Nobara OS, Arch Linux and Pop!_OS beat Windows 11 by a slim margin in fps (delta 8) in Windows native games - Cyberpunk 2077, Forspoken, Starfield and The Talos Principle II. Windows 11 wins in Rachet & Clank.
ComputerBase’s testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.
Update: Windows 11 wins in one game.
Soooo when did Arch become a gaming focused OS?
Since Valve decided that.
Pretty much this.
I upvoted but it sounds hostile. Since valve started using and contributing to arch appears to be more reasonable.
No arch btw.
it sounds hostile.
I like my Steam Deck. Why would I be hostile? You’re reading too much into a concise statement.
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Many readers are overly sensitive these days. If you use things like a period on the end of your sentences, and don’t include emojis, then anything you say will be called out as “hostile” by some people.
Also, I’ve noticed many people ignore qualifiers in speech. If you use qualifiers thoughtfully, having them ignored by the reader can lead to miscommunication. I think the fact that so many people have used them without thought has led to a blindness for qualifiers. OTH, not including qualifiers can make us sound authoritative and even arrogant to some people.
For instance, in my first sentence, above, I said “Many readers…”, and “…things like…”, and “…by some people.” If you ignore those qualifiers, what I said takes on a very different tone.
Can’t win for losing.
Manjaro is/used to be a good choice for gaming purpose
I assume doog is the opposite of good, in which case I agree
fixed
Is arch really gaming focused though?
Arch is focused on being cutting-edge and lightweight which happens to be perfect for gaming performance in most cases but that’s all.
Arch is focused on however you put it together
Arch is focused like the same way a beach is a camera lens.
Exactly. The only thing Arch focuses on is not focusing on anything. They ship packages as vanilla as possible, have pretty much no default configuration, etc. In short, they try to make as few assumptions as possible.
It ends up being pretty good for gaming because Linux is pretty good for gaming. They’re explicitly not doing anything special here.
SteamOS is based on Arch, likely why they picked it.
That’s like saying PlayStation 5 and Switch are based on FreeBSD, so you should game on FreeBSD (well, not quite, but hopefully the point is clear). FreeBSD isn’t good for gaming, it’s just liberally licensed and easy to build on top of, hence why it’s used.
Valve has reasons to use an Arch base, and none of them have anything to do with any specific benefit regarding gaming. It’s easy to fork and maintain customized build files for since it makes so few assumptions (packages are as vanilla as possible in Arch, so it’s easier to maintain a patch set).
Valve likely has patches in SteamOS that haven’t made it to upstream Arch, and there’s likely a number of packages that are quite outdated vs upstream Arch, so installing upstream Arch will give you quite a different experience vs SteamOS.
shrug, I’ve been using arch and Manjaro for years and gaming in them. They are what you make them, and AUR is massive and solves a lot of problems I have in other distros so that’s why I use it.
I recently switched to ubuntu in a gaming laptop, right now I’ve been using it just for jellyfin and some other coding tasks, but it definitely runs smoother, more stable, quicker, and cooler than windows did for the same workload.
I was surprised at the difference of even just having the machine idle, on windows it was noticeable warm, now on ubuntu it’s almost as if it has been turned off.Honestly, at this point – If Valve made a more generalized Linux OS… or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.
Now now, I’m not saying YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP!! - but Valve would be a great mother for fostering an ecosystem that would potentially make Microsoft compete by not making their OS shittier year-by-year.
If Valve made a Linux OS… or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.
Sorry, does SteamOS 3 not count? Is Valve’s massive investment in Mesa, Wine, Wayland (HDR, Gamescope, etc) not exactly what you’re talking about? I feel like we’re living in parallel dimensions or something lol
Yh it does count although it only supports a certain set of hardware. Not entirely sure if that’s true though.
Yes but the improvements and contributing Valve made to various packages in the Linux ecosystem and the kernel were all pushed upstream meaning any Linux distribution can benefit from them.
Aren’t all of these things basically out-of-band investments? They didn’t recontribute upstream to these projects from what I understand, but they made their own forks and developed on those - or those projects have scurried to backport the changes Valve has made, simply being lucky enough that the licenses required them to remain open so the changes could be pulled backwards into public projects.
