NTSYNC will change Linux gaming forever (and other gaming news)

This week, we’re seeing NTSYNC making its way into WINE, but what will it mean for us Linux Gamers? Plus, this guy turned his Steam Deck into the Steam Brick. We’ll talk about it. And what’s new with the NexusMods app? .

All of this and more today. That’s right, it’s Steam Deck (and Linux Gaming) news time.

# NTSync, what is it?

So this week, we saw Wine developers start the process of enabling NTSYNC support for their compatibility layer.

But what is NTSYNC and how will it help gaming on Linux?

Well, this is actually really interesting. If you’ve ever ever tried Windows and Linux, you’ll know they’re quite different. One is slow, the other is sleek. One is full of bloat, the other is pretty lean. But even down to the very core of the operating system environment, things are very different. While the Linux kernel offers multithreaded synchronization options, it should come as no surprise that the way these are implemented are very different from the way Windows handles them.

WINE, and by extension Proton, have their own way of handling these differences. But they live in userspace. This means that they’re unprivileged tasks and don’t have the kind of insights that a driver-level implementation would have. This also means that the existing WINE implementations are one of the few ways WINE is actually significantly slower than Windows.

However, with this new NTSYNC driver in the Linux kernel, we’re seeing huge increases in performance for multithreaded workloads. Some games have seen an over 600% increase in performance.

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Godot Engine Bundle: https://humblebundleinc.sjv.io/GK0gXE
Steam Brick: https://crastinator-pro.github.io/steam-brick/
Nexusmods App: https://github.com/Nexus-Mods/NexusMods.App/releases/tag/v0.7.2

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About Gardiner Bryant: A native Maine resident, Gardiner (yes, that’s his first name) is an enthusiastic Linux evangelist, a believer in the efficacy and superiority of the Free and Open Source way, and President of Heavy Element. Heavy Element offers web design, media production, and YouTube consulting services to individuals and companies in Maine and beyond.

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— Chapters —
00:00 Introduction
00:19 NTSYNC will change Linux gaming forever
04:47 Deals of the Week
05:29 Steam Brick
08:42 Nexus Mods app