Mint vs. Unbuntu vs. Windows

piccolo289 · 08-08-2015, 09:00 AM #1

Hello all, im in the process of building a pc and was considering using linux over windows. Now, i know the price is a massive positive for linux, but the amount of games available on windows is also a big plus for windows. Now ive decided on the final straw being emulation quality. Does dolphin run better on a version of linux over windows? Which version of linux should i use?

Aleron Ives · 08-08-2015, 09:11 AM #2

Windows doesn't have a huge benefit in OGL over Linux (as long as you use nVidia's proprietary GPU driver under Linux). The main benefit of Windows is that you have the option to use D3D if OGL doesn't work well in a particular game. You might want to check the wiki pages for the games you want to play to see if any of them require D3D for decent operation. If they don't, then you should have a pretty good experience with Dolphin under Linux. (I'll let someone with more *nix experience suggest which distro is best.)

**mbc07** · 08-08-2015, 04:31 PM #3

I know you're building a desktop and that won't apply to you but if anyone reading this have plans of running Dolphin in a laptop with NVIDIA card and that laptop is Optimus-enabled (almost all recent laptops), do yourself something good and stay away from Linux. Even with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, the overhead of current Optimus implementations on Linux (at time of this post) is so high that makes Dolphin run terribly slower when compared to it running on Windows (I mean, seriously, the performance hit is horrible)...

**Helios** · (This post was last modified: 08-08-2015, 04:35 PM by Helios.)

If you're worried about it, use Windows.

With the exception of Intel (Somebody please correct me), GPU vendors tend to have much better Windows OGL drivers than Linux. Nvidia's drivers are for the most part on par, but OGL on Windows it's known to be a little better. And AMD is a hilarious mess on Linux so I wouldn't even bother with Linux there.

That and like Aleron said, you have the option between D3D and OGL if you use Windows. I know many games have graphical defects that are worked around by using the OGL backend, but I imagine there are a small few that work the other way around too.

Also, Jhonn, that can be worked around if you just tell Linux to use one GPU at a time and screw the other (I know Ubuntu does this by default on proprietary drivers, uses the nvidia gpu by default) but yeah. If you actually want to use Optimus on Linux, it's a painful mess. Don't.

**mbc07**

(08-08-2015, 04:32 PM)helios747 Wrote: With the exception of Intel (Somebody please correct me), GPU vendors tend to have much better Windows OGL drivers than Linux. Nvidia's drivers are for the most part on par, but OGL on Windows it's known to be a little better. And AMD is a hilarious mess on Linux so I wouldn't even bother with Linux there.

As far as I know, Intel drivers and NVIDIA proprietary drivers (as long you're not using Optimus-enabled device) are very good in Linux and provide almost the same Dolphin performance when compared to OGL in Windows. AMD, at the moment, is a mess, but it's improving slowly...

(08-08-2015, 04:32 PM)helios747 Wrote: Also, Jhonn, that can be worked around if you just tell Linux to use one GPU at a time and screw the other (I know Ubuntu does this by default on proprietary drivers, uses the nvidia gpu by default) but yeah. If you actually want to use Optimus on Linux, it's a painful mess. Don't.

It won't help. Optimus won't allow (at least in my laptop) to just switch to the dedicated GPU and "disable" the IGP (like on the first laptops with that implementation that had a GPU switch setting in BIOS/UEFI). In current implementation (again, at least in my laptop), even when you're using the dedicated GPU, it doesn't have physical access to the video outputs, so it'll need to copy the rendered frame into the framebuffer of the IGP to be able to show the rendered frame in the laptop monitor or VGA/HDMI output. And since the overhead that slowdown performance a lot is in that dedicated GPU->IGP copy, the only difference in running the dedicated GPU all the time is that your laptop will run warmer and your battery will be drained faster because the dedicated GPU is active all time, there's almost zero performance gain =/

***Shonumi*** · (This post was last modified: 08-09-2015, 04:26 AM by Shonumi.)

Nvidia proprietary drivers are indeed really good on Linux (again, as Jhonn said, as long as it's not Optimus). They should perform the same. The only caveat is that Linux drivers often get some of the "cool" features implemented later than their Windows counterparts, e.g. iirc, fancy stuff like G-Sync gets Windows support as a priority. Other than that, it generally doesn't make a difference which OS you use, as it relates to Dolphin and Linux vs. Windows.

But if you're into PC gaming, Steam doesn't have as many native Linux games as it does Windows. Running things through WINE can be hit or miss depending on which game you're trying to run. Older games generally do well though.

