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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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Praetorian
[Obligatory "Scam Citizen won't run on Linux because it's not real" joke here]
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Phoronix does a lot of Linux testing, and in some games, Linux was faster even for nvidia (I think one of the F1 games was such a case).
Win10 also tends to be faster than Win11 for gaming, usually at small or negligible margins, but sometimes by a noticeable amount.
Of course, the software and driver landscape also changes over time, with driver updates, game updates, OS updates, etc.
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Depends on what specific games you're playing. I predominantly play single-player games, but still play more than a few multiplayer and co-op games (most recently Helldivers and Baldur's Gate 3) and haven't had any issues running them on Linux. ProtonDB has a pretty thorough database showing what games are and are not compatible, as of today 79% of the top 100 games by player count are rated Gold or above (run perfectly), that goes up to 87% if you include games rated Silver (run but have minor issues). The numbers are basically the same if you expand to the top 1000 games; 79% Gold or better and 88% Silver or better.
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Great, hopefully the kick in the teeth MS needs to actually improve Windows! Then the next day they will make it infinitely worse by adding more "AI"!
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How much of the performance improvement can be attributed to community-provided precompiled shaders and other hardware-specific per-game tweaks on SteamOS that aren't automatically available on generic Windows installs? Or does the testing procedure make those elements moot?
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Nothing stopping you from dual boot those two, so why not both? Heck, throw another drive in the box and try them out. Make a gradual switch from Win10. If it's a desktop there's not much of a hurdle to try them out, while maintaining your active rig on the same hardware.
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This extends to my corporate life. Switched my workstation to linux a few years back, missing nothing. Thanks to Microsoft migrating to the web, nowadays i can even use the entire office 365 in the browser.
I'd bet a ton of money nobody at my company (<1k employees) actually needs windows anymore. >99% of the work is done in either web applications, microsoft office or cross-platform developer tools. Certainly nobody at the government level (>100K employees) actually needs windows, i know because we provision these with super heavily locked down windows, office and practically nothing else.
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Plasma isn't an operating system, it's a desktop environment. SteamOS doesn't boot into Plasma, it boots into what's essentially a Steam Big Picture Mode session. One of the major advantages of Linux is that your user session can boot into whatever shell/DE/window manager you want. In Windows everything you run is going to be within the Windows Desktop as a fullscreen application, with all the overhead and jank that entails. Only when you expressly switch into Desktop Mode, it'll log you out of your Big Picture Mode Session and then start up a Plasma session.
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Just did that, no it's not the same. 4 processes are using time > 0.
Yes, many are user space, still part of windows or software necessary to make windows work. That is the fundamental problem. (almost) No one cares if it's kernel vs user space. They care why so much stuff is running in the background wasting resources. Hey, it's user space windows process that wasted your battery doesn't make it any better.
Older versions of windows were better.
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The Proton translation not being a huge performance sink is only counterintuitive if you know nothing about reasonably recent game and graphics tech. Yes, the function calls have to be translated, but then the majority of the work is done by the CPU and GPU in relatively large chunks and relatively independently, without need for the translation layers to intervene until it's time for the next batch of work. And yes of course there are exceptions, but the vast majority of hot loops in a game have to do with graphics, and the actual data doesn't require much translation since it's still going to the same hardware no matter the software in front.
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I tested this by building a Windows 11 image that has just about everything stripped out (used the Titus WinUtl) for my ROG ally. I then ran a bunch of benchmarks using the stripped down Win 11 and Bazzite. They were close enough that I kept win11. That said, its kind of a nightmare to keep the dang thing up to date and not have Windows just download everything. So maintenance might actually be easier with Linux, my only gripe is 3rd party launchers not being so seamless.
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I have one utility that needs windows to run at work, and I use it about once per quarter. As you'd expect, I've got a VM that is usually disabled for this. When I need to run that utility, I boot the VM, run the utility, grab the output, and turn the VM off again.
We've got a few people who use Windows, I think perhaps a dozen or two out of a bit over 1,100. We're overwhelmingly Linux and Mac-based.
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There's a lot of stuff running, but most of it isn't consuming any CPU at all. Most of it is idle, waiting for the kernel to hand it a TCP connection. On my Linux server (with a desktop installed), there are 5-10 processes consuming CPU at any given time, and two of them are MineCraft and Plex. (I don't have a SteamDesk to check what it's doing.)
