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