Ubuntu gaming
Few days ago I’ve had a controversial discussion within a group of gaming friends of mine. So happened we’ve been planning to buy a laptop as a gift to one of us and the thing caused arguing was “should we buy windows too”. Not that I have something against this OS, but this were to lay some extra expenses on us while the main gift itself was already a bit pricy. So I proposed: “Why not Ubuntu”? Indeed, why? It’s free int’s solid and gaming is also possible on Linux platform since Steam deck release which also runs linux. So the rumble began.
Even though we decided to stick with windows, my own arguments were kinda stuck within my head so I am now installing latest LTS version of Ubuntu and going to give it a try. Haven’t been working with it for two years by now and have little to no idea of how good is it today.
Results were not as surprising as one might think. But even before I reached game testing I began cosplaying this scene:
To be perfectly honest, everything works more or less stable but not the way you would expect it to. For example you may check the option “do nothing when laptop lid is closed” still, Ubuntu might ignore it, as well as it will forget certain display settings… anyways, this is not a text on why I have dropped Ubuntu on desktop. Let’s get to testdrive!
Modern games require a hell lot of space so I started with something small yet pretty — Valheim.
It’s a bit early though, first I installed Steam. Client is presented in ubuntu (20.04) repositories but I prefer to download it from the original website. Simple deb file and a few shell commands do miracles.
sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb
sudo apt install -f # this is to get all missing dependanciesThen you can simply start Steam client and after the graphic install get to login screen. By default steam will show you only supported games from your library, but in settings you may enable support for all titles (no guarantees they will work though).
Everything else is exactly the same you will experience with Windows client, pick the game on the list, install it and launch.
With the Valheim I have not experienced any issues running it in 1080p game has 25–50 FPS on ultra settings
More than playable in my opinion, but this game does have native version even still being in early access, so this title is not exactly what I am trying to test now.
Worth mentioning that my laptop is not a top notch, it’s an old model from ~5 years ago:
Intel® Core™ i7–8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz × 12
GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q (6Gb)
32 Gb DDR4-SDRAM 2666 MHzNext game was “Elden ring” — windows only game and only appeared in my library with ticked “Steam play for all titles”.
This particular title I’ve tested in several resolutions:
First run was 4k resolution, unfortunately, High settings provided not stable 20 FPS, so I played a bit with anti aliasing and some other settings . These changes made game run in stable 30 FPS and this is great!
But not long enough - after a few minutes frame rate dropped below 10 with no particular reason, first time this happened the game reported this frame rate is not suitable for online play and I find myself in main menu. “Ok, this is indeed impressive resolution and settings for my laptop, let’s be more humble” was my first thought.
Then I switched to 1080p with same graphic settings, FPS jumped to 50 but, just like in previous case, dropped again in a few minutes with no particular reason for it.
This title seem not playable, at least on my setup, with nvidia driver 535 over Ubuntu 22.04.
Next was “Starfield”, with no further hesitation, this is result:
Couldn’t even made it to main menu and I finished this game on same hardware on Windows 11. Surely it was low to medium settings but in 4k resolution! And before you will think why am I so optimistic to run game in such resolution on laptop this old… I have had no other options, Bethesda didn’t manage to support dedicated fullscreen mode for this game, only windowed and borderless windowed. Game screen was simply aligned with the desktop resolution and I am too lazy to decrease one on OS level.
This one might be caused by obsolete driver version which I suspect is released before the game itself.
To finish this article on a positive note, today a new Momodora installment had been released, it is also windows exclusive but runs perfectly well on Ubuntu. Obviously I haven’t play long, but first boss is no longer a threat.
I discovered these series a few months ago, and I was highly impressed by how smooth and enchanting the gameplay was.
Heroes of might and magic HD also have had no issues as well as native support for Linux.
I also tried to play with a gamepad (PS5 Dualsense), but couldn’t manage to make it work within the game itself. Steam client recognized gamepad, you are able to navigate through the menus or “big picture mode”, yet, the game refused to read this input source. Most probably this could be fixed but the very idea of this test was to find out how playable games are out of the box.
Every story should have some conclusion so does this one:
Gaming on Linux (Ubuntu in particular) done few large steps forward. Average user now can install Steam just as easy as you do it in windows same goes for games. Library for linux games is also improved, for example my library has 114 “verified” games, 306 games are marked as verified and playable, but I’d not rely on this playable too much. Current total in my library is 405 titles so it is ~25% of games that either have native version or “verified”. If you don’t have a better option you still can have some fun on linux. In comparison, 112 games are marked as MacOS compatible, yet not all of them playable. For example some titles were built for 32bit systems and current macOS is not able to run such applications.
P.S. Cyberpunk 2077 launcher proposed me to “Force quit” application.