I have no idea what most of the stuff in Windows task manager is doing, but I see at least 30+ processes consume some CPU. Anti Malware Service Executable consumes more CPU by itself than all of my active processes on Linux, and the Linux CPU is much less capable than my Windows box.
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Oh, I see.
I don't actually have a steamdeck, I was sent one of those lenovo things (which was... very large) which just booted into windows, and just assumed the steam one did the same thing.
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In fact, people have reported significant speedups on Windows using DXVK (which is used in Proton) for DirectX 11 and lower games.
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The irony is, by ignoring the gamers, they have also ignored improving their hardware, which in the next generation, MAYBE two if they are lucky, means that AMD will overtake them and regain the performance crowd.
AMD is also investing heavily into ROCm, which means that the advantage Nvidia has with CUDA and AI will also vanish.
Nvidia acts like they are untouchable...and TODAY, that may be the case, but hubris brought down IBM, it's bringing down Microsoft, and it's going to come home to roost at Nvidia.
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Nope. Steam only loads the Steam interface at launch, and only loads the desktop UI when it's needed. Windows HAS to load the desktop UI, then overlays whatever gaming interface they have OVER that...which is why they are now scrambling to develop a "slimmed down" version for gaming handhelds now for the new ROG Ally X handhelds.
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Ubuntu disables Intel GPU security mitigations, promises 20% performance boost
Seems to me this could be done by SteamOS too? Since it's a curated system used for gaming only, seems to me Spectre isn't all that big a deal in that context.
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I did a bit of messing around on Bazzite and Windows 10, with the Dune benchmark demo when it came out. I have a high end PC, but there was still a performance improvement using Bazzite.
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Guys...I see tons of conversations here talking about the finer points of linux, different distributions, configurations etc...and this misses the point entirely.
We are finally getting an OS that is noob friendly. Friendly enough that Levono (and Valve) ship products that use it OUT OF THE BOX and don't require getting a training guide from a local bookstore in order to use it!
When ANY customer, regardless of how technical they are or if they have any experience with computers whatsoever, can install SteamOS on their machine FOR FREE, and get better performance (and also eliminate Microsoft's spying/data collection!) and better reliability...and can spend more time playing games and less time tweaking and futzing with tuning the OS to run properly, well, that's game over for Windows!
Those that don't have experience with it should download it and try it on your system at home. It's NOT perfect...but for a consumer that just wants to play games on their PC and do other "light" computing tasks (like web browsing/streaming) it's perfect, with the caveat that it works much better using AMD hardware right now.
MS SHOULD feel threatened, because if things dont change with Windows, SteamOS WILL eat their lunch! Bet on it.
We are finally getting an OS that is noob friendly. Friendly enough that Levono (and Valve) ship products that use it OUT OF THE BOX and don't require getting a training guide from a local bookstore in order to use it!
When ANY customer, regardless of how technical they are or if they have any experience with computers whatsoever, can install SteamOS on their machine FOR FREE, and get better performance (and also eliminate Microsoft's spying/data collection!) and better reliability...and can spend more time playing games and less time tweaking and futzing with tuning the OS to run properly, well, that's game over for Windows!
Those that don't have experience with it should download it and try it on your system at home. It's NOT perfect...but for a consumer that just wants to play games on their PC and do other "light" computing tasks (like web browsing/streaming) it's perfect, with the caveat that it works much better using AMD hardware right now.
MS SHOULD feel threatened, because if things dont change with Windows, SteamOS WILL eat their lunch! Bet on it.
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You just gave me the image of enterprises mass-deploying locked down SteamOS with nothing but Office 365 and Chrome on it. And Microsoft and Google wouldn't mind one bit.
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That's not how it works. If it was, then this machine came with windows first, so arguably it was "designed for" windows.and should be faster there.
Except it doesn't matter, and the software, specifically drivers, being appropriate for the hardware is the key, not the other way.
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I've always wondered why Microsoft hasn't done much to improve the efficiency of gaming on Windows, when it's been one of the main gaming platforms, and one of the reasons for it's continued existence has been gaming.
How inefficient do you have to be, before someone emulating your OS can run games faster through emulation than Windows does natively?
I really wonder what is going on with their jumbled next Xbox marketing. Some people seem to be assuming the next Xbox is just going to run full Windows, and that just doesn't make any sense.
How inefficient do you have to be, before someone emulating your OS can run games faster through emulation than Windows does natively?
