Upvote Upvoted 3 Downvote Downvoted
tf2 worse in linux?
posted in Q/A Help
1
#1
0 Frags +

been using mint 20 for around 2 months and installed tf2 again recently and it felt fine at first but today i booted tf2 on windows and the linux version feels... noticeably worse?

the game's framerate generally feels worse (drop to <100 fps in soap dm), even though the benchmark_test demo says otherwise. there's also a decent chunk of input lag compared to windows (most noticeable while trying to det stickies). there's also other minor issues like boot up time and out-of-the-box raw input but these are ignorable/fixable

don't really know if this is a problem with mint in particular or the linux build of tf2 but i would like to know if the other 0.003 people that have played tf2 on linux have had these problems

been using mint 20 for around 2 months and installed tf2 again recently and it felt fine at first but today i booted tf2 on windows and the linux version feels... noticeably worse?

the game's framerate generally feels worse (drop to <100 fps in soap dm), even though the benchmark_test demo says otherwise. there's also a decent chunk of input lag compared to windows (most noticeable while trying to det stickies). there's also other minor issues like boot up time and out-of-the-box raw input but these are ignorable/fixable

don't really know if this is a problem with mint in particular or the linux build of tf2 but i would like to know if the other 0.003 people that have played tf2 on linux have had these problems
2
#2
3 Frags +

i get 0 input lag and perfect performance on debian 11, marginally better than windows. you need the nonfree repo for nvidia drivers if you don't have it already

however xinput makes aiming consistently impossible because of some weird acceleration - I couldn't even disable it after disabling desktop accel manually. ended up giving up on it

as a last resort you could try wayland instead of xorg

i get 0 input lag and perfect performance on debian 11, marginally better than windows. you need the nonfree repo for nvidia drivers if you don't have it already

however xinput makes aiming consistently impossible because of some weird acceleration - I couldn't even disable it after disabling desktop accel manually. ended up giving up on it

as a last resort you could try wayland instead of xorg
3
#3
3 Frags +

for me using mastercomfig high/medium + args on arch runs better than on windows. i found you can disable xinput acceleration by setting some values to -1, which ones depend on the mouse if i remember right. i've definitely played tf2 on linux before (debian, 5 or so years ago) where it felt exactly as you describe, so I think it could be an issue with your specific setup. could be your window manager, drivers, launch options, config, or any other software you might have installed. I'd look at window manager/DE first, thats the first thing subtle but noticeable input lag would make me think of

for me using mastercomfig high/medium + args on arch runs better than on windows. i found you can disable xinput acceleration by setting some values to -1, which ones depend on the mouse if i remember right. i've definitely played tf2 on linux before (debian, 5 or so years ago) where it felt exactly as you describe, so I think it could be an issue with your specific setup. could be your window manager, drivers, launch options, config, or any other software you might have installed. I'd look at window manager/DE first, thats the first thing subtle but noticeable input lag would make me think of
4
#4
2 Frags +

I played on arch linux, and i got higher avg. fps than on windows and didn't have any issues, also gaming on linux is getting much better recently so maybe it's even better now, but i haven't tried it in 3years.

I played on arch linux, and i got higher avg. fps than on windows and didn't have any issues, also gaming on linux is getting much better recently so maybe it's even better now, but i haven't tried it in 3years.
5
#5
2 Frags +

Not had a particularly bad experience with Linux and nvidia- I think I tend to get slightly worse framerates but much less variation which means the game ends up feeling a lot smoother. In terms of tweaks you can do with xinput that might help you there's this. The second method has mouse movement that feels pretty similar to Windows to me. Deleting the libSDL2-2.0.so.0 library from Team Fortress 2/bin fixes doubled sens when using raw input and might help with input lag?

Not had a particularly bad experience with Linux and nvidia- I think I tend to get slightly worse framerates but much less variation which means the game ends up feeling a lot smoother. In terms of tweaks you can do with xinput that might help you there's [url=https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_acceleration#Disabling_mouse_acceleration]this[/url]. The second method has mouse movement that feels pretty similar to Windows to me. Deleting the libSDL2-2.0.so.0 library from Team Fortress 2/bin fixes doubled sens when using raw input and might help with input lag?
6
#6
2 Frags +
kawaas a last resort you could try wayland instead of xorg

probably gonna try doing this later

toads_tfcould be your window manager, drivers, launch options, config, or any other software you might have installed.

stuff is pretty vanilla afaik, window manager is muffin, drivers are wayland 515.65.01, config is mastercoms medium-low, launch options are same as mastercom's recc

-novid -nojoy -nosteamcontroller -nohltv -particles 1 -precachefontchars -noquicktime -freq 144 -w 1920 -h 1080 -fullscreen
Zesty In terms of tweaks you can do with xinput that might help you there's this.

