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Is gaming with Coreboot (or any other open source bios) viable?
(lemmy.sdf.org)
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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The BIOS does a lot less than you'd expect, it doesn't really have an impact on gaming performance. For what it's worth, I've been gaming in a VM for years, and it uses the TianoCore/OVMF/EDK2 firmware, and no issues. Once Linux is booted, it doesn't really matter all that much. You're not even allowed to use firmware services after the OS is booted, it's only meant for bootloaders or simple applications. As long as all the hardware is initialized and configured properly it shouldn't matter.
Tell us more about your setup! I'm assuming you have 2 GPUs and are passing one to the VM for Windows gaming? Is it even worth doing nowadays now that Kernel AC games are banning VMs anyway?
Yes dual GPU. I set that up like 6 years ago, so its use changed over time. It used to be Windows but now it's another Linux VM.
The reason I still use it is it serves as a second seat and is very convenient at that. The GPU's output is connected to the TV, so the TV gets its own dedicated and independent OS. So my wife can use it when I'm not. When the VM isn't running I use the card as a render offload, so games get the full power of the better card as well.
I also use it for toying with macOS and Windows because both of those are basically unusable without some form of 3D acceleration. For Windows I use Looking Glass which makes it feel pretty native performance. I don't play games in it anymore but I still need to run Visual Studio to build the Windows exes for some projects.
This week I also used the second card to test out stuff on Bazzite because one if my friends finally made the switch and I need to be able to test things out in it as I have no fucking clue how uBlue works.
You'd think so but IIRC when Phoronix tested it, Coreboot would always significantly underperform compared to the regular firmware. It wasn't much but the effect was measurable.
Yeah it'll depend on how good your coreboot implementation is. AFAIK it's pretty good on Chromebooks because Google whereas a corebooted ThinkPad might have some downsides to it.
The slowdowns I would attribute to likely bad power management, because ultimately the code runs on the CPU with no involvement with the BIOS unless you call into it, which should be very little.
Looking up the article seems to confirm:
I'd expect System76 laptops to have a smaller performance gap if any since it's a first-party implementation and it's in their interest for that stuff to work properly. But I don't have coreboot computers so I can't validate, that's all assumptions.
That said for a 5% performance loss, I'd say it counts as viable. My games VM has a similar hit vs native. I've been gaming on Linux well before Proton and Steam and have taken much larger performance hits before just to avoid closing all my work to reboot for break time games.