(Warning I'm rather tired so this is going to turn into a ramble and most likely will not be coherent or have a point. You've been warned! ;-P)

A bit of background; I decided back in October to move away from Windows and to return to Linux. My reason was rather complex but the part of it was that I wanted to start focusing more on Linux (and Unix) administration as over the years I have found that I have become more of a Windows admin and while I've always worked with Linux in some form it wasn't at the level I desired.

At first I started off by planing to drop my gaming rig completely and convert it into a hyper visor and instead of having a massive overclock and water cooled system as my primary machine I would use a notebook instead. So I opted for a Dell 17 7000 series notebook as it provided the large screen I liked while still begin rather slim allowing me to use it on flights without any issues.

I soon found myself back into gaming however as a means of entertainment while staying at the hotels. This is when I decided to see how far I could push the little 750M and was rather surprised to what the GPU could handle. By December I was 100% Linux and only used Windows for testing purposes on my hyper-visor.

Overall I found that staying pure Linux has been easy, something that I wouldn't have thought five plus years ago.

However the issue I am seeing now is that while more games are coming to Linux many of them are poorly optimized and in some cases there have been games that run better on wine than their native counter part. I feel that once we start getting games that are optimized for Linux we will see more people move away from dual-booting for gaming reasons.

Who knows maybe over the years as Vulkan grows we might start seeing big title games release same day on Windows, Linux and Mac and have all of them perform the same. Until then though dual-booting into Windows be something that is tempting to many Linux gamers because who doesn't want to have a smooth gaming experience?

Recently I've been working on moving over to a more powerful notebook ( in the process of being RMA'd due to hardware instability.) This has given me the opportunity to experience games I have only experienced on Linux on Windows and I could clearly see what dual-booting is attractive I even considered purchasing two mSATA SSD so that I could dual-boot because it was just that much more enjoyable (Dying Light being a great example in my case.) However I have decided that if/when my notebook is replaced I will stick with Linux and see what happens as this year looks very exciting indeed!

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Seeing how much the patch improved Dying Light on my Linux notebook running a 750M I decided to see how Dying Light ran on the Windows notebook with the 980M (still having issues trying to get Linux working on it.) As I mentioned before the Windows with 980M was a solid 60 FPS with everything maxed but view distance. This time around it was avg 37 FPS and even dipped down to 27 FPS however it was still smoother than the Linux client at the same frame rate.

So I guess you can say that on the Window side of things it got much worse for me while on the Linux side it was better but still not playable without modding. Wonder what the next patch will bring.

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Quoting: Segata SanshiroAm I seeing wrong or is the screen 4:3?? Who makes screens like that anymore?

It's the perspective the camera looking down at an angle, if you go to their site there is a head on shot.

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Congratulations on your first hardware review, I'm rather impressed by the performance you got from the 860M, I wonder if they will release a larger model with a 980M.

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Holy smokes, I closed out of Cities: Skylines and a few minutes later I noticed my system was starting to slow down so I decided to check the system and this is what I saw.

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Performance wise it’s a little bad, as I was originally getting around 100FPS on High settings, and then a patch a couple days before release nerfed it down to around 30FPS, and this is on an Nvidia 970. Having the level of detail set to Very High makes it even worse, and does make it very sluggish when you zoom in, so the game is a bit of a hog.

Yeah it seems like something is up, as I'm getting around 25FPS on my 750M when I set the game to Very High (mind you I only have a small town at the moment) and your 970 is a heck of a lot better.

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Impressive patch, the game is completely playable on my old 750M while on the lowest settings however I still need to disable sun shadows and I also need to drop the resolution to 720 (native is 1080.) Still I'm stable at 35 fps which is something I never thought I would say about this notebook.