SteamOS is not a General Purpose OS. It is a hardware-specific Linux fork of Arch. Not the same thing.
So while yes, Valve has used Linux quite gracefully for their ends; my point was that if they acted more as an orchestrator and guided the community in the general OS space, they would be good stewards for doing so.
Valve didn’t invest in Wine. They forked it, called it Proton, developed that, and Wine can only benefit if they scurry and ‘chase’ the changes in Proton. There’s nothing wrong with that - but it’s hardly conducive to improving existing projects.
Aren’t all of these things basically out-of-band investments? They didn’t recontribute upstream to these projects from what I understand
Maintaining a fork is not mutually exclusive with contributing changes upstream. Valve’s policy is to upstream everything.
So many errors in what you’ve said. Valve made Proton with the developers from CodeWeavers who make Wine, quite literally investing in the developers and development of Wine itself. And given Valve upstream everything, your comments about forking, back porting, etc are quite ill informed.
That’s why they were posed as questions, and not statements. And I also quite clearly stated that my understanding may have been wrong.
Steam deck was definitely a move in this direction. From what I hear people like it. If they like it, I see more traction to it as people understand that it’s not windows. Ya never know. 2035: year of the Linux desktop!
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Computerbase is very solid and well known in Germany and have been covering Linux quite a bit for a while now.
Performance of course can fluctuate heavily between games but the amount of progress that Linux made over the past decade is nothing but astonishing.that’s kind of my take on it too. Linux has come so far from what it used to be like. it’s not quite ready to see mass-adoption, but it’s making some amazing strides. so many different parties have been contributing to a massive effort to iron out some of the issues with Linux. once performance improves significantly over Windows, and compatibility gets a little more wide-spread, you’ll start to see people willing to put up with the teething problems, in the name of superior performance.
THAT is when Linux will see more mainstream success.
some year, i don’t know when, really will be the year of Linux… maybe.
I don’t think we’ll see like some definitive year of Linux, instead we will just have slowly rising user numbers. The only exception would be if Microsoft fucks up so badly that it will completely drive people away from Windows.
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You mean worse than the train wreck of Vista, then 8, then 11? Yes they will continue to do worse for most people but it wont matters as long as it is the default choice.
Always count on a corporation to make something worse.
Apparently so. At least that’s what the numbers suggest.
Description is false. Windows won in R&C. This was not an across the board win for Linux. Good news doesn’t need to be sensationalized.
Updated the summary about Windows winning.
Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don’t run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.
Its like people miss the good old days of “This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don’t work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don’t”. Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn’t still work to be done serves no benefit.
Yup. Just use the same benchmarks major sites use and note any interesting differences. They usually pick games for specific technical reasons, so most of the work figuring out where Linux is weak is done for you.
I personally play on Linux because I use Linux, but because I think it has better performance than Windows or whatever. That should be the selling point, not slight differences in performance. Show that Linux is largely on par with Windows, and then go through all of the other benefits to using Linux, like privacy, package management, and user choice.
Yeah. More or less the same. Pretty much the entirety of my work day is in a terminal and I have increasingly liked “linux” as a desktop since Mint (and now Plasma) are “more windows than windows” in terms of UI/UX. WSL gets Windows a lot of the way toward the OS I want (a good nix-ish terminal with a strong GUI for day to day), but MS also add more and more spyware and stupidity with every update so…
But holy crap do the evangelists go out of their way to undermine widespread linux adoption. Whether it is pretending that opencad is at all a replacement for fusion 360 or that gimp is comparable to photoshop or it is inflating performance or compatibility numbers.
