this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Linux Gaming

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[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 180 points 1 week ago (6 children)

What is often overlooked

Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.

Ntsync is great and there will be performance improvement. But not exactly massive

[–] henfredemars 82 points 1 week ago (1 children)

XDA was not always this sensationalist. With that said, I always welcome performance improvements.

[–] Mynameisallen@lemmy.zip 119 points 1 week ago (4 children)

My old ass remembers when XDA was a place where you learned how to put Android on your windows phone

[–] db2@lemmy.world 62 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Or hacked up your own android rom because even knowing jack and shit you could.

[–] Mynameisallen@lemmy.zip 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah I remember getting the G1 weeks before it came out because the local TMobile store was just sick or me asking every fucking day. I remember rooting it, loving it, then moving to the n900 and thinking "I want this forever" only for fucking Microsoft to buy Nokia and tank Meego

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm still hunting for leftover stocks of the N950... would love that phone.

Imagine if we got a refresh of that - tilt screen, full QWERTY, modern, large, high resolution display, modern hardware and battery tech, bundled with open bootloader and pick your poison OS...

[–] Mynameisallen@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

It's my dream phone honestly. I really should have grabbed one years ago.

As much as I HATED the way the company put out this phone, you're describing the FXTEC pro 1

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 2 points 1 week ago

This would be lovely. I loved the Nokia phones, it’s such a shame it was all ruined by Microsoft.

[–] kopasz7@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That was the XDA forums, I never found their site very usefuly, but maybe that's just me.

[–] Mynameisallen@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago

Oh I know, but for a long time that was the only reason to visit the site.

[–] kalpol@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah the forums are a treasure for old phone hacking

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

seriously. their stuff now is borderline clickbait! so. many. listicles.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not borderline, they're literally a clickbait farm now. There's an almost daily release of the exact same articles rehashed (e.g. "these are the main Docker containers I run on every server" title changed up a little and it's literally always the same 4-5 containers).

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 3 points 1 week ago

i mean this article about wine 11 and ntsync is at least relevant and somewhat technical, not just "i tried out 5 different self-hosted ai butthole identifiers on proxmox - number 4 will surprise you!"

[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

putting Android on the HTC HD2. Man college me wanted that phone so badly. And a lot of HTC's phones tbh

[–] washbasin@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 days ago

HTC Incredible was my first. XDA was my place shortly thereafter.

[–] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What’s massive is the need for clicks

[–] homes@piefed.world 8 points 1 week ago
[–] TwilitSky@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

That's not the only thing that's massive.
How about their gigantic ego?

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.

I don't think that's overlooked at all. 99.9% of people using WINE/Proton aren't going to have any idea what fsync is, and almost nobody not using proton-cachyos is going to use it. fsync, itself a workaround, is niche within what's already a niche.

[–] SmoochyPit@lemmy.ca 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

From what I found online, Steam enables esync by default, and fsync if your kernel supports it.

Lutris has both options nowadays in the runner settings. Idk if they’re both enabled by default, but in my case they’re enabled. ymmv there.

source

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

In short, LXDE was the measured as the fastest desktop environment for gaming, while XFCE with compositor disabled came in second fastest out of the ones tested. If you need the maximum performance XFCE may be a good compromise between looks vs performance. You can use the “Disable desktop effects” option in Lutris which may reduce the overhead of the desktop environment further.

any idea how this would compare to starting steam directly from a display manager using gamescope as the compositor?

[–] SmoochyPit@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 days ago

I’m imagine gamescope is the best-case, since there’s no other apps or visual effects.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What are the kernel requirements? Is it something any random Debian user is likely to have, or do you need to be compiling it yourself?

[–] SmoochyPit@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

From the article:

Futex2, often referred to interchangeably with fsync, did make it to Linux kernel 5.16 as futex_waitv, but the original implementation of fsync isn't that. Fsync used futex_wait_multiple, and Futex2 used futex_waitv. Applications such as Lutris still refer to it as Fsync, though. It's still kind of fsync, but it's not the original fsync.

So since Jan 2022, it’s been in the stable Linux kernel. For Debian and its derivatives, it would be included beginning with Bookworm.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So basically, both esync and fsync are enabled by default for almost everybody.

[–] SmoochyPit@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago

Assuming that most non-technical users (who wouldn’t research and enable it) are probably using Wine/Proton through Steam: yeah.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fsync maybe not but AFAIK esync is widely used. On some protondb pages there's a hint to disable esync, not the other way round. And while esync is not as performant as fsync, it is still much better than vanilla

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's worth noting that the new sync implementation shouldn't cause any of the compatibility problems esync and fsync ran into, so it's a worthwhile upgrade from a stability viewpoint even if a user won't see huge performance gains.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 5 points 1 week ago

i use ntsync whenever i can, but i've only had linux (cachyos) on my gaming rig since like august. that said, i believe one of their recent updates made ntsync the default for proton-cachyos

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 week ago

It should still fix minor stuttering that some gets get on Linux, which will be pretty huge.

[–] Tywele@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too.

These don't sound massive to you?

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 2 points 1 week ago

You won't see those because most probably you are already using one of other *sync

[–] Lojcs@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I remember hearing that Ntsync isn't even faster than fsync in general use, just in some rare corner cases

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is true and expected, the point of NTSYNC was to be a more faithful emulation of Windows synchronization primitives, so increased compatibility and correctness. If it's ever faster than esync or fsync it's just a bonus. It's on par generally, though.

[–] HouseWolf@pawb.social 4 points 1 week ago

It fixed the lag spikes I experienced playing some of the older Call of Duty titles so it's overall been a huge upgrade for me.