Gaming on Linux - With WENDELL from Level1Techs!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,968 words · ~14 min read
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you're just putting the finishing touches on your brand new gaming rig
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cables organized graphics card in
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side panel on and you're about to get going fast
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but then wait wha what is this
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i'm sorry you need what no we'll just turn all this stuff off
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here we go wait a minute
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some of this stuff isn't even optional
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and making matters worse this is just the
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stuff that microsoft is telling us about
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i mean all i wanted to do was get some frags
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not join the freaking botnet
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hey
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i think i know something that might help with that oh my god wendell from level
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one text how's it going what are you doing in my closet
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it's a long story uh you know what no never mind since you're here can you help me with my sponsor spot no but i
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can't help you fix your gaming problem okay well hey let's give it a shot
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and while we're at it you know what else is worth a shot origin pc origin pc
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offers beautiful custom desktops and laptops such as their evo 15s that
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or 4k displays and an NVIDIA GeForce gtx 1070 max q be sure to check them out at
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the link below i don't know if i messed it up because i wasn't sure what i was
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supposed to do so i went back in the closet no no that's fine
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the last time i checked the graphics
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driver in particular situation on Linux was abominable and when it comes to wine
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i mean any newer titles pretty much anything requiring directx 10 or directx
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11 was a total mess like has any of that changed actually uh
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the everything you said was wrong what you're referring to is Linux is
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actually gnu slash Linux or as i've recently taken to calling it gnu plus
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Linux and the driver situation has improved dramatically
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you know both AMD and NVIDIA have put a lot of work into their drivers AMD has
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got a really amazing open source driver in the very latest Linux kernels and on
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the wine side of things we've got dxvk which is a real-time directx translation
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layer to vulkan so you can play games like the witcher 3.
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in terms of performance vega 64 and a 1080 ti were competitive with one
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another in some titles especially Linux titles Linux optimized titles natively
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at the beginning of the year but NVIDIA driver updates and things like that have
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led to other optimizations so it's leapfrog again and freesync is not quite
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ready yet in the newer Linux kernels from AMD so that's still a little bit of
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a problem with the very very bleeding edge kernels but the situation's really
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changed and improved okay so
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i have at it i'm i'm gonna let you drive because you're running an AMD graphics
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card we're gonna update the Linux kernel to something a little newer than what
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ubuntu supports by default now if you're running an NVIDIA graphics card you wouldn't need to do this but you would
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definitely need to get the binary driver from NVIDIA in order to you know take
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advantage of the latest and greatest uh running your 1080 or 1080 ti or whatever
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recent graphics are so we get the ubuntu kernel upgrade utility
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basically all we have to do is paste some stuff into the command line so with
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the ubuntu kernel update utility installed yeah we can just do uku
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and at the time of this video i think 4.7.5
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4.17.5 is going to be the most recent version running 17.4 because we were
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messing around with the system a little bit before but you just hit install
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and you'll have to put in the password and this is going to go and get a newer
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version of the kernel booting previous kernels blah blah blah
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blah blah okay now at this point all we're going to do is reboot and it'll use the newer kernel by default
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so by default we've got ubuntu but if we do advanced options we can see that
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we've got all of our kernels so we started out on 4.15 and then we got 4.17
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yep and now that we're on the newest kernel we need to update the other
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the other sort of side of things the kernel gives us the driver but we also need mesa updates and that sort of thing
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so there's another ppa for that which is an extension to ubuntu so we're gonna do
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the same thing and add a repository which will give us mesa mesa and opengl
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or sort of the other side of the graphics driver so like you need the bottom half for the hardware and the top
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half for the software side of it for games with the ppa installed you can see that
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there's a ton of stuff that's going to get updated so this is all stuff that
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doesn't really matter for you Intel intelxserver.org
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now you wouldn't need to do this if you were just going to run steam games
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native steam games sure this is just for wine and dxvk and getting the bleeding
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edge out of that so what's this we've got gallium 9 which
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i'm not going to install because we we don't really need it per se but i'll
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mention it because it will let you run directx 9 titles it's older it's not as
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supported there are other options but this is the options that you have for
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plugging stuff into wine so that you can get more functionality out of wine so we
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should probably explain what wine is for the uninitiated wine is not an emulator
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it's like an emulator but it's not an emulator and see wine stands for wine is
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not an emulator see that's the joke and it's terrible
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wine is a re-implementation of certain Windows apis to make
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applications available on Linux and so
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you can run a Windows application under Linux and the Windows application thinks
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Windows is there but not all of Windows is there you know sometimes even Windows
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owned utilities don't know that it's not Windows and so you can use that to run
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some Windows games but not a lot and we've got lutress which will give us
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runners a script for scripts for running games like the witcher 3. okay so
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hopefully y'all have been keeping up if not don't worry we're going to have
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links to all of these sources and also to wendell's forum
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down in the video description so the worst is over it actually gets a lot
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easier from here so easy that i could do it
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definitely really really okay fine
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okay let's just do this so we've got lutress all ready can you kind
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of explain what lutetris does so
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it's a lot to ask a user to manage all the different versions of wine and the
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command line bs and i would agree that's not really the best user experience
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right people have written scripts to make it easier because when you think
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about the witcher 3 you can't just run the witcher 3 because
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you probably also need steam and so but it's not the Linux version of steam you
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need the Windows version of steam so that has to run underwine or some kind
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of emulation layer as well so lutrus gives you a script you just hit an
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install button on the webpage and some person has gone through the hell of
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developing that before you hit install
