Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
Mirrored from Hacker News — AI on Front Page for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
In March 2026, Linux crossed five percent of Steam's user base for the first time, an all-time high for an operating system that spent two decades as a novelty when it came to any kind of gaming. Microsoft's end-of-support deadline for Windows 10 last October pushed many users to look at alternatives, and the Steam Deck has quietly turned millions of people into Linux gamers without them really thinking about it, leading to more widespread adoption on desktop machines.
Most of that progress used to happen inside a piece of software called Wine, the translation layer that convinces Windows games they're running on Windows. Valve's tuned version of Wine, called Proton, is what makes Steam Play and the Steam Deck work. For years, every meaningful improvement to Linux gaming came from changes to Wine and Proton themselves. That's still true, but increasingly the most important changes are happening one layer deeper, inside the Linux kernel. The latest example of that is something called NTSYNC, a kernel-level driver that has offered great performance gains over previous versions of Wine, and is loaded by default on every Steam Deck that's up-to-date.
Related
Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level, and the speed gains are massive
Wine 11 is the biggest jump for Linux gaming in years.
What NTSYNC actually is
An additional piece of the performance puzzle
NTSYNC is a small piece of driver added directly to the Linux kernel that gives it a native implementation of a set of Windows-specific tools that games depend on to coordinate themselves.
Modern games juggle dozens of things at once. While you're playing, your CPU manages the rendering pipeline, loading assets, running physics, processing audio, handling AI NPC routines, and tracking inputs, all in parallel across multiple cores. All those jobs constantly have to coordinate so they don't trip over each other.
QuizThe history of Linux
Trivia challenge
From a Finnish student's side project to powering the world — how well do you know the story of Linux?
In what year did Linus Torvalds first announce the Linux kernel to the world?
Which university was Linus Torvalds attending when he created the first version of the Linux kernel?
What operating system primarily inspired Linus Torvalds to create the Linux kernel?
What was the version number of the first publicly released Linux kernel in 1991?
Which Linux distribution, first released in 1993, is one of the oldest still actively maintained today?
The GNU Project, which provided many tools that paired with the Linux kernel, was founded by which developer?
Which company released a landmark commercial Linux distribution in 1994, helping bring Linux into the enterprise world?
Ubuntu Linux, one of the most popular desktop distributions, is based on which other Linux distribution?
Your Score
Thanks for playing!
Windows handles this coordination by using a specific set of mechanisms, and before NTSYNC, Wine had to mimic these mechanisms using things like esync and fsync, which both worked, but didn't always match Windows exactly. NTSYNC builds these mechanisms straight into the Linux kernel for the first time, and it means Wine doesn't have to emulate anything anymore. The developer-facing API calls don't actually change, Linux just knows how to answer them natively.
Related
Wine has been translating Windows games to Linux since 1993, but Proton is what made it effortless
Wine is the foundation that makes gaming on Linux possible.
NTSYNC is part of a growing pattern
Not the first time Linux has inherited features because of Windows
NTSYNC isn't the first time Linux has gained a new feature specifically because Windows games needed it. A few years back, Linux added a way for software to wait on several events at once, which is something Windows had built in for decades, but Linux didn't. Wine had been working around the gap with awkward tricks until the kernel finally got native support.
This work is driven by Valve, by CodeWeavers (the company that employs many of the core Wine developers, including NTSYNC's author Elizabeth Figura), and by a steady stream of contributors who want Linux to be a real gaming platform without depending on out-of-ecosystem patches forever.
Related
Valve isn't ditching Windows or x86, but it's quietly making both optional
Valve wants to make it possible for gamers to play anywhere.
These aren't magical performance gains
fsync was already pretty good
The headline performance gains look great, but they need some context. The eye-catching 40 to 200 percent FPS gains cited in NTSYNC's original benchmarks were measured against unmodified upstream Wine, which almost nobody uses to play games on Linux anymore. Most Linux gamers, including every Steam Deck owner, use Proton, which already has fsync. Compared to fsync, NTSYNC's performance gains are far more modest. The games that benefit most from the change to NTSYNC are games that were really struggling before. Anything that was running at decent framerates beforehand is still going to run fine.
Related
These 7 Linux myths you still believe simply aren't true
Linux is a completely different beast than it was a decade ago.
Valve adopted it anyway
It's a great sign
Pierre-Loup Griffais, an engineer at Valve, has gone on the record to say that fsync was already fast enough, and despite that, Valve still shipped NTSYNC in stable SteamOS in March anyway, which speaks to the fact that fsync is still a workaround at its core, and can be the cause of issues outside of poor raw FPS.
These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.
Related
4 reasons Valve's full SteamOS release will change PC gaming again
Valve's full SteamOS release will change PC gaming again, and here are some of the most important ways.
Gaming on Linux continues to improve by the month
Linux has grown so much in the gaming department. Where there once was nothing but clever Wine patches and community workarounds now lies support from gaming behemoths like Valve, driving changes to the Linux kernel itself. NTSYNC won't be the last time a piece of Windows gets rebuilt inside Linux because gamers needed it, and with more than five percent of Steam's user base now running Linux, the incentive to keep doing it has never been stronger.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.