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Question about speed and perfomance

Is there any significant difference with Windows?

Författare Svar
nac_linux Friday 13 September 2013 at 20:20
nac_linuxAnonymous

In the past I tried to run League of Legends on a Virtual Machine as smoothly as possible while consuming the minimum amount of resources.

You see, a lot of my friend have very old computers, so managing to create a weightless version of LoL may enable them to play with me without having to dish out tons of money.

Moreover, with the right software+hardware tools I may be able to use my PC to host two or three games at the same time, meaning even less computers will be required. (I will require an additional pair of keyboards, mouses and screens though).

I used Windows xp LoL version. First and foremost, because Windows XP is a lighter OS than Windows 7 or Windows 8, which means it consumes less resources. Secondly, the xp version only requires half the ram to run. (possibly due to the former)

However, my results were less than satisfactory.
Even when trying to trimm down Win xp to the bare minimum (with tools like nLite) the result was not noticeably smoother. Windows is kind of cryptic and a hard bone to crack, particularly for someone with the lack of knowledge I have on OS.

Linux, on the other hand, would be a lot easier to tune due to being open source and having a lot of tutorials. There exists already a lot of "minimal" Linux distributions to work with, so I don't think it will be that much of a hustle.

However, I am not sure if PlayOnLinux has the same performance than Windows for certain games, or if the cost is somehow superior. I know WINE/PlayOnLinux are not emulator, so in theory they should work just fine, but perhaps there are some additional costs I am unaware of.

TLDR; For low-end computers, does it change anything playing something on PoL than directly playing it on Windows?
petch Saturday 14 September 2013 at 0:05
petch

Hi,
The main factor will probably be (video) drivers quality; Depending on how well is your friends hardware supported under Linux, result will wildly vary.
That said, to quote the WineHQ Wiki (http://wiki.winehq.org/Performance):
"Currently 80% of Windows performance is a high water mark, few games run faster. Many games run around 50%, which means there's a lot of room for improvement. If your game runs even slower there are probably some nasty bugs around."
Don't know where LoL stands here.
booman Saturday 14 September 2013 at 0:48
booman

Linux is the best operating system for hosting games.
I have been hosting LAN parties at home with 6 computers for years. My Fedora server has been hosting games like: Battlefield 2, Quake Wars, Doom 3, Wolfenstein ET, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, Counter-Strike:Source, Unreal Tournament 3, The Ship, and more...

The main problem you are going to have with hosting is that the game needs Linux native binaries for the game server. If it does, then you can install and run with a command line. Then you don't really need a super graphics card because everything is running in console.

As for gaming machines, Petch is completely right. Your machine can run Linux, but the best video cards for gaming are the GeForce 8800 and newer. If your old computers can handle that, then you can run games in Linux.

Now I have been testing many PC games in Linux with PlayOnLinux and they run great, but I havn't had a chance to test the multiplayer/networking capabilities. Just last week I tried connecting Titan Quest with a Mint 14 and Windows 7 but they couldn't see eachother. This is going to require more testing and trial-n-error.

I have a unique scenario with 6 computers and a games server. So its rare to find people wanting to do the same thing.

† Booman †
Mint 21 64-bit | Nvidia 515| GeForce GTX 1650
Linux for Beginners | PlayOnLinux Guides | PlayOnLinux Explained
SuperDanceParty Monday 16 September 2013 at 22:31
SuperDancePartyAnonymous

As far as I can tell, League of Legends' performance doesn't take any real hit from being run on Wine in Linux.

After installing vcrun2005, the load screen to get in game ran the same in windows as it does now. The game has excellent framerate, usually ~80fps for me (60hz samsung LED monitor and GTX570HD gpu).

I only noticed one discrepency with this, and thats that after a game or two it drops from ~80 to ~60, which is fine. Windows couldn't push it past ~60 for me usually either.

I also noticed that if I put my computer in suspend mode, and then come back, the Ubuntu OS runs fine, and all other apps and games, but in game LoL runs ~30-40 fps. I think it has something to do with RAM, either a glitch with my MOBO handling ram (I do have a minor glitch with my MOBO, I can't use ram slot 3 or it crashes on startup), or it has something to do with running league in x86 mode, since it only uses 3.25 gb of ram that way, maybe it's full up in that part of the RAM because of suspend state not clearing properly. That's just a wild guess based on what I've been studying about hardware recently, I'm no professional (yet).