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was that a lewd scene oh never mind i thought that was a
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raised rump okay you know what let's just
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okay so continue install
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this is so easy i can do it here we go so
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our steam account is logging in and there it is and this is the Windows
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version of steam Windows steam the only thing that doesn't work under wine is
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the copy protection now witcher 3 works fine with copy protection right but
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that's not true of every title like far cry 5 interesting
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there it is okay witcher 3 wild hunt so i just click play let's hope
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can i get a can i get a finger cross
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hey there are a couple of bugs here and
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there in the game but it's it's pretty much okay
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it's rendering you know if i would have told you a year
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ago that we could have real-time directx translation to vulcan you'd probably call me a crazy person hey why can't i
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just go into the menu in the middle of a cutscene new modern game developers like holy
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what's happened with games is that they've made far more
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assumptions about the amount of [ __ ] time that i have like if my baby starts
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crying i don't want to miss the cutscene i need to be able to pause
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maybe gaming hasn't changed maybe it's me maybe i have a life so
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this is really cool so it's a dp vk or
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dxv dxvk just think directx to vulcan total game
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changer Linux gaming is better than ever but like come on
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how many times have we heard no no really really Linux gaming is better
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than ever that's a fair point i mean if you need something right now and you
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just don't want to think about it and you don't want to mess with the libraries you can run a full virtual
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machine you can run a full Windows virtual machine and do all your gaming
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that way can i ulta 4 out of a game
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cool it actually closes a lot faster yeah
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that's one thing that i've always loved about anything that's not Windows so why
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don't you tell us about using a vm if you want to use a vm
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you will need to pass through a second graphics card okay so do we have one we
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do somewhere
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so we'll need to shut this down because that's hot plug graphics cards it's not
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a thing yet are you sure are you sure i'm not did you watch my
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video no i didn't total madness there it is
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there it is it's a thing if you've got it's a thing
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no it's a thing it's finally becoming a thing because
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laptop users need it not the enterprise which is funny oh we should probably get
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the other monitor AMD and NVIDIA in the same system this is heresy
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sorry you want the other one i'll grab it so then this is not that dissimilar to
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what i've set up before with unraid so this is just red hat kvm yep running in
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ubuntu yep and then we've got an extra SSD for Windows an extra graphics card
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to pass through yup and an extra keyboard and mouse because
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why not because why not okay so
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what do we do we just boot up the virtual machine damn
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the configuration we just set it up we do the i o mmu groups for pass through
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and we tell it the graphics card we go into usb devices and find a keyboard and
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mouse and map them and then we just let the machine boot up so this is it this
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is just the full fat Windows experience
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now overhead wise from what i've seen in the past we're looking
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at anywhere from as little as two or three percent to as much as you know 10
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or more in terms of a performance hit but
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any is there anything else i should be aware of about running it this way it
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shows up as an AMD epic processor just because
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there is a performance in some scenarios but mostly it's okay some things are faster like super position
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interesting now you got the NVIDIA drivers installed
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uh in spite of the infamous code 43 error code 43 is a thing that shows up
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when NVIDIA and video drivers detect they're running as a virtual machine so
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you have to set a configuration option in the in the virtual machine on the
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Linux side of things to hide the fact that the machine's virtualized and then code 43 goes away
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right which is kind of annoying and silly right because they just want you to buy
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a quadro or better right now it's also kind of annoying and silly
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that this monitor that you could use for things other than gaming not on Windows
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on Linux but you know it's not super convenient
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so there's also looking glass one of our
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forum members jeff at host vision he's put a lot of work into it i've put a lot
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of work into it i think you may need to go run it
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okay okay oh cool look at that how's the
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latency oh not bad yeah this is a direct memory to memory
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copy uh using the directx capture API so the same capture that you get so even
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just then it was actually faster than your native monitor to handle the mode
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switch interesting
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and so this way you could run your Windows
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vm with full hardware acceleration but as fast as we can copy the frames from
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the guest to the host you can run it
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and how do i make it full screen um
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i think you didn't think of that yet no there's a guy there's a command line option for that
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but first
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damn it you guys
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this is a bad guy oh look at that it is
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and honestly like we don't know what we're doing as far as opengl programming
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goes so if there's if there's any opengl programmers that want to contribute to
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the project out there you are more than welcome it's open source it's on github
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what more could you ask for uh full screen
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uh that's a command line yeah i think i saw a hiccup there that
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i'm not sure if i saw over on the other side either yeah there will be some it's
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not perfect but we're getting there it's not bad for alpha software it's not bad
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at all so there you have it i hope this was a fun and enlightening look at just
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how far the humble penguin has come in the last couple of years guys we're
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gonna have links to wendell's channel it's level one text we'll have that down below as well as their amazing looking
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glass software and more information on how to get something like this running
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for yourself but in the meantime just let us know in
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the comments below if you're running something like this what
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kind of challenges you've run into and if there's any other great educational
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resources that you can provide for people who are into gaming on Linux
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disclaimer though
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the experience off-camera was not as
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perfect and smooth as we you know made it out to be i mean fair
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point you've been working on this for how long now quite a while to help us do
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this video which by the way thank you so much happy to do it and uh the step by
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step gotta have the guides that's pretty much it guys thanks for
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