Here is what I'm getting:
Patch 1.5.0:
Max Settings no tweaks: 9 FPS avg, 17 FPS max, 7 FPS low
Max Settings data files uncompressed: 10 FPS avg, 16 FPS max, 6 FPS low
Max Settings View Distance Zero: 9 FPS avg, 16 FPS max, 5 FPS low
Lowest Setings with Sun Shadow disabled: 25 FPS avg, 38 FPS max, 21 FPS low
Lowest Setings with Sun Shadow disabled (720): 35 FPS avg, 47 FPS max, 27 low

You can read about my experience with that past patches in the comment section of 1.4.0 Dying Light article.
http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/dying-light-major-patch-released-still-abysmal-on-linux.4969/page=2#31981

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I'm enjoying Torchlight II all over again though I can't help but hope that we might see Path of Exile one day ported to Linux (most likely will never happen up still I hope.)

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I'm looking forward to testing it out as it seems I'm now stuck on my old 750M (not that I expect it to ever be playable on a 750M) if I want any kind of stability in Linux. The Alienware 17 R2 runs okay on Windows but on Linux it locks up at random moments and by random I mean I've had it lock up no less than 12 times while in CLI, live disk and installed while trying to trouble shoot why it was happening and all this with in one day. I even had it lock up in Windows a couple of times on a fresh install so I'm wondering if it's the hardware.

Either way it's now unusable on Linux so I've fallen back on my old system, seeing as the new one might have a hardware issue I'm going to see about RMA'ing it or just returning it and eating the restock fee.

Still it was nice when it was working. ^_^

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I am happy to see The Witcher III on the list, I had canceled my GoG.com pre-order back when the Linux community was still confused about if it was coming to Linux. Still I am holding off on my excitement until I see a little penguin sitting next to that window.

Right now I've switch back to Windows as my experience with Dying Light has gone south, I have no clue what happened but one day I started the game and instead of the barely tolerable 25+ FPS I was getting 13 FPS on averaged. I get a solid 60 FPS on Windows with everything maxed but view distance (even with view distance maxed it rarely drops below 45 FPS.)

Once I have had my fill with Dying Light (which will be very soon) I'll be wiping my notebook and once again return to Arch.

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Here's an update on the performance this time on the new system (arrived yesterday, see my earlier post for specs.)

This is just a quick run through as I'm still working on getting the notebook up and running (now the headphone jacks are not working and of course the Wi-Fi but I knew about the Wi-Fi issues and will replace it later.)

For comparison I ran Dying Light on Windows 8.1 before I replaced it with Arch.

Windows 8.1
Max Settings no tweaks: 41 FPS avg, 60 FPS max, 25 FPS low
Film Grain and Blur disable, view distance 0: 60 FPS avg, 60 FPS max, 60 FPS low

Note: Film Grain and Blur made no difference I just turned them off as they hurt my eyes. :P

Here's the thing I'm not sure what happened with second time around as lowering view distance should not have had this kind of results. During the second play through I decided to set view distance back to max and here's the kicker FPS stayed at 60 and only dipped to 50 once or twice. Now note that I was still in the slums which I've found is one of the better areas FPS wise. I don't know what happened on the second play through but wanted to list its results as I found them very strange (not complaining though.)

Arch Linux (Antergos)
Max Settings no tweaks: 15 FPS avg, 60 FPS max, 11 FPS low
Film Grain and Blur disable, view distance 0: 20 FPS avg, 63 FPS max, 13 FPS low

I have yet to do any tweaks but what I'm noticing is two things, clearly the card made a huge difference as I have almost max setting and get the same FPS as I did with Medium and Sun Shadow and AA disabled. The second is the massive difference between the Windows and Linux experience. Not only does the game look better on Windows with max settings it also runs about 5x better.

Now I don't expect Dying Light to ever look on Linux as it does on Windows as OpenGL is just not at that level yet but the performance gap is massive.

Also I don't know if anyone else noticed this but while messing around in Linux I noticed that when I disable AA the ugly blur goes away. I never noticed that on my other system but it was night and day on the new one.

Edit: Just an update; with sun shadow disabled I'm seeing the following: 45 FPS avg, 63 FPS max, 25 FPS low

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