Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve's free operating system.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
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In my personal life, Windows is only useful for gaming and it seems like pretty soon I won't even need it for that.
Nice.
Nice.
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Artem S. Tashkinov
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Windows 11 by default is just too fat for such devices:
- 4GB of RAM consumption on boot, not counting Steam itself. I guess it's way below 1GB for SteamOS, which means a lot fewer hard faults and SWAP use.
- VBS/HVCI/Memory integrity on by default
- Virtualized full screen ("Full screen optimizations") by default
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So, how platform-specific is this? I understand comparing a non-steam-deck console, however I'd be interested in how it looks like on PC.
IIRC SteamOS launched for PC?
IIRC SteamOS launched for PC?
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A much more trimmed down operating system running something faster than a bloated one? Never woulda thought.
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Nowadays my Windows drive only gets booted into to play games like GTA V online or Ubisoft games needing their launcher (I still like FarCry and Ghost Recon, sue me)
Linux + Proton seems to work for most everything else, and work damn well for the most part.
Linux + Proton seems to work for most everything else, and work damn well for the most part.
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I don’t have a SteamOS device, but I hope it puts real pressure on Microsoft. The competition is sorely needed.
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Windows background applications and services, they seriously impact low spec computers. Not surprised they impact games that haven't been heavily optimized.
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I made the switch from Windows 11 to Fedora a couple months back after a failed attempt last year (some games just refused to work). It’s honestly in a really good spot. Everything I play just works and it works well.
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It would be nice to see if this holds up in Linux (when configured for gaming) generally or is exclusive to SteamOS supported devices. Testing Bazzite vs Windows 11 on a gaming desktop with supported hardware would be an appreciated followup.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Praetorian
Bellular News reported on this yesterday. The numbers weren't any prettier than these. For those of us who still game on desktop PCs, those performance boosts might be enticing. For mobile folks gaming on... have we settled on terminology for the form factor? Handhelds? Decks? Regardless, the battery life savings on less beefy titles could be absolutely experience defining. The ones unlikely to switch? Online competitive gamers, especially those gated behind anti-cheat.
I'm Win10 until I can't, and then it's a question of Mint or SteamOS.
I'm Win10 until I can't, and then it's a question of Mint or SteamOS.
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I don't think that's the main point. The point is that it's running Windows games in not-Windows better than in Windows.
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Impressive. I have not made the jump yet, but I plan to jump into Linux gaming at some point soon. This is very encouraging.
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That's the thing though. Linux isn't that much more "trimmed down" when you're running a distro like Fedora KDE Ediition. It's a full desktop. Sure, stuff isn't where Windows puts it and you'll need to use a different app or whatever, but it's a "full OS".
Also, I don't give Windows a pass for that. Sure, it's bloated and basically an ad platform these days to drive O365 subscriptions, but all those "services" and stuff running aren't that large and are all hanging off the kernel and "NT System" core. They don't really get between a "game" and "performance". The NT kernel, the core "NT System" and NTFS are still the main "chokepoint" for that.
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I have ditched Windows entirely. All of our household PCs are on Mint 22.1, and we have two Steam Decks sticking with Steam OS. There are issues with running some games, but we’ve decided that it’s not worth going back just to play them; and all of our favorites work excellently anyway.
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Yeah, gaming was the one thing I kept Windows around for. Earlier this year I ditched it for good, I'm running Linux Mint and I haven't run into any issues with any games in my library yet.
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That is a good question about what was running during the tests. I know SteamOS uses KDE when in Desktop Mode, and I know you can keep desktop applications running while you are playing a game, and switch between them, but I didn't think all that was running by default when you first booted into Gaming Mode.
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By default, SteamOS has no desktop environment. It boots directly into a mobile optimized Steam Big Picture Mode with the gamescope compositor. If you take the extra steps to switch into "desktop mode" only at that point does it load up plasma.
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You're right. There's no appreciable difference in performance between distros these days.
I meant that it would be interesting to explore if it was specific to hardware supported well by SteamOS and therefore with related optimizations having made them into the Linux stack (drivers confirmed to work well, Proton configured well and known to interact with said drivers, etc.) versus other hardware that isn't running AMD APUs.