I really wonder what is going on with their jumbled next Xbox marketing. Some people seem to be assuming the next Xbox is just going to run full Windows, and that just doesn't make any sense.
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There hasn't been any need for it. It's really not long ago where Linux gaming was Tuxracer. I remember even how nervous Microsoft was when puny Be, Inc got games ported to BeOS before Microsoft had Windows 2000 out, and Microsoft wanted none of it.
When the geeks are starting to leave Microsoft as it seems the snowball has slowly started building, that is when i would be worried. I doubt Windows 12 will change that, i am sure Microsoft's focus has been elsewhere during it's development.
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In Microsoft’s defense, they need all the extra resources to find more surfaces to convince you to switch to edge and bing
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I hate to rain on your parade, but this is exctly oposite of what SteamOS is. Valve is very clear about their intentions. SteamOS is a hand-held gaming OS for supported hand-helds. Not a general purpose OS.
Per the SteamOS Page:
I get your excitement. I'm excited too! SteamOS is a great show case for Linux gaming. And serves as a wedge to get people off of Windows gaming.
But lets temper that excitement with understanding. SteamOS is intentionally limited. Limited by the hardware it supports. Limited by it's lack of an installer. Limited by what you the user can do with it (which is still a lot).
Valve is only interested in supporting hardware they or a partner produce. Which makes sense. Letting anyone and everyone install SteamOS is partly what killed the Steam Machines.
Valve does not provide an installer for SteamOS. They expect SteamOS to be flashed to a device during the manufacturing process. Yes, you can flash SteamOS to other devices, but it's a bit technical. Not really something suitable for your computer novice.
As far as SteamOS's desktop environment, it's intended for developers to develop and test games on the Steam Deck. It has a read-only root filesystem, and you can only install applications through Flatpak. Don't get me wrong, these are great user protections. Valve does not want users borking their device. But if you're some novice trying to follow a tutorial, inevitably you'll hit a step that doesn't work. And you won't understand why it doesn't work. And that's supremely frustrating.
So yeah, SteamOS is great. But it is not, and never will be a replacement for Windows. If you want a general purpose OS that's like SteamOS, Bazzite OS is a better choice.
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It would be interesting to see these same benchmarks run on the Legion Go S with Windows while using DXVK to see if DXVK is contributing significantly to the speedup.
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While there is quite a bit of bloat and inefficiency in Windows, it's not really that shocking that "someone emulating your OS can run games faster through emulation than Windows does natively" if you think about how modern games (and software in general) are structured. Wine/Proton is not really "emulation" in the sense that people think of in terms of emulating old consoles like NES or SNES, where you're using software to emulate the behavior of a very foreign hardware architecture.
This is more accurately described as an independent implementation of the Windows APIs. The game is still running native x64 code on an x64 CPU, it's just that when it calls a Windows API function, it gets the Wine/Proton implementation of that function rather than the Microsoft implementation of that function, and if that function needs to interface with the OS kernel in some way, it will be interacting with a Linux kernel rather than an NT kernel.
There can be certain cases where the kernels themselves are different enough (and the API is designed in a way that works efficiently with the NT kernel behavior) that Wine/Proton needs to do things in a less efficient way in order to accurately replicate the external behavior of the API, but this is a relatively small amount of code, and as long as it isn't being called repeatedly in a performance-critical section, it generally isn't a problem.
For DirectX APIs specifically, the Proton implementation of those APIs are built on top of Vulkan.
DirectX 12 and Vulkan are both low-level APIs that are relatively similar at a rough conceptual level, so the Proton implementation of it (VKD3D) it's somewhat close to a "direct translation", so it adds relatively little overhead.
Earlier DirectX versions were higher level APIs, so the Proton implementation (DXVK) is essentially an independent implementation built on top of the low level Vulkan API. A low level API like Vulkan gives you fairly direct access to GPU functionality without a lot of overhead, so there's no reason to believe that a high level API implemented on top of Vulkan couldn't be at least close to the performance of an implementation built specifically for a certain GPU architecture.
In either case, once the data is passed to Vulkan, it's going to be handled by a Linux-native Vulkan driver for the GPU (RADV, in the case of SteamOS with an AMD GPU), and a lot of the actual performance-critical work is handled by the GPU itself, and the API is just there to get the data to the GPU and tell it what to do with it, so as long as Proton's implementation of the API gets the data to the GPU efficiently, the GPU will perform just as well.
