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submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago

Now, gamers will want to play on Linux for the low latency on online games.

[-] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago

Most low latency use cases in games use UDP, not TCP.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

Unless it's a Java Minecraft server which I believe exclusively uses TCP still.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Yeah, that would make sense as opening TCP connections is not really viable for low latency, hahaha.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Opening the connections is one thing but resends and stream ordering can also cause issues since they might delay the latest information reaching the user space application even if the packet for them has actually arrived just because some earlier packet has not. There can also be issues with implementations waiting for enough data to be available before sending a packet.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Depends. There was that one F2P COD clone which used TCP and IIRC it did fine?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

If your connection is stable, the latency will more or less be the same, but TCP will consume more bandwidth because of acknowledgement packets, making it harder to keep your connection stable.

On an unstable connection, TCP latency will skyrocket as it resends packets, while UDP will just drop those packets unless the game engine has its own way of resending them. Most engines have that, but they only do it for data that is marked as "important". For example using an item is important, but the position of your character probably isn't, because it'll be updated on the next tick anyway.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Online games don't typically have many concurrent connections, though, do they? Just the one.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I'm not an expert, but I suppose as this patch is on the kernel and not on the game, this will still improve any connection your kernel needs to do, like sending telemetry of your anti-cheat engine and other apps that make TCP requests while you are playing online games.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Before that you have to download it. Well, using p2p mechanisms.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I always download my games before playing them. I don't know what you mean here.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

I think they mean peer to peer ^arrr^

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

But is that related to my comment? I don't understand why he's talking about downloading games via P2P.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Unfortunately, many games where people care about that lower latency tend to be competitive with some kind of anti-cheat that doesn’t mesh with Linux.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago

Somebody please temper my expectations because this seems like an absolute game changer.

[-] [email protected] 68 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

You're not a cloud server that needs to run this many concurrent connections (probably)

[-] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago

Well I am, so that's exciting

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

No but my friend is cloud server with many concurrent connections and may want to hear the good news!

[-] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The test data on article is about server setup which is the right use case for this change.

Moreover the L3 cache on CPU is what makes significant difference, IMO.

If that is true, not sure how much improvement consumer-grade desktop will see, given that most consumer-grade CPU will not have that much L3 cache on chip.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

AMD has been putting a lot of L3 cache on their consumer CPUs. The 5800X3D has 96mb of L3 cache.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Yes, that's true. Only if Intel follows the same in future.

On a separate note, 5800X3D seems to be most efficient (throughput/watt) consumer grade CPU out there right now.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

On a separate note, 5800X3D seems to be most efficient (throughput/watt) consumer grade CPU out there right now.

Pretty sure the 7800x3D surpasses it and the 7950x3D is no slouch either.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Their top-of-the-range Epyc 9684X has 1152MB :)

[-] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

That's definitely a CPU for server (unless you are a general consumer with lots of $ 🙂 ).

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

There definitely are vendors ignoring common sense and putting socket SP5 on desktop boards.

No argument about the price, I think list on these is something like $13k USD.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Man looking at my old 5960x with it's 20mb of cache from 2014, and Intel's current top consumer chip with 36mb.

Crazy to think Intel were 'ahead of the curve' so long ago, those x99 chips are still relevant compared to some AM4 chips.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


This effort has been around optimizing cacheline consumption and adding safeguards to ensure future changes don't regress.

In turn this optimizing of core networking structures is causing TCP performance with many concurrent connections to increase by as much as 40% or more!

This patch series attempts to reorganize the core networking stack variables to minimize cacheline consumption during the phase of data transfer.

Meanwhile new Ethernet driver hardware support in Linux 6.8 includes the Octeon CN10K devices, Broadcom 5760X P7, Qualcomm SM8550 SoC, and Texas Instrument DP83TG720S PHY.

NVIDIA Mellanox Ethernet data center switches can also now enjoy firmware updates without a reboot.

The full list of new networking patches for the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window can be found via today's pull request.


The original article contains 387 words, the summary contains 124 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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