Like, I’ve tried to switch over a few times over the years. And it has always been a shitshow. ProtonDB goes a long way, but it is also prone to outdated information (since the one person still playing Tribes 2 has no need to try newer versions of wine/proton and so forth). And if you check message boards you get the same skewed bullshit. Which mostly boils down to “Okay, well. I figured out that game X won’t work. And I now assume that these fifty other games I care about won’t either”
These days? it is a lot easier because Valve have put in the work to the point that I can more or less just check games in steam. There is still the risk of a new patch breaking something, but it is a lot closer to the good parts of protondb where the steps to recover to a good build are pretty easy (Armored Core 6 was basically a case of just rolling back a major revision of proton) rather than the shitshow. Which then makes it “Well, game X won’t work. But I am reasonably confident that every other game I care about will run performantly so…”
This is exactly why I don’t recommend my distro, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It works well for me, but online help is more limited vs Fedora and the various Debian derivatives. I’ve been Linux only for something like 15 years, and I’d hate for someone to take my advice and have a bad experience.
So I recommend Linux Mint Debian, because I know Debian is solid and Linux Mint has a ton of support. I also tell people to not expect crazy performance and for some games to just not work, that way they’ll be pleasantly surprised when things work better than they expect. As they say, under promise, over deliver.
Of the two main games I play, one doesn’t work on Linux due to the anti-cheat they use, and the other has horrific stuttering while loading game assets.
But Linux works better for the curated selection for this article.
Ok, but what about Nvidia GPUs? Those are what the the vast majority of gamers use.
93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
Nvidia has been kind of a mess for me on Wayland, especially the lastest 545 drivers. I just switched to AMD and literally all my issues disappeared, including one I thought was a KDE plasma bug
Looks like KDE Plasma 6 is going to default to Wayland, so I’ll probably give it another shot when it comes out (in Feb I think?). I’m currently on GNOME because of weird KDE Wayland issues on my AMD card (maybe it’s no longer a thing, IDK). I don’t have a strong preference between them, but my kids use my computer and I think KDE is probably easier for them.
From my experience default KDE is more windows-like so it can help with transition for Windows users
My kids don’t have any experience with Windows, they’ve only used ChromeOS (at school) and Linux (my computers, one has Plasma 5, and the other has GNOME).
But yeah, it feels kinda Windows like with the start menu and whatnot.
It’s anecdotal but I saw a significant improvement in multiple games on an Nvidia 1050 running Nobara. Had no issues installing drivers and getting things set up.
Nvidia 1070 here. Haven’t run into problems using Mint or Endevour. Had to choose propriety drivers on Mint, but that was it.
Might buy an AMD card next, but that’s more to see if there are any features I’m missing out on. I’m also excited to see whether AMD has grown better hardware, as it was a constant hassle when I last used one 10+ years ago.
For now I will probably keep buying used Nvidia cards, but I’ve considered going AMD for graphics at some point. Love my Ryzen CPU.
Yea, Ryzen Is awesome! No plans on going back to Intel.
While Intel might have better IPC, AMD having twice as many cores easily makes up for this.
Might come with an argument in regard to single-threaded games, but that should not be relevant with pretty much everything having moved to multi-thread by now.
And if it’s still single threaded you’ll most likely have plenty of performance no matter the brand.
That’s just how it is, no matter if you like it
I use NVIDIA gpus and they have worked fine for me.
Does it really matter? The majority buy Nvidia due to mindshare, the same probably goes for why they use Windows.
Nvidia has been so far ahead of AMD cards for so long, and running AI stuff on them is a much better experience as well.
I love AMD and wished it weren’t so, but buying an AMD video card can only be justified by price or Linux compatibility.
I’ve forgotten which generation but the last time AMD had the better card most people still bought Nvidia.
I only dislike AMD significantly less than Nvidia. Give me friendly company with non-proprietary drivers and I’d consider that even if it wasn’t “the best”.
The majority buys NVIDIA, because NVIDIA cards are just better.
At least in terms of the latest features, like RTX. If you’re only interested in raster performance, AMD works quite well and provides excellent value.
Not just the latest features. NVENC is better for both streaming and untethered VR, CUDA is usually better supported by photo/video/3D/CAD software, etc. AMD is only good if you’re only playing games and can’t afford an NVIDIA card.
Or you’re like me and use Linux and value better drivers (e.g. Wayland support, no update bugs on rolling release distros, etc) over those other features.
And on Windows as well, if you’re buying mid-range, you’re probably not going to have a good experience with those other features, so you should go with AMD. The premium for buying Nvidia at the mid-range often isn’t worth it.
