How Did We Get Here?
With companies pushing to develop Artificial Intelligence, many supporting components are outrageously priced. One of those components is memory. Although the memory data centers use is different than that used by the common consumer, when factories concentrate on producing data center memory, they don’t produce consumer products. Shortages mean higher prices.
Most systems now use DDR5, with AMD still producing some processors that use DDR4. That leaves DDR3. It has risen in price, but not as much as newer memory. It’s also over ten years old. That’s fine for some games, but those released in the last couple of years are sometimes poorly optimized. Some also have features that didn’t exist a decade ago. There is also the fact that systems with DDR3 don’t have Windows 11 support.
What About Gaming?
It’s still possible to use some versions of Windows 10 and, of course, Linux, but for this trial we used Win10 Pro without the latest updates. We tested games as old as ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’ from a decade ago, up to new releases like ‘Clar Obscur: Expedition 33’. The games had a wide array of features including Ray Tracing and Cheat Detection. The last is important because it requires a Trusted Point Module, specifically version 2.0.
Games with Anti-Cheat require both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Most Anti-Cheat also doesn’t work well on Linux, further pushing gamers to Windows 11. These are still compatible with Windows 10 Long Term Service and IOT editions, but TPM requires extra hardware. More recent CPUs have this built in. Most games will run fine on Linux, but demand for Linux gaming will have to increase quite a bit for developers start implementing it. The good news is, that may not be too far off with companies like VALVE striving to make their OS mainstream.
So, what are our options?
That depends on your favorite games. If you’re into competitive shooters, most require anti cheat and Windows 10 Long Term or IOT and a separate TPM module may help. Those into pretty much anything else, will find many Linux distros waiting to be explored, and they get better every day.
If that is your cup of tea, Pop OS, CachyOS, Nobara, Bazzitte, and of course, Steam OS seem to be great options and I’ve actually played around with each to varying results. In testing Bazzitte and Nobara Linux played the most games without issue. Nobara also has DaVinci Resolve as a working package. Many of these also use OBS well, if you stream what you play. All are options that I will continue to explore.
Those looking for videos can check out a few of videos on my Linux Gaming playlist here.
To read other blog entries, check out this link.