hard to say so far but mouse movements definitely feel different, and at least stickies feel better on a local server so take this with a grain of salt
i already deleted the outdated library a while ago

--
leaning towards this being a mint issue if anything since other games have felt slightly sluggish (but far from unplayable) which is a shame, thankfully booting up windows takes like less than a minute atlhough still an incovinience compared to just booting up steam and clicking play on tf2

[quote=kawa]as a last resort you could try wayland instead of xorg[/quote]
probably gonna try doing this later

[quote=toads_tf]could be your window manager, drivers, launch options, config, or any other software you might have installed.[/quote]
stuff is pretty vanilla afaik, window manager is muffin, drivers are wayland 515.65.01, config is mastercoms medium-low, launch options are same as mastercom's recc
[code]-novid -nojoy -nosteamcontroller -nohltv -particles 1 -precachefontchars -noquicktime -freq 144 -w 1920 -h 1080 -fullscreen[/code]

[quote=Zesty] In terms of tweaks you can do with xinput that might help you there's [url=https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_acceleration#Disabling_mouse_acceleration]this[/url]. [/quote]
hard to say so far but mouse movements definitely feel different, and at least stickies feel better on a local server so take this with a grain of salt
i already deleted the outdated library a while ago

--
leaning towards this being a mint issue if anything since other games have felt slightly sluggish (but far from unplayable) which is a shame, thankfully booting up windows takes like less than a minute atlhough still an incovinience compared to just booting up steam and clicking play on tf2
7
#7
2 Frags +

could be a wayland thing, I would try X to see if it's better

could be a wayland thing, I would try X to see if it's better
8
#8
8 Frags +

Cinnamon which is the desktop environment mint uses by default is really bad for gaming unless they've changed it but i don't think there are many people working on it. you can't disable compositing and when I tried playing tf2 on it, quite a while back admittedly, it didn't feel like it did fullscreen unredirection, which led it to feeling like utter shit, felt like the game was vsynced to 60 fps and massive input lag etc. if you're not confident with linux i'd recommend installing lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu or some shit over mint, or if you're comfortable with linux just installing XFCE or KDE. KDE supports fullscreen unredirection and optionally allows disabling the compositor for 0 lag, same with XFCE while still basically looking and feeling like windows

To address the accel issue, the simplest and most consistent way as far as I am aware to disable it, is to simply put a config file in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ folder to just disable it system-wide. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_acceleration#with_libinput should work for any modern linux distro, I don't think anyone ships X.org without libinput anymore. I've had no issues with a slightly modified file anyway. though if you switch to KDE, it seems like it ignores this config file which is annoying but at least setting mouse acceleration to flat in the system settings works fine

on wayland v xorg: honestly i didn't really notice a difference, both felt fine. mumble 1.4.230 doesn't really work with wayland, they block you from setting hotkeys and using global hotkeys since i don't think there's a standard for it in wayland. don't bother if you have an nvidia gpu. KDE wayland has a bug with it's xwayland system or something where it's like your cursor randomly feels like it gets some heavy negative acceleration and you can't move your mouse for a split second, idk if it's tf2 specific though

Cinnamon which is the desktop environment mint uses by default is really bad for gaming unless they've changed it but i don't think there are many people working on it. you can't disable compositing and when I tried playing tf2 on it, quite a while back admittedly, it didn't feel like it did fullscreen unredirection, which led it to feeling like utter shit, felt like the game was vsynced to 60 fps and massive input lag etc. if you're not confident with linux i'd recommend installing lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu or some shit over mint, or if you're comfortable with linux just installing XFCE or KDE. KDE supports fullscreen unredirection and optionally allows disabling the compositor for 0 lag, same with XFCE while still basically looking and feeling like windows

To address the accel issue, the simplest and most consistent way as far as I am aware to disable it, is to simply put a config file in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ folder to just disable it system-wide. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_acceleration#with_libinput should work for any modern linux distro, I don't think anyone ships X.org without libinput anymore. I've had no issues with a slightly modified file anyway. though if you switch to KDE, it seems like it ignores this config file which is annoying but at least setting mouse acceleration to flat in the system settings works fine

on wayland v xorg: honestly i didn't really notice a difference, both felt fine. mumble 1.4.230 doesn't really work with wayland, they block you from setting hotkeys and using global hotkeys since i don't think there's a standard for it in wayland. don't bother if you have an nvidia gpu. KDE wayland has a bug with it's xwayland system or something where it's like your cursor randomly feels like it gets some heavy negative acceleration and you can't move your mouse for a split second, idk if it's tf2 specific though
Please sign in through STEAM to post a comment.