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Is OpenBSD an option for gamers? How do I squeeze out the last bit of performance? I have noticed questions in that vein coming up, maybe more than there used to be since gaming of OpenBSD has become a little more visible. Let's examine the current state.
Also asks if OpenBSD is the "best desktop BSD for gaming"?
They mention wanting to move to OpenBSD, but gaming a lot and not sure if that will work.
Other questions that came up elsewhere outside of reddit from my recollection:
What laptop would be an upgrade for my OpenBSD gaming performance?
What *BSD is the best for gaming? OpenBSD?
Linux gaming has significantly more volunteer and corporate support. Linux also is where you get dotnet that actually works.
I can't really speak to other *BSD, but it would seem to me that FreeBSD is probably the closest to Linux in its capabilities. Unlike OpenBSD, it still has the Linux emulation layer. This way, the actual Steam client and AFAIK Proton do work. I have heard that games that use some anti-piracy measures tend not to work. I don't know much about the bhyve virtual machine and if it can be used for hardware-accelerated emulation of a Linux machine.
Hardware selection, especially "cutting edge", is a very DIY endeavor at this point.
"Tried and tested" is probably the safest way for hardware selection. I highly recommend jcs@'s entries that test some laptops for how well they play with OpenBSD.
Thinkpads tend to be fairly well supported, due to their popularity with OpenBSD developers.
If you want to try more cutting edge or less used hardware, you may want to find out the components and search through the OpenBSD mailing lists to see if people have used it, and if issues have been reported. Still, you may want to expect unsupported or only partially supported hardware. If you are ready for this, as well as looking for solutions on your own and/or filing bug reports, then this may be the way for you.
WINE or Proton are not supported and might never be.
There is no full machine emulator, like VirtualBox. qemu is software-only. vmm can run some Linux's as far as I know, but I haven't heard of any GPU passthrough or similar yet (hope I'm getting the concepts right here...).
There is currently no GUI game library/downloader like you may be used to from Steam, Lutris etc.
As libraries and APIs evolve, currently supported commercial/closed-source games might cease to work.
The performance will likely be lower than on Windows or Linux with comparable hardware.
Support for all games rests on the shoulders of a few volunteers (or enthusiasts).
There is no Bluetooth support at all, and likely won't be in the foreseeable future.
For someone with a gaming hobby, the net effect of switching to OpenBSD is that it puts severe constraints on what games you can play, as well as requiring a considerable DIY attitude and tolerance for things not working the way you may have gotten used to.
Most genres are represented in the catalogue of games, with many high-quality entries that are either source ports of classic games (say, X-Com or OpenTTD) or indie games based on open source frameworks that require a small amount of (largely automated) workarounds (e.g. Dead Cells or Slay the Spire).
It can be argued that while the OpenBSD gaming library is comparatively small, the average quality of the games is quite high - especially as no (Unity?) shovelware or AAA games made to milk their consumers exist here.
Finally, I stick with my opinion that you should not choose OpenBSD for gaming. You choose OpenBSD for what makes it OpenBSD - a security-focused development approach that doesn't try to run everything under the sun at any cost. And I consider all the games that can run somehow to be a bonus, to sweeten the deal and give me one fewer reason to boot into another operating system.
You can get games from popular distribution platforms without needing a separate install of Linux or Windows. GOG.com allows you to downloads games directly via the web interface, and for Steam there is steamctl in ports.
Even in the absence of significant commercial incentives to consider non-Linux *nix, not all game developers are the same and they have different motivations. In my experience, indie game developers have often responded with interest when they learned that their game could easily run on even more obscure platforms than Linux.
There is a misunderstanding that modern games "just can't run" on OpenBSD. It is rather a question of software being coded and published in a way that ties it strongly to a particular platform, something that Microsoft Windows and gaming consoles have a significant history of.
It is a welcome surprise every time a game developer decides to opensource their game. This way any future issues can be worked around, as long as someone with the right skills gets on the job. This is ideal for both cross-platform support, as well as video game preservation.
In the end, if people being interested in running their games on OpenBSD helps curb some of the habits in game development that are so heavily influenced by the big corporations, maybe it will still have a small net benefit for gaming culture as a whole.
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