Essentially, there's not really any reason to necessarily expect Microsoft's implementation of the API to perform better than Wine/Proton's implementation of that API just because MS wrote the API spec. It can reasonably be expected that some API functions might perform better in the MS implementation, while others might perform better in the Wine/Proton implementation.
I would generally expect that if you configured a custom "stripped down" version of Windows without all the extraneous background processes and bloat, you could probably get Windows to perform pretty similarly, and you'd probably ultimately end up in a situation where some games/workloads ran better on Windows, and some ran better on Linux/Wine/Proton, depending on what particular API functions they were calling in their most performance-sensitive loops.
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Is this testing done with Memory Integrity and VMP disabled like MS suggests for gaming setups?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-11-a255f612-2949-4373-a566-ff6f3f474613
Those tweaks seem to give a 4-8% boost in FPS on the ROG Ally which would put the performance in Windows roughly on par with SteamOS. It's annoying that this isn't done out of the box for the Windows Handheldss, but I'm holding out hope that this is part of the "Xbox Experience" coming next year.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-11-a255f612-2949-4373-a566-ff6f3f474613
Those tweaks seem to give a 4-8% boost in FPS on the ROG Ally which would put the performance in Windows roughly on par with SteamOS. It's annoying that this isn't done out of the box for the Windows Handheldss, but I'm holding out hope that this is part of the "Xbox Experience" coming next year.
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If you have the hardware (i.e. pretty much any spare desktop PC with an SSD and AMD graphics) then probably the best introduction to Linux gaming is to run SteamOS on it, hooked up to your living room TV, as a “home console” setup. SteamOS “just works” the vast majority of the time* and it’s a lot more pleasant than trying to use Windows for the same task.
(* the main pain point for SteamOS on desktops is that it’s designed for handhelds with a single SSD and getting it to remember secondary hard drives can be annoying.)
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I'd point to Bazzite instead. It has everything to get you started out of the box. Steam? Check. Proton? Check. Lutris? Check. Firefox? Check. Flatpaks manager? Check. Text editor, media player (VLC, halu). Check.
It's also supported on a wider range of hardware (nvidia, amd, tablets, handhelds, etc).
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Every time I see one of these articles I get excited and boot back into my Nobara partition only to be reminded I have an NVIDIA GPU when I get equivalent to slightly worse performance instead
That said some games might be more stable; back when Robocop Rogue City came out the game was hard crashing every time it ran out of VRAM on Windows - no such thing happened when running via Proton
That said some games might be more stable; back when Robocop Rogue City came out the game was hard crashing every time it ran out of VRAM on Windows - no such thing happened when running via Proton
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Didn't you see the other Ars article recently? 10 is good for support til late 2026 now, by which time Windows 12 will be out or right around the corner.
Of course, ditching Windows is always an option
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As someone who's seen Microsoft monopoly, and their great Windows 11 OS and AI, seeing games made for Windows run better on Linux, in many other videos and articles, please allow me a moment while I.....AAAaaaAAAAaaaaaAaAAaAAAAAHhHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhahahhahahahaha. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHahahhhahAAaAaaaaaAAAaahhhhhAaaaa...
Sorry for breaking decorum.
Sorry for breaking decorum.
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Do it. I did, but chose Pop OS because the Steam OS news hadn't happened yet.
I might have gone with them anyway because Pop has good gaming support, but the main takeaway is it was very easy. I'm a mac/PS5 guy, but bought a gaming PC during the pandemic because why not? I guess the mobo isn't up to Win 11's standards, so I started looking into Linux options. I don't even have any experience with Windows, but the hardest part of switching to Pop was installing a second SSD for it.
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I can't say anything about modern wine / proton / steam os because i haven't been paying attention.
But back when I was playing WoW (burning crusade days) the system was overall more responsive on linux/wine than on windows/native on the same hardware. I play my mmos in a windows, keep them open more than I actually play and alt tab out a lot. Back then at least, Windows couldn't handle that gracefully.
But back when I was playing WoW (burning crusade days) the system was overall more responsive on linux/wine than on windows/native on the same hardware. I play my mmos in a windows, keep them open more than I actually play and alt tab out a lot. Back then at least, Windows couldn't handle that gracefully.
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At some point, probably soon, the downward curve of "proportion of PC games that are incompatible with Linux" will intersect the upward curve of "proportion of Windows features I find intolerable" and I will finally switch from Windows to Linux for my gaming PC.
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