In hindsight it wasn't really relevant for what's interesting about the test, but I mentioned "configured for gaming" because using something like Bazzite (or Nobara, etc.) is a simpler/quicker way to get testable userspace running than a general purpose distro which isn't assuming installation for gaming. If someone wants to use the PC for general purpose, Fedora or similar aren't any more cumbersome than Windows for getting things set up for games.
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Even with a full blown enterprise anti-malware software installed on a Linux distribution, Steam on Linux is still faster than Windows on my desktop in case you were all wondering.
The main problem is denuvo and sometimes anti-cheating on newer games don’t let you play those games on Linux.
I stick to single player games + Crossover/GOG for now, until Steam can work something out with newer games, or wait for GOG, but my existing 2020-ish library on Steam works well on Linux.
The main problem is denuvo and sometimes anti-cheating on newer games don’t let you play those games on Linux.
I stick to single player games + Crossover/GOG for now, until Steam can work something out with newer games, or wait for GOG, but my existing 2020-ish library on Steam works well on Linux.
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Windows 11 is a mess when it comes to background processes. I look at my taskmanger as I type this. Nividia has multiple processes using <1% each, but not 0. Explorer, CTF Loader, PresentMon, FancyZones, Process Lasso (because the MS scheduler is broken for machines with a lot of cores), system, antimalware services, service host, msys2 terminal, systeminterrupts, lamp array, IAstoreIcon.
You are right, these should be idle, the problem is, they are not. This is a fundamental problem with the ecosystem as it exists today. For example every app has it's own updater, why? Why is a mallware scanner constantly running when I am not transferring files? System does so much disk activity that the drives can almost never enter a low power state.
Fundamentally windows has way too many things running in the background doing more than they need to. They need to be resolving fundamental missing APIs that require every vendor to run even more background processes. Ideally they would also crackdown on driver bloat.
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Artem S. Tashkinov
Ars Scholae Palatinae
NVIDIA is deep into AI, so they barely care about consumer GPUs any more. Consumer Blackwell uses the exact same node that Ada used more than 2.5 years prior. That has never happened before.
AMD on the other hand is getting help from ... Valve to optimize its hardware for Linux (DXVK and VKD3D to be more specific).
Different priorities.
Sadly NVIDIA is so entrenched they are unlikely to wake up any time soon and then they have big fat margins to care about Linux gaming.
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It's so close.
I just grabbed a deal on a prebuilt PC from Microcenter (first time in 25 years of having my own that I didn't build!). I figured this is the time to experiment and it's an AMD machine so first thing I did was try to blow away Windows and install SteamOS. Unfortunately the installer wouldn't boot and I couldn't figure out why so I moved on to Bazzite.
It's crazy how well it works overall, as this article shows. But I ended up having a weird issue with Ubisoft Connect not being able to download games. I went so far as to re-buy a game on Steam after seeing that the demo there worked. Alas, it still wouldn't run so with that and a couple minor things like Apple Music not being supported outside the browser, I'm back on Windows.
For now.
I just grabbed a deal on a prebuilt PC from Microcenter (first time in 25 years of having my own that I didn't build!). I figured this is the time to experiment and it's an AMD machine so first thing I did was try to blow away Windows and install SteamOS. Unfortunately the installer wouldn't boot and I couldn't figure out why so I moved on to Bazzite.
It's crazy how well it works overall, as this article shows. But I ended up having a weird issue with Ubisoft Connect not being able to download games. I went so far as to re-buy a game on Steam after seeing that the demo there worked. Alas, it still wouldn't run so with that and a couple minor things like Apple Music not being supported outside the browser, I'm back on Windows.
For now.
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What Valve (and Codeweavers, Wine's dev team et al.) have done is nothing short of miraculous. In the article Ars themselves link re Steamboxes, the ending paragraph has this bit, which I find speaks to the prevailing attitude at the time:
I think Valve recognized this impasse at some point and did a bit of a Sherlock Holmes: eliminated the impossible (get people to voluntarily adopt SteamOS) and left only the improbable (make Windows games run just as well or better under SteamOS without developer effort). But heck, what an improbability! If you remember what Wine was like in 2016, you'll know what mountains they've moved to make SteamOS a reality.