Nintonito · 08-09-2015, 07:25 AM #7

(08-09-2015, 03:29 AM)Jhonn Wrote:
(08-08-2015, 04:32 PM)helios747 Wrote: With the exception of Intel (Somebody please correct me), GPU vendors tend to have much better Windows OGL drivers than Linux. Nvidia's drivers are for the most part on par, but OGL on Windows it's known to be a little better. And AMD is a hilarious mess on Linux so I wouldn't even bother with Linux there.
As far as I know, Intel drivers and NVIDIA proprietary drivers (as long you're not using Optimus-enabled device) are very good in Linux and provide almost the same Dolphin performance when compared to OGL in Windows. AMD, at the moment, is a mess, but it's improving slowly...

(08-08-2015, 04:32 PM)helios747 Wrote: Also, Jhonn, that can be worked around if you just tell Linux to use one GPU at a time and screw the other (I know Ubuntu does this by default on proprietary drivers, uses the nvidia gpu by default) but yeah. If you actually want to use Optimus on Linux, it's a painful mess. Don't.
It won't help. Optimus won't allow (at least in my laptop) to just switch to the dedicated GPU and "disable" the IGP (like on the first laptops with that implementation that had a GPU switch setting in BIOS/UEFI). In current implementation (again, at least in my laptop), even when you're using the dedicated GPU, it doesn't have physical access to the video outputs, so it'll need to copy the rendered frame into the framebuffer of the IGP to be able to sow the rendered frame in the laptop monitor or VGA/HDMI output. And since the overhead that slowdown performance a lot is in that dedicated GPU->IGP copy, the only difference in running the dedicated GPU all the time is that your laptop will run warmer and your battery will be drained faster because the dedicated GPU is active all time, there's almost zero performance gain =/

Really? On my ASUS ROG there's an easy method to disable Optimus. Simply installing the Intel drivers will expose an option in the nvidia panel to select and disable GPU's. At least for me

**NKF98** · 08-09-2015, 10:15 AM #8

proprietary drivers for linux are fine, so that shouldn't really be an issue. as far as i know (and i know little about debian) linux mint and ubuntu are the same thing with a different UI, so there's no "competition" there, just whichever you like better, and with linux, you can always install a new UI anyways. I've run dolphin on the same system with windows and fedora and i don't notice any performance changes

**mbc07** · 08-09-2015, 03:40 PM #9

(08-09-2015, 07:25 AM)Nintonito Wrote: Really? On my ASUS ROG there's an easy method to disable Optimus. Simply installing the Intel drivers will expose an option in the nvidia panel to select and disable GPU's. At least for me

This depends on how the dedicated GPU and IGP are physically connected in the motherboard. And the common setting in multimedia laptops (like mine) is the cheaper one where dedicated GPU isn't connected directly to an output like laptop monitor or VGA/HDMI, only the IGP, so the dedicated card must copy the rendered frame to the IGP frame buffer in order to display anything. You said you have an ASUS ROG that as far as I searched is specifically gaming laptop and that's probably why you can simply disable Optimus feature, both GPUs probably have physical access to the available video outputs, so they can operate independently and you can completely disable one or another. However, that kind of implementation is probably more expensive and that's why I've never seen a multimedia laptop with it...

I really wished I could simply disable Optimus like you can in your ASUS ROG, even on Windows, some very old apps don't play nice with it and need some workarounds. And in Linux is literally a pain in the ass to configure it properly and even then you get poor performance most of the time =/

Nintonito · (This post was last modified: 08-10-2015, 03:51 AM by Nintonito.)

(08-09-2015, 03:40 PM)Jhonn Wrote:
(08-09-2015, 07:25 AM)Nintonito Wrote: Really? On my ASUS ROG there's an easy method to disable Optimus. Simply installing the Intel drivers will expose an option in the nvidia panel to select and disable GPU's. At least for me

This depends on how the dedicated GPU and IGP are physically connected in the motherboard. And the common setting in multimedia laptops (like mine) is the cheaper one where dedicated GPU isn't connected directly to an output like laptop monitor or VGA/HDMI, only the IGP, so the dedicated card must copy the rendered frame to the IGP frame buffer in order to display anything. You said you have an ASUS ROG that as far as I searched is specifically gaming laptop and that's probably why you can simply disable Optimus feature, both GPUs probably have physical access to the available video outputs, so they can operate independently and you can completely disable one or another. However, that kind of implementation is probably more expensive and that's why I've never seen a multimedia laptop with it...

I really wished I could simply disable Optimus like you can in your ASUS ROG, even on Windows, some very old apps don't play nice with it and need some workarounds. And in Linux is literally a pain in the ass to configure it properly and even then you get poor performance most of the time =/

Ouch that sucks. Guess you get what you pay for. My laptop was $1800 so I kinda expect to avoid problems like this. On my system when I plug in to charge Optimus is fully disabled by default. And on Linux I just install the nvidia drivers only and never bother with Intel related stuff