Well, I don’t buy midrange, personally. As I tend to use my GPU for hobbies and work, I tend to buy the best thing available on the market.
And even when I play games, I play in 4K exclusively, for the past seven years :)
Then I guess you and I are very different people.
I also use my GPU for hobbies and work. My hobbies are game dev (nothing hardcore GPU-wise, just some mid-poly modeling), gaming (mostly indie, though occasionally SP AAA), and random SW-dev projects (e.g. I’m building a Lemmy/Reddit clone). For work, I’m a full-stack web dev and don’t do CUDA work (and I have a separate work-provided laptop), just occasionally run renders of things (mostly web-based three.js stuff). So for me personally, I’d only really see a benefit for running some of the latest games, which is incredibly rare since I honestly don’t have a ton of time to keep up with things (e.g. I’m finally starting RDR2 after owning it for years). I game in 1440p, and most games don’t tax my GPU (RX 6650XT). If I need CUDA, I’ll just rent space on AWS or something instead of running it locally.
So I care a lot more about Wayland support (I have monitors with different refresh rates) and driver stability (I run a rolling release, and Nvidia causes issues at least a few times/year) than top tier performance or latest features. I’ve been on Linux longer than Steam has, and I’ve honestly only been playing more games because Valve has made it so easy. For me, Linux comes first, gaming second, and AMD provides a high quality product for my use case. I used to use Nvidia because ATI used to be worse on Linux, if you can believe that, but I upgraded after COVID because Wayland got quite stable.
These tech YouTubers should do Linux comparisons. These are not small differences when comparing, let’s say, Nvidia 4060 and the RX 7600. It could make the AMD GPU edge out the more expensive Nvidia offering
Every comment should be “But what about in Linux?”
And with the popularity of the Steam Deck, it’s actually a pretty reasonable thing to do now. I want three sets of numbers: Windows and Linux on the same hardware, and Steam Deck. Maybe do a fourth for Windows handheld PCs like ROG Ally.
I’d like this. At first I stuck with Nvidia because they had drivers for Linux. But I’ve been on that train so long. Only reason I’m still on it is cuda cores for video editing with davinci resolve.
I’ve been using arch and manjaro for the past 3 years with awesomewm and gnome (can’t get awesomewm to behave with second monitor while gaming so I switch to gnome when using the second monitor, using laptop) and this has pretty much been my experience. Windows is bloated and it never"just works".
Windows almost always just works.
This seems crazy to say when talking about Linux. Especially when saying you have to switch to use dual monitors.
I have to agree. I love Linux but Windows really does just work. Especially when it comes to gaming. I applaud anyone that enjoys Linux gaming but don’t act like it’s anywhere near as simple as on windows.
For me it has been that simple, but to get to that simplicity took a lot of work. I’ve tried Windows 11 and it just sucked for gaming. Stuttered like mad on Cyberpunk and Bluetooth had major latency problems, and neither occurred on Linux.
Exactly. It doesn’t “just work” but if you can get it going it’s great.
All that work is what makes it not simple though.
Pretty much. If you want the simplest, “just works” Linux setup, your best bet right now is buying a Steam Deck.
Literally selected gaming profile in arch installer and started gaming as soon as the system booted up.
Yeah. In all the time I’ve been using windows I never had a problem that people constantly report; even BSOD happened quite rarely. I never got my pc to randomly shut down and update either…
Like, I switched to Linux cause i saw it as cool, wanted to try it out and liked how customisable it was and mostly to spite the megacorp
Honestly since windows 10 the only blue screens I’ve gotten are due to my own doing.
Nearly always something random breaks for me on windows, and it’s a huge pain to fix it. I hate dealing with windows, Linux is easier, because it isn’t a black box.
A stupid amount of non tech users manage to use it absolutely fine, so I’m not sure what you’re doing wrong tbh.
Linux is 100% not easier and not advertised as such.
A stupid amount of non tech users manage to use it
Meanwhile, most of those users are running systems that are so deteriorated that it takes them a minute+ to open a browser.
On a machine that they only use to browse internet.
