 You're just putting the finishing touches on your brand new gaming rig. Cables organized, graphics card in, side panel on, and you're about to get going fast. But then... Wait, what is this? I'm sorry, you need what? No, we'll just turn all this stuff off. Here we go. Wait a minute. Some of this stuff isn't even optional. And... Making matters worse, this is just the stuff that Microsoft is telling us about. I mean... All I wanted to do was get some frags, not join the freaking botnet. Hey. I think I know something that might help with that. Oh my god, Wendell from Level One Text? How's it going? What are you doing in my closet? It's a long story. You know what, no nevermind, since you're here, can you help me with my sponsor spot? No, but I can help you fix your gaming problem. Okay, well, hey, let's give it a shot. And while we're at it, you know what else is worth a shot? Origin PC. Origin PC offers beautiful custom desktops and laptops such as their EVO 15S that weighs only 4.3 pounds and is under an inch thick featuring smooth 144Hz, 1080p or 4K displays and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q. Be sure to check them out at the link below. I don't know if I messed it up because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do so I went back in the closet. No, no, that's fine. The last time I checked, the graphics driver in particular situation on Linux was abominable and when it comes to Wine, I mean, any newer titles pretty much, anything requiring DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 was a total mess. Like, has any of that changed? Actually, everything you said was wrong. What we're referring to as Linux is actually GNU slash Linux or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux and the driver situation has improved dramatically. What? Still go on. You know, both AMD and NVIDIA have put a lot of work into their drivers. AMD has got a really amazing open source driver in the very latest Linux kernels and on the Wine side of things, we've got DXVK, which is a real-time DirectX translation layer to Vulkan so you can play games like The Witcher 3. In terms of performance, Vega64 and a 1080 Ti were competitive with one another in some titles, especially Linux titles, Linux optimized titles natively at the beginning of the year, but NVIDIA driver updates and things like that have led to other optimizations, so it's leapfrogging again and FreeSync is not quite ready yet in the newer Linux kernels from AMD, so that's still a little bit of a problem with the very bleeding edge kernels, but the situation's really changed and improved. Okay, so have at it. I'm gonna let you drive. Because you're running an AMD graphics card, we're gonna update the Linux kernel to something a little newer than what Ubuntu supports by default. Now, if you're running an NVIDIA graphics card, you wouldn't need to do this, but you would definitely need to get the binary driver from NVIDIA in order to, you know, take advantage of the latest and greatest, running your 1080 or 1080 Ti or whatever recent graphics card. So we've got the Ubuntu kernel upgrade utility. Basically, all we have to do is paste some stuff into the command line. So with the Ubuntu kernel update utility installed, we can just do ukuu, and at the time of this video, I think 4.7.5, 4.17.5 is going to be the most recent version, we're running 17.4 because we were messing around with the system a little bit before, but you just hit install, and you'll have to put in the password, and this is going to go and get a newer version of the kernel. Booting previous kernels, blah blah blah blah blah, okay. Now at this point, all we got to do is reboot, and it'll use the newer kernel by default. So by default, we've got Ubuntu, but if we do advanced options, we can see that we've got all of our kernels. So we started out on 4.15, and then we got 4.17. Yep. And now that we're on the newest kernel, we need to update the other sort of side of things. The kernel gives us the driver, but we also need Mesa updates and that sort of thing. So there's another PPA for that, which is an extension to Ubuntu. So we're going to do the same thing and add a repository, which will give us Mesa. Mesa and OpenGL are sort of the other side of the graphics driver. So you need the bottom half for the hardware and the top half for the software side of it for games. With the PPA installed, you can see that there's a ton of stuff that's going to get updated. So this is all stuff that doesn't really matter for you. IntelXserver.org. Now you wouldn't need to do this if you were just going to run Steam games, native Steam games. Sure. This is just for Wine and DXVK and getting the bleeding edge out of that. So what's this? We've got Gallium 9, which I'm not going to install because we don't really need it per se, but I'll mention it