 291 | may have been a side project while he was in school.\r |
| 292 | \r |
| 293 | ** Leopard1907\r |
| 294 | I hope he is enjoying SteamPlay like we do and\r |
| 295 | living his life. :)\r |
| 296 | \r |
| 297 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 298 | That doesn't mean we don't still need Linux game\r |
| 299 | benchmarking. At least we have Phoronix and a few\r |
| 300 | other youtube channels that do it somewhat.\r |
| 301 | \r |
| 302 | \r |
| 303 | \r |
| 304 | \r |
| 305 | \r |
| 306 | \r |
| 307 | ** mykro76\r |
| 308 | ITT - many apps and games do load faster on Linux.\r |
| 309 | This seems like something worth promoting to game devs as a\r |
| 310 | benefit of developing on Linux. How much time must they spend\r |
| 311 | staring at their own loading screen when tweaking and testing\r |
| 312 | their game?\r |
| 313 | \r |
| 314 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 315 | Good point!\r |
| 316 | \r |
| 317 | \r |
| 318 | ** ThenewLore\r |
| 319 | If it only would load the actual missions and not crash on the\r |
| 320 | mission title...\r |
| 321 | \r |
| 322 | ** Atlas__risen\r |
| 323 | I noticed a big improvement in FFXV on Linux vs Windows as well.\r |
| 324 | \r |
| 325 | ** Offensive_joke_lord\r |
| 326 | My windows-using friend is always so impressed by how fast my\r |
| 327 | games load. Well, it's happened twice, once with invisible inc\r |
| 328 | and once with crusader kings II. I'm pretty sure his computer is\r |
| 329 | better spec-wise as well\r |
| 330 | \r |
| 331 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 332 | On the first load, or subsequent loads, or all loads? Because\r |
| 333 | Linux generally seems faster to load all games on subsequent\r |
| 334 | loads at least, but also sometimes on first loads as well.\r |
| 335 | \r |
| 336 | ** Offensive_joke_lord\r |
| 337 | Both first loads actually, we only play, and have only\r |
| 338 | played, those games together at my house\r |
| 339 | P.S. (yes, they're both singleplayer haha, we have fun\r |
| 340 | playing singleplayer games and exchanging the controls.)\r |
| 341 | P.P.S. (we even divide controls, one time we had 3 people\r |
| 342 | and we played the binding of isaac where one person moved,\r |
| 343 | one attacked, and the other used items)\r |
| 344 | \r |
| 345 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 346 | Cool, and sounds fun, playing together is always best!\r |
| 347 | :3\r |
| 348 | \r |
| 349 | \r |
| 350 | \r |
| 351 | ** Greydmiyu\r |
| 352 | For me it is both. But that is because when I dumped Win10\r |
| 353 | off my gaming rig I purposely went the LVM route so I\r |
| 354 | could clear off my largely unused SSD and make it a\r |
| 355 | [1]cache for my HDD.\r |
| 356 | The problem I had before was that I would get a game, put\r |
| 357 | it on the SSD for fast loading, then move on to another\r |
| 358 | game and not swap the games out from the SSD. With LVM\r |
| 359 | using the SSD as a cache anything I use often gets loaded\r |
| 360 | onto the SSD. If it ever fills up stuff I've stopped using\r |
| 361 | gets removed from SSD. No need for me to manage it\r |
| 362 | manually.\r |
| 363 | Recently it has been Warframe and World of Warcraft that\r |
| 364 | take up the bulk of my time. From boot to shutdown about\r |
| 365 | 80-90% of my file-system calls hit the SSD. I have a 120Gb\r |
| 366 | cache for a 2Tb drive and so far it's only about 60%\r |
| 367 | utilized.\r |
| 368 | A few months of that without touching the Win10 drive I\r |
| 369 | still have sitting there and I can drop the cache, add the\r |
| 370 | 1Tb of space to my volume, expand my file system, put the\r |
| 371 | cache back on and have a 3Tb seamless logical volume to\r |
| 372 | play with. :)\r |
| 373 | \r |
| 374 | \r |
| 375 | \r |
| 376 | \r |
| 377 | [1]\r |
| 378 | https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/using-lvms-new-cache-\r |
