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The original was posted on /r/linux_gaming by /u/Fluffy_Wafer_9212 on 2024-06-30 09:50:28+00:00.
It feels amazing 🥹
I was not dual booting Windows and I didn’t have it on a VM either. I have been running Linux for a good while now after switching from Windows 10, and since then I had my data 1 TB HDD partition running on the NTFS filesystem that it inherited from Windows.
I hadn’t noticed any issues with NTFS till I started missing Forza Horizon 4 and decided to try it on Linux for the first time. I would run FH4 on the max graphics with no issues at all on Windows.
However on Linux, the game stuttered/froze every 1-3 seconds even on the lowest graphics preset (I installed the game on the NTFS partition).
Like every troubleshooter, I went for my little journey of Googling and I came across solutions like running the game under Gamemode, changing kernel parameters - but none of that worked for my particular issue.
Till I suspected that it may either be that my HDD is too slow (highly doubted since the game ran fine on the same disk on Windows), or it may be that NTFS is just too problematic on Linux.
I wanted to give the “NTFS to ext4” experience a try (especially since I have been wanting to do this for a while now anyway). and this comment gave me a little push to do it right away.
Switching from NTFS to ext4 was not really the easiest process for me since it involves completely formatting the data, and I didn’t have a spare disk to move my data on first. However, I got to it and everything has been so much smoother since then.
The Forza Horizon 4 lag has been completely eliminated, and everything else that used the HDD runs a ton better now.
On top of that, since NTFS runs as a FUSE filesystem on Linux, it quite often kept my CPU usage high throughout the hours my partition was mounted at. This issue is also gone after switching to ext4.
Conclusion 🕴️- If you are not running Windows alongside Linux, nor are you planning to go back to Windows, switching from NTFS to a Linux filesystem is absolutely worth it. At times running NTFS on a Linux system feels like you are using a NAS (which can be terrible for a lot of use cases such as gaming).
TL;DR 🕵️♂️ - Forza Horizon 4 froze for me every 1-3 seconds on a NTFS HDD partition. After switching the partition to the ext4 file system, it fixed the issue and made a lot of things much better.