because it will let you run DirectX 9 titles. It's older. It's not as supported. There are other options, but this is the options that you have for plugging stuff into Wine so that you can get more functionality out of Wine. So we should probably explain what Wine is for the uninitiated. Wine is not an emulator. It's like an emulator, but it's not an emulator. See, Wine stands for Wine is not an emulator. See, that's the joke and it's terrible. Wine is a re-implementation of certain Windows APIs to make applications available on Linux. And so you can run a Windows application under Linux, and the Windows application thinks Windows is there, but not all of Windows is there. Sometimes even Windows-owned utilities don't know that it's not Windows. And so you can use that to run some Windows games, but not a lot. And we've got Lutris, which will give us runners, a script for scripts for running games like The Witcher 3. Okay, so hopefully y'all have been keeping up. If not, don't worry. We're going to have links to all of these sources and also to Webnull's forum down in the video description. So the worst is over. It actually gets a lot easier from here. So easy that I could do it. Definitely. Really? Really? Okay, fine. Okay, let's just do this. So we've got Lutris already. Can you kind of explain what Lutris does? So it's a lot to ask a user to manage all the different versions of Wine and the command line BS. And I would agree that that's not really the best user experience. People have written scripts to make it easier, because when you think about The Witcher 3, you can't just run The Witcher 3 because you probably also need Steam. But it's not the Linux version of Steam, you need the Windows version of Steam. So that has to run under Wine or some kind of emulation layer as well. So Lutris gives you a script. You just hit an install button on the web page, and some person has gone through the hell of developing that before you hit install. Was that a lewd scene? Oh, never mind. I thought that was a raised rump. Okay, you know what? Let's just... Okay, so continue. Install. This is so easy. I can do it. Here we go. So our Steam account's logging in. And there it is. And this is the Windows version of Steam. Windows Steam. The only thing that doesn't work under Wine is the copy protection. Now, Witcher 3 works fine with copy protection. Right. But that's not true of every title like Far Cry 5. Interesting. There it is. Okay. The Witcher 3, Wild Hunt. So I just click play. Let's hope. Can I get a finger cross? Hey! There are a couple of bugs here and there in the game, but it's pretty much okay. It's rendering. You know, if I would have told you a year ago that we could have real-time DirectX translation to Vulkan, you'd probably call me a crazy person. Dang. Why can't I just go into the menu in the middle of a cutscene? F***ing new modern game developers. Like, holy f***. What's happened with games is that they've made far more assumptions about the amount of f***ing time that I have. Like, if my baby starts crying, I don't want to miss the f***ing cutscene. I need to be able to pause. Maybe gaming hasn't changed. Maybe it's me. Maybe I have a life. So this is really cool. So it's DPvk or... DXvk. DXvk. Just think DirectX to Vulkan. Total game changer. Linux gaming is better than ever. But like, come on. How many times have we heard, no, no, really, really, Linux gaming is better than ever. That's a fair point. I mean, if you need something right now and you just don't want to think about it and you don't want to mess with the libraries, you can run a full virtual machine. You can run a full Windows virtual machine and do all your gaming that way. Can I alt-f4 out of a ga... Cool! It actually closes a lot faster. That's one thing that I've always loved about anything that's not Windows. So why don't you tell us about using a VM? If you want to use a VM, you will need to pass through a second graphics card. Okay. So do we have one? We do. Somewhere. So we'll need to shut this down because that's hot plug graphics card is not a thing yet. Are you sure? Are you sure? I'm not sure. Did you watch my video? No, I didn't. Total madness. There it is! There it is! It's a thing. If you've got... It's a thing. No, it's a thing. It's finally becoming a thing because laptop users need it, not the enterprise, which is funny. Oh, we should probably get the other monitor. AMD and Nvidia in the same system. This is heresy. Sorry, you want the other monitor? I'll grab it. So then this is not that dissimilar to what I've set up before with Unraid. So this is just Red Hat KVM. Yep. Running in Ubuntu. Yep. And then we've got an extra SSD for Windows, an extra graphics card to pass through. Yep. And an extra keyboard and mouse because... Why not? Because why not? Okay. So what do we do? We just boot up the virtual