| 379 | feature/\r |
| 380 | \r |
| 381 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 382 | The problem I had before was that I would get a game,\r |
| 383 | put it on the SSD for fast loading, then move on to\r |
| 384 | another game and not swap the games out from the SSD.\r |
| 385 | With LVM using the SSD as a cache anything I use often\r |
| 386 | gets loaded onto the SSD. If it ever fills up stuff\r |
| 387 | I've stopped using gets removed from SSD. No need for\r |
| 388 | me to manage it manually.\r |
| 389 | I was about to ask wtf the point of this would be, lol,\r |
| 390 | but that clears things up, thanks!\r |
| 391 | I guess since RAM is more expensive than a SSD, having\r |
| 392 | the SSD cache things makes sense as long as RAM is\r |
| 393 | still used first and foremost for file caching.\r |
| 394 | \r |
| 395 | have a 3Tb seamless logical volume to play with\r |
| 396 | As long as you have a backup somewhere of all your\r |
| 397 | important stuff! Since HDDs are big and cheap I prefer\r |
| 398 | just using one big one. Hell, there are 10TB ones out\r |
| 399 | now and higher.\r |
| 400 | \r |
| 401 | ** Greydmiyu\r |
| 402 | As long as you have a backup somewhere of all your\r |
| 403 | important stuff! Since HDDs are big and cheap I\r |
| 404 | prefer just using one big one. Hell, there are 10TB\r |
| 405 | ones out now and higher.\r |
| 406 | These are the two largest drives I have. I used to\r |
| 407 | have Win10 on the 1TB and used the 2TB to record\r |
| 408 | gaming videos. When I wanted to switch I realized I\r |
| 409 | could just drop Linux on the 2TB drive and have the\r |
| 410 | 1TB Win10 to fall back to if my litmus test for\r |
| 411 | Linux wasn't passed this time around (Warframe & WoW\r |
| 412 | being playable).\r |
| 413 | Being able to merge the 1TB into the file system is\r |
| 414 | just an added bonus for when I'm ready to get rid of\r |
| 415 | the safety blanket. Been a month and I think I've\r |
| 416 | thought about booting to that drive... once? But the\r |
| 417 | desire to try Destiny 2 again passed. :)\r |
| 418 | \r |
| 419 | \r |
| 420 | \r |
| 421 | \r |
| 422 | \r |
| 423 | ** yoshi314\r |
| 424 | too bad this beta won't load its own saves. i am reluctant to\r |
| 425 | replay game from scratch again, because neither autosaves nor my\r |
| 426 | manual saves will load.\r |
| 427 | \r |
| 428 | ** Dakkaface\r |
| 429 | Haven't have that issue myself, it's been working for me\r |
| 430 | aside from some graphical glitches. Hopefully they get it\r |
| 431 | working for everyone soon.\r |
| 432 | \r |
| 433 | \r |
| 434 | ** MJBrune\r |
| 435 | I will say while I do think there is some sort of faster load on\r |
| 436 | linux, one user randomly staying on a forum shouldn't really be\r |
| 437 | big news and certainly shouldn't be held as true to any real\r |
| 438 | means.\r |
| 439 | \r |
| 440 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 441 | Linux loading times being faster for many games, especially\r |
| 442 | during 2nd+ loads, is 100% confirmed. As for this particular\r |
| 443 | game, other users have confirmed the same thing within this\r |
| 444 | very post.\r |
| 445 | So, while wanting evidence is amiable, we already have it.\r |
| 446 | \r |
| 447 | ** MJBrune\r |
| 448 | I mean sure. And there are plenty of benchmarks to show\r |
| 449 | it. I just think "10 times" is a bit excessive and random.\r |
| 450 | I dunno. Am not trying to crap on your joke either.\r |
| 451 | \r |
| 452 | ** Swiftpaw22\r |
| 453 | I don't know how accurate "10" is hehe, but some of the\r |
| 454 | benchmark videos show huge differences, so I totally\r |
| 455 | get someone say "10 times faster". But we don't have to\r |
| 456 | be overly anal, they just mean it's "much faster" I'm\r |
| 457 | sure, and that much is confirmed.\r |
| 458 | Nothing against anal. :3\r |
| 459 | \r |
| 460 | \r |
| 461 | \r |
| 462 | \r |
| 463 | \r |