Comment by soulnothing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soulnothing | Hacker News Reader

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I've been amazed with what proton can do and how well it runs. A number of games run very well, and performance is generally very good.

But I'm planning a new SFF build and I'm trying to figure out how to get two gpus in an ITX build. VFIO is still the best option to me for gaming on Linux.

Several nights ago I signed up for the origin pass. Reading on Lutris it worked relatively well with Battle field and others. Single player only, not worried about online. First night was fine. Then next day BF1 forced an update. The game no longer worked. Then origin updated, that stopped working.

I just bought the new Resident Evil 2 remake, which had a gold proton db rating. Booted it got past the intro then it crashed. It was a documented issues, but none of the fixes I saw worked.

I don't game in long stints any more. I use it to relieve the stress. Every couple of days in maybe thirty to forty minutes spurts as a break. Essentially today I spent the time I wanted to take a break debugging a game issue.

This is not in a negative manner to the developers. Either open source or the game companies. Just there are fringe issues / edge cases. With VFIO I just have an external VM that does one thing and encounters little issues. I trade continual trouble shooting, for an initial troubleshooting phase.

Assuming you aren't going to be gaming on Linux directly (only in the Windows VM), PCI-E bifurcation can do this. Going down to x8 from x16 only loses you a few FPS, generally speaking, and something like Sliger's SM560 (http://sliger.com/products/cases/sm560/ - no relationship but I have a SM550 and am pretty happy with it) would allow you to fit a 2-slot Nvidia card for the Windows VM (recommended over AMD; Vega & Navi AMD cards cannot don't do pcie FLR or full reset properly so you'll have to do full machine reboot per VM restart if you're using one of those for Windows), and a 1 slot AMD workstation card for desktop usage. Note that you'll need a motherboard with BIOS that supports bifurcation; Gigabyte & ASrock tend to, ASUS rarely if ever does, other brands YMMV, but regardless you should check mobo manual before purchasing and see if the settings are there.

> Vega & Navi AMD cards cannot don't do pcie FLR or full reset properly so you'll have to do full machine reboot per VM restart if you're using one of those for Windows)

To add: for Navi 10 (RX 5700/RX 5700 XT) there's currently a patch available at Level1Techs[1] which force the card to enter and exit Bus Active, Chip Off (BACO) which essentially resetting the card.

I have been using this patch with my VFIO setup ever since the author made it available and has been working quite reliably for me with my RX 5700 XT reference card. v1 patch sometimes stuck in weird state after BACO but usually it could be fixed by sleep the machine and wake it up. I have not experience any issues with v2 patch so far.

[1]: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/navi-reset-kernel-patch/1475...

Ahh, fantastic; good to hear that that got somewhere

Thanks that was one of my top choices. I'm also looking at custom building a case. I'm debating if trimming 2L is worth the effort to build my own case.

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