There's an implicit assumption in those words: that SteamOS would require developer effort to make games work on it. That was how every other system had gained significant gaming market share before, with only a handful of exceptions: get great first-party or otherwise exclusive titles, or hope the other market participants fumble and publishers are forced to target your platform.
I think Valve recognized this impasse at some point and did a bit of a Sherlock Holmes: eliminated the impossible (get people to voluntarily adopt SteamOS) and left only the improbable (make Windows games run just as well or better under SteamOS without developer effort). But heck, what an improbability! If you remember what Wine was like in 2016, you'll know what mountains they've moved to make SteamOS a reality.
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Yeah, but run "top" or "ps aux" as root on any modern "desktop" Linux distro. There is a lot of shit running as well. systemd, chrony, journalctl, auditd, cups, kde connect, etc...
Most of what you mention should be "user space" and on a multi-core system really should just "get out of the way" of your game doing whatever it's doing when talking to NT kernel and the core "NT system". If it's not, then that's the NT kernel's problem. Most games are GPU bound anyway and most often are single threaded (ie: they're using, at best, a couple of CPU cores), so having a couple of random "user space" processes running around isn't that big of a deal on any decent system. Yes, those processes take up RAM, so if you're running on a potato then Linux probably will work better just because it has a smaller footprint, but most decent gaming rigs are 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs and a 8core+ CPU. A couple of user space processes sitting around with a couple hundred MB of RAM and <5% CPU on 1 core is / should be nothing.
Yes, if you start talking AV and "kernel" level processes then it gets more iffy.
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No surprise there, but my desktop and gaming laptop are more than just gaming machines. Until an alternative can run all the CAD and design software I use, I still don't have much of a choice.
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This story is of particular interest to me because I'm transitioning my household to Linux.
I've been using Mint GNOME, but probably should have gone with Cinnamon since it has a file system paradigm that's closer in function (if not form) to Windows. So if someone is looking to jump into Linux from Windows, it's a shallower learning curve.
That said, games run fine in Linux. I have my game which I didn't use Steam to run, then put my wife on the same system, and used the built-in option to add Steam to it. It took some tweaking to get things to work from a vanilla Linux install, but it's working pretty well.
Our roommate plays more games than either of us, so with her computer, I plan on doing SteamOS, hoping that the tweaks are already built in, making installing and running games as easy as it is through the Steam application on Windows.
So if you're waiting for Linux to be "game ready", it's there, even if it's a bit more work and research to make sure all the toggles to get it to work are flipped to Linux. I don't consider myself to be a "Linux guru" by any stretch, but I can handle configuration instructions pretty well, which are readily available online for just about any game (that she uses so far, at least, which is a couple of dozen).
As for the article, I do have to wonder if the hardware plays the greater role here in gaming frame rate. Comparing a dedicated "handheld" between two different OS's that was originally designed for only one seems... uneven. The handheld's hardware can be optimized for for one OS, and not the other.
What I'd love to see is the same test done, swapping hard drives in a desktop (or laptop, as long as all the other factors are the same except the OS), using the exact same hard drive model in both. That evens the playing field and removes any doubt about why there's a difference.
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At this point it's just anti-cheat keeping linux gaming from going mainstream. The irony being that even ring 0 anti-cheat has been unable to stop rampant cheating.
But even apart from performance, Windows 11 is just not stable period.
But even apart from performance, Windows 11 is just not stable period.
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Yeah I check periodically and actually the games I play most are going to mean I personally have to keep windows around for the next few years at least but hopefully this sort of advancement continues.
Yeah I'm in a tough spot there because my favored games are already kinda niche. I can technically get DCS to run under Linux but the juice isn't really worth the squeeze to do so because my VR headset is Windows-only AFAIK (and I can't even upgrade to Win11 or it'll break).
Star Citizen… I won't even bother checking
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Yeah, but this wasn't tested on the SteamDeck. It was a Lenovo Legion and they did develop it for both Windows and SteamOS. If I remember right it was even going to be Windows only when it was first announced, but that could have been a different device.
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