I’m waiting for impending doom when Windows 10 support ends. My PC is more than adequate to play most of my games, but I decided that if I’m going to move to Linux for most things and maybe run leftover windows things in a VM, that I could do with a little bit of an upgrade. All without spending much money.

If I wanted to spend money, I’d just buy a new PC for Windows 11, and a new GPU. But since bills crop up when you least want them, I have to pay those instead of buy new kit.

So, After roughly 12 years of existence as an i5-2500 machine running at 3.3GHz. My PC now has a i7-3660k at 3.5GHz.

The thing that will make the biggest difference is that this new CPU has HyperThreading, meaning that there are essentially pairs of CPUs where each pair shares low level cache. Programs that are written well for threaded and multi-processing can run two threads on the same physical core by running different parts of the CPU pipeline concurrently with different registers and caches.. or something. Basically it should be a bit faster at doing multiple things compared to the old 4 core i5.

So. First up on the testing!

In my Even More Optimal! post, I show Rev 1.5 clocking in on my test map and test call at about 676 calls per second as a max possible number.

With this nice new CPU … <drumroll>!

700-720!

So, that’s about 6% better on average. Yay! (Internet suggested 12%)

Thats good!

Ok, So I mentioned Linux. I’ve been a linux user for years, professionally it’s my main desktop environment, I rarely use windows at work. But it’s been a very long time since I’ve tried to play games on Linux. Back then it was Tux Racer, or stuff like Starcraft Broodwar under Wine. It was possible, but was hard work and performance was spotty.

I was pleasantly surprised to be able to install Steam and Discord on Debian GNU/Linux (13- Trixie) really really easily, and then install the NVidia GPU drivers without much of a fuss.

CC2 actually runs very nicely, It “feels” faster than windows, but perhaps that is my wishful thinking.

But, now. I can actually benchmark. With almost a like-for-like with the common elements unchanged:

• Carrier Command 2 – 1.5.12
• Rev 1.5 beta mod
• Resupply+
• Tacops 1.5
• Rev:debug
• same “perftest” map
• same hardware

With the differences being:

• Linux + Proton vs Windows

Running my same benchmark test as above.. Linux gives me…

850 calls/sec

Wow! That is 20% faster than Windows 10!!