Not without stuff breaking constantly
You talking about Linux or windows haha
Believe it or not, but since I switched fully to linux things have been running a lot more smoothly to me. The biggest issue, if anything, being bad support for the operating system from some applications, but that excuse doesn’t work for windows.
Sounds like skill issue when even grandmas can use Windows
Yeah we love Linux but don’t need the exaggerations
My parents can’t use windows but they can use Linux - their windows was covered in “you need to update” and OEM thingies asking them to consider the premium package and shutting down against the user’s will and adverts for onedrive and that ridiculous universal search feature that can find things on Bing but not your My Documents folder and the antivirus showing distressing messages about how your PC is dangerous unless you pay for the deluxe service. Not all of that is “Windows” it’s true but it’s partially Windows fault that uninstalling things is so difficult - some things are on the “add and remove software”, some aren’t. All of that is standard part of the Windows experience on the Windows ecosystem, even if it’s not all intrinsically Windows. So I put Linux on their laptop and GNOME just lets them easily use their browser, email and files without needing to dig through settings to disable tracking, without shutting down against your will, without saying you have to buy new hardware to update versions.
So there are points on both sides but don’t say that Windows is unarguably easier.
Edit: not to mention that using a package manger’s GUI is clearly easier - and easier to do safely - than getting software by surfing the internet for MSIs and EXEs.
Linux allows you to change anything. Like using a WM that’s specifically made for enthusiasts, and developed by random people in their spare time.
Windows doesn’t allow you to move the taskbar.
Who’d guess some Linux setups are not going to be plug and play…
Windows allows you to do anything. If you don’t know how - that’s the problem of your skills.
I’m creating my own desktop environment and deal with bugs here and there that I fix on my own since it’s my own product. It’s designed with my needs in mind created by someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time.
There are absolutely awesome products like gnome and kde that just work. You can use them to get a stable environment that are designed to work in multitude of situations for general public. Windows never just works, you just learn to ignore its shortcomings. Like updating in the background even when you need the bandwidth, lack of central update station for your apps, dealing with lengthy custom install processes trying to impose bloatware you didn’t ask for, uninstall processes begging you not to uninstall the sweet sweet spyware.
You just learn not to let these problems bother you. And that’s not anything personal against you, it’s just how a bad product with good marketing works. Linux is objectively better.
You may want a few products that are built for Windows and are not available on Linux and you wouldn’t want to try an alternative that may even work better objectively and that is absolutely your choice and is respectable. You may not want to learn a new environment and stay in your safe zone and that’s respectable. But you can’t use your safe zone to decide what’s better. A free product that provides better hardware support, faster communication bus, easier user experience with much faster bug fix and release cycle, tons and tons of choice is objectively better. You are free not to try it.
Those things aren’t it not working. They’re just things you don’t like. They all work.
The vast majority of users don’t give a shit about manual os updates and just want it done. You can absolutely pause updates. I think by default it gives you two weeks before it starts complaining. So you just need to do your updates manually at a time that suits you.
Winget allows you to install a huge amount of software. It works as your central update location.
You can normally run uninstalls silently.
The default configuration is for an average user. It’s can be customized quite a bit.
I find Linux users complaining about the default configuration funny.
Just a skill issue hehe
Same can be said about Windows users. The default is what defines the just works statement. The default is shit, you just learn to ignore it or find ways to make a bad product sort of work for you. You need to do basic stuff the hard way and still believe the product is alright. “you can pause updates for two weeks” translates to “the product is designed to assume you own it for up to two weeks”. It’s not a feature mate, it’s not a skill to circumvent it, it’s bending over backwards and paying money to do so.
The forced updates are because non tech users don’t understand why they are so important. I’m assuming you keep your Linux updated to date?
Just as a note on what I do on Linux besides programming Browsing, multimedia, bluetooth obviously work Gaming:
- Cyberpunk
- Dota
- Baldur’s gate 3
- Titanfall 2
- Batman arkham series
- Assassin’s creed, almost all of them except that last three which I didn’t even buy
- various pixel art and voxel games
All with the bare setup of Manjaro or Arch gaming profile worked out of the box.
Mulemedia. Explain yourself.
