Usually I expect to have to troubleshoot problems with Linux (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by init@lemmy.ml to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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I've been daily driving Pop!_OS for about two years. I've had to troubleshoot and look up how to solve problems here and there, but it has largely been pain free. About eight months ago I had to dual boot Windows 10 because my wife wanted to play Hogwarts and for the life of me I couldn't get Linux to stream to the client connected to the Xbox controller and TV upstairs.

Well, today she goes to boot up the game, and the lag is beyond terrible. None of the settings I try change anything, and even trying Sunshine/moonlight instead of Steam Link is only a bit better. I decided to try booting the game in Linux, and lo and behold, the game is once again liquid smooth via Steam Link client, and whatever issues I ran into 8 months ago are gone.

I'm not used to Windows being the OS I have issues with.

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[-] snowe@programming.dev 9 points 11 months ago

Not sure it has anything to do with windows sadly. HL is terrible written, there’s posts all over the internet about it. It works fine on my computer and stutters and lags on my wife’s. There’s some mods you can install to fix some issues, but she has an amd gpu and it seems that that’s part of the problem.

[-] init@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

Your guess is as good as mine. It runs well on my windows partition and probably slightly faster on Linux. I tried streaming several games, and they all lagged terribly. I tried resetting the wireless router, and installed Sunshine/Moonlight. With S/M, it would be fine and then about every 30-35 seconds it would lag for about 5-7 seconds. It was able to stream fairly smoothly at 720p if set to "performance" in the moonlight settings.

Everything points towards a slow local wifi connection, or something hogging the bandwidth in the background. I ran a speed test that came back with 250Mbit download/35Mbit upload, so it didn't seem like that was the problem. I also turned off OneDrive and ensured no updates or downloads were happening concurrently. I haven't tried doing a pcap because that's beyond the amount of effort I really want to put into it.

I don't really use windows for anything other than a handful of games I was streaming up to the steam link upstairs, so the easy option is to wipe it and start over I think.

[-] snowe@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago

That would be really strange if it was tied to Internet speed. I have a unifi setup and we have synchronous gigabit internet. Also both our gaming computers are wired so they normally get 800-1000mbps.

From what I can tell it’s literally just hl being badly optimized. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason

One thing I did discover is that you need at least 32gb of ram. It still stutters, but was less.

[-] init@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

I was thinking more along the lines of whether my local wifi throughput was a bottleneck, not the connection on the other side of the router. As for the RAM, I'm sitting at 24gb, which runs smoothly on the host machine on both Linux and windows. Even when it is streaming the game upstairs, the host framerate is smooth--its the client that is stuttering if the host is running HL from windows.

Like I said, very strange all around.

this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023

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