machine. Bam! The configuration, we just set it up. We do the IOMMU groups for pass through and we tell it the graphics card. We go in the USB devices and find the keyboard and mouse and map them. And then we just let the machine boot up. So this is it. This is just the full fat Windows experience. Yep. Now overhead-wise, from what I've seen in the past, we're looking at anywhere from as little as two or three percent to as much as, you know, 10% or more in terms of a performance set. But any... Is there anything else I should be aware of about running it this way? It shows up as an AMD Epic processor just because. There is a performance hit in some scenarios, but mostly it's okay. Some things are faster, like superposition. Interesting. Now you got the Nvidia drivers installed in spite of the infamous code 43 error. Code 43 is a thing that shows up when Nvidia drivers detect they're running as a virtual machine. So you have to set a configuration option in the virtual machine on the Linux side of things to hide the fact that the machine's virtualized and then code 43 goes away. Right. Which is kind of annoying and silly. Right, because they just want you to buy a Quadro or better. Right. Now, it's also kind of annoying and silly that this monitor that you could use for things other than gaming, not on Windows, on Linux, but you know, it's not super convenient. So there's also Looking Glass, one of our forum members, Jeff at Hostvision. He's put a lot of work into it. I've put a lot of work into it. I think you might need to go run it. Okay. Okay. Oh, cool. Look at that. How's the latency? Oh, not bad. Yeah, this is a direct memory to memory copy using the DirectX Capture API. So the same capture that you get. So even just then, it was actually faster than your native monitor to handle the mode switch. Interesting. And so this way, you could run your Windows VM with full hardware acceleration. But as fast as we can copy the frames from the guest to the host, you can run it. And how do I make it full screen? I think... You didn't think of that yet? No, there's a command line option for that. Of course there is. Damn it, you guys. This is a bad guy. Oh, look at that. It is. And honestly, we don't know what we're doing as far as OpenGL programming goes. So if there's any OpenGL programmers that want to contribute to the project out there, you are more than welcome. It's open source. It's on GitHub. What more could you ask for? Full screen? That's a command line option. Yeah, and I think I saw a hiccup there that I'm not sure if I saw over on the other side either. Yeah, there will be some... It's not perfect. But we're getting there. It's not bad for alpha software. It's not bad at all. So there you have it. I hope this was a fun and enlightening look at just how far the humble penguin has come in the last couple of years. Guys, we're going to have links to Wendel's channel. It's level one text. We'll have that down below as well as their amazing Looking Glass software and more information on how to get something like this running for yourself. But in the meantime, just let us know in the comments below if you're running something like this, what kind of challenges you've run into, and if there's any other great educational resources that you can provide for people who are into gaming on Linux. Disclaimer, though. The experience off camera was not as perfect and smooth as we, you know, made it out to be. I mean... Fair point. You've been working on this for how long now? Quite a while. To help us do this video, which by the way, thank you so much. I'm happy to do it. And... The step by step, gotta have the guys. That's pretty much it, guys. Thanks for watching. Unless, unless you're a small business owner or a freelancer, in which case stick around because FreshBooks has got an offer for you. Their small business accounting software is custom built for how you want to work. It's a simple way to be more productive, more organized, and to get paid faster. You can create and send professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster. You can see when your client has opened your invoice for the first time to put an end to the guessing games. And they've got the full experience available on the go for both iOS and Android. So for your unrestricted 30-day free trial, go to freshbooks.com slash tech tips and enter Linus Tech Tips in the How did you hear about us section. Not tech tips, like I said just now. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, well, you know where that button is. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy this stuff. It's all free. It's free software. At the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one in our community forum which you should totally join. And also level one Texas forum you can join that too. It's all good. We love you.