That must be because you're awesome.

No. This is about what happens whenever someone, anyone, talks about Firestorm 7 and/or PBR:

A bunch of people who can't afford anything better than cheap laptops with on-board graphics complain that Firestorm 7 is too slow for them.

Then someone with something like a 2025 ultra-high-end gaming rig, like Intel Core i9-14900KS, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, both overclocked to the hilt, water-cooled, 512GB of RAM, gaming-grade M.2 SSD and all the shebang, fully up-to-date Windows 11, all the latest drivers, comes and says that Firestorm 7 is painfully slow on their machine, too.

Then I come with a vastly inferior machine, upper-mid-range hardware from 2018, AMD GPU, AMD graphics, SATA SSD, Debian, and I say that Firestorm is running smoothly on my box. Even though my machine is a toaster in comparison with those ultra-high-end gaming rigs. Even though AMD graphics shouldn't be nearly as powerful as Nvidia graphics, especially AMD graphics with an open-source driver in comparison with Nvidia graphics with a proprietary driver. Even though Linux should be vastly inferior to Windows when it comes to gaming and 3-D.

And then someone always comes and calls me a liar. Firestorm 7 is allegedly ALWAYS slow on EVERY machine, and that's allegedly a fact, and it's absolutely impossible that it could run smoothly on a clunker like mine with a shoddy OS like mine.

Always.

And I'm wondering how come Firestorm performs so badly on a computer that's dozens of times more powerful than mine, with an operating system that should be vastly better at handling 3-D than mine.

The latest M chips are really great for SL these days! :)

Also, the whole Windows ecosystem is based upon buying new stuff again and again because the old stuff will stop working.

You'll have to buy new hardware all the time because either Windows or the latest Windows drivers for your hardware don't support your current hardware anymore. Windows 11 itself hardly supports any computers from the 2010s, and Windows 12 won't run on anything made before the mid-2020s because it'll absolutely require an NPU. Old games won't run anymore because Windows doesn't support their old DirectX version anymore, much less old OpenGL, so you'll have to abandon them and buy new ones. And, of course, new hardware and new games will require new Windows versions to be bought.

I think nothing shows the difference between Windows and *nix like Steam's own hardware that boots GNU/Linux-based SteamOS. How can the Steam Deck run modern-day games so smoothly, all without the same issues that befell the Atari Lynx and the SEGA Game Gear back in the day (granted, that was when NiCd rechargeable batteries were all the rage, and lithium-based batteries weren't even science-fiction), while Windows gamers have to shell out much more money for a Windows gaming laptop that performs similarly?

And now we have the Steam Machine that, small as it may be, has got what it takes to take on both much more expensive high-end Windows gaming rigs and dongled-up consoles, the latter also because it's still also a fully-fledged PC.

It's hilarious how some state-of-the-art AAA games are more performant on Wine than on their native Windows. And game devs can no longer afford to not make their games compatible with Wine, now that more and more of their customers are on SteamOS instead of Windows.

Lastly, ask yourself why CachyOS is soaring on DistroWatch. Gamers simply have begun to understand. And distro makers have begun to cater. This, by the way, goes doubly for retro gamers.

I'm increasingly inclined to believe that Windows is actually the issue at hand.

Windows 11 must have largely abandoned the technology used by Second Life, OpenSim and their viewers. It simply doesn't support it anymore. That is, Windows never had that much support for OpenGL, always favouring its own native DirectX until very recently when even AAA game devs started flirting with Vulkan.

It doesn't even matter how well Nvidia and AMD support old OpenGL versions (or OpenGL in general) in their own drivers if the host OS doesn't support that stuff anymore.

GNU/Linux, on the other hand, has never abandoned OpenGL. As DirectX is proprietary Windows technology, the free-and-open-source world has had to rely on OpenGL for 3-D acceleration until Vulkan came around. And there are tons of FLOSS games that rely upon OpenGL, and that don't have any resources to be upgraded to Vulkan.

Thus, even modern-day GNU/Linux, be it something rock-solid stable but inherently outdated like LMDE, be it a bleeding-edge rolling release like Arch, has much better support for the old technology that Second Life, OpenSim and the viewers use than modern-day Windows.