Butter fingers
Windows never works so much that you have to switch between distros to do different stuff, ahahaha! Oh my, the delusion…
Gnome and awesomewm are apps
Anyone tried crysis?
That’s when we know it’s:
The year of the Linux desktop
When we all can finally run crysis.
I’m not familiar with the games mentioned in the article, but Linux is great for gaming. I run Manjaro on my T540p laptop and have never had problems with Angband or Nethack. I can even run DF with tilesets if I’m feeling spunky. Mind you, I do have 8 gbs of RAM and a pretty sweet Intel integrated graphics setup, so that may be why it’s so smooth.
woah sounds like quite the rig! enjoy
slim margin isn’t significant enough.
I want bigger margins.
Still very impressive considering this is all run by translating the same Windows API calls into Linux ones, and then running them. There’s definitely some overhead in doing this, and yet they still beat Windows native.
And still … it would not matter.
Kinda like this comment?
Feel free to contribute. Most the stack from driver to software is FOSS
Install Gentoo
Doesn’t matter. Easy of use + compatibility trumps all.
Some people already using Linux as daily driver and booting to windows is not ease for them.
People doesn’t need every games to be compatible. They only need the games they want to play compatible.
For me, I no longer need to boot into windows to play game.
Yes. That is the status quo.
I agree to an extent, but most games just work in Linux with no slowdowns or glitches. And I’ve had to mess with many games in Windows over the years to get them to run.
That’s true, but also a W for Linux.
I don’t agree whole heartedly, but I understand where you are coming from.
I recently installed Win11 for work related reasons. Not entirely happy with that, but keep learning or die. If I’m gonna have to support Win11, I should probably run it for a while, lol.
I will say it was nice to just install steam, vortex, download game and mods, and just play without any further tinkering required.
I’d love to see Linux have that sort of native support, not just from the gaming industry, but the community as well.
More like, “doesn’t matter – not being tracked > all.” :^)
Even so, Linux is easier to use than Windows (yes, I went there.) because of a single and only fact:
Configuration files.
Does the average Windows user can configure EVERYTHING through a SINGLE configuration/text file, that explicitly says “what does what”? Video, sound, window size, hotkeys…?
No? So there you have it.
Linux is easier if you’re already comfortable with a computer. A lot of users wouldn’t understand how to edit a config file / would be uncomfortable doing so, especially those who grew up with modern phones and apps. Even if a 30 second edit took 30 minutes in a GUI, lots of people will prefer the GUI.
Unfortunately most people find Windows / MacOS “just works”. If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher. I love my Arch setup but the average user would probably find it unusable LOL
If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher
People use what comes on the computer. OS usage on the Steam Deck is overwhelmingly Linux because that’s what comes on it. This indicates that Linux is perfectly fine for the average person, it just needs to come pre-installed. Very few people install their own OS either way, Linux or Windows.
100% - I was thinking more about adoption for gaming in relation to the article (which I should have been clearer about), but pre-installation is the #1 reason for the lack of general adoption. But I think if the perception of Linux was a little less intimidating, and some aspects were easier (NVIDIA drivers, I’m looking at you LOL), I think people putting together a new PC would have a much more difficult choice to make when flashing the pen drive :P
That’s an incredibly wrong assessment. People don’t use Linux because it’s not pushed like drugs by hardware manufacturers. It’s that simple. Linux is at a point where it’s actually way easier to install, use and maintain than the 2 other major players out there. Add to this the diversity of DEs, ways to make things work, customization, etc.
No it’s not. That’s a flat out typical year of the Linux desktop mentality.
I have commits to TF and cncf. I ran lfs like 6 years ago. I use Windows DE because it’s a far better experience now that WSL does 99% of what I need. Not because I’m uncomfortable in Linux.
There’s nothing wrong with preferring the Windows workflow.
Windows has a configuration file, it’s called a registry. Always has been.
Hasn’t this been happening for years?
Intel’s clear Linux had similar articles published about it years ago.
I switched to Mint this month and have only run into issues with anti-cheat. I’ve tried about 8 different games. Halo Infinite had some odd textures the first time I ran it, but not since.
All in all I’m very happy with my OS switch.
