In my purely anecdotal experience over the last few years, performance ranking is as follows:
1. Steam on Linux via Proton + Wayland (Niri)
2. Steam on Linux via Proton + X11 (Xfce)
3. Steam on Windows
4. Games on Linux launched via other means (it's possible I was missing out on certain flags/optimizations, but this is just about the average experience)
The biggest thing I noticed when switching to Linux was an improvement in framerate consistency, i.e. I'd have fewer situations where the framerate would drop momentarily. Games felt more solid and predictable.
The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate. I'd failed this jump many times over the years, so it was notable when I jumped and stayed there earlier this year.
It does feel like games take longer to launch on average, but this makes sense given the fact that it's launching via Proton/Wine.
thewebguyd · 8h ago
Interestingly enough, I've had games that had both a native Linux port and Windows version, and the Windows version through Proton ran better than the native Linux version. This ended up being true for Civ5, Civ6 and Cities Skylines (1).
With those admittedly limited examples though, I don't experience the same ranking in performance, but I attribute that to my non-gaming hardware vs. any problem with Linux or Proton/Wine. I play on a laptop with an Nvidia 3050 laptop GPU, and I get much better performance in Windows still. In Cities Skylines, for example, I'll get ~20 fps on Linux via Proton (but I do experience what you said, it's consistent no major spikes or drops) while on Windows I get between 45-60fps up until about 15k population or so.
Other games, despite working, remain unplayable to me due to performance. I can play Diablo 4 on windows no problem on medium settings, but even on low it's just too unresponsive on Linux.
Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
nialv7 · 8h ago
Linux port if there is one is usually done by a third party porting studio, which is not necessarily at the same quality as the original codebase. Also the devs just don't have the manpower/bandwidth to spare for Linux users given how small this community is.
It's better value for money for both the gamers and the devs if the devs just choose to engage with valve and get their game running perfectly under proton.
preisschild · 3m ago
> and get their game running perfectly under proton
Even better would be to compile for linux, but use DXVK-Native (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk#dxvk-native) if you think migrating from DirectX to Vulkan requires too much effort.
egypturnash · 5h ago
But maybe figure out how to start getting those third party Linux porting studios paid to work on Proton...
YokoZar · 2h ago
The answer is pretty simple here - hire CodeWeavers to work on supporting your game in Proton/Wine rather than some other porting shop doing an old rewrite-style port.
unaindz · 7h ago
To be you should compare the windows version on windows, no proton against the Linux version.
DXVK, which proton uses, makes some games run better in windows than "native".
umbra07 · 7h ago
> Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
preisschild · 1m ago
> On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
> HDR
Already supported
> Nvidia GPUs
You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue.
> VR
SteamVR works though?
_aavaa_ · 6h ago
To the extent that Linux doesn’t support nvidia gpu it is actually Nvidia not supporting Linux and keeping their drivers proprietary.
dcl · 6h ago
Doesn't support NVIDIA GPU's!? Is this a display or gaming specific thing?
All the ML people are using NVIDIA GPU's on Linux.
benley · 6h ago
There are indeed nvidia drivers for Linux and they're reasonably good for gaming, but the feature set sometimes lags far behind windows. There is no DLSS 3 for Linux, for instance. (as of a few months ago anyway - I haven't checked recently)
dcl · 5h ago
Ahh rightio. That's a shame.
komali2 · 5h ago
Nvidia support across the desktop ecosystem is poor, for example practically nonfunctional in Sway. And just buggy in other Wayland based desktop environments (kde seems to be the best in my experience).
maxhille · 1h ago
WRT Nvidia+Sway this was certainly true not so long ago. But since the latest Ubuntu release and with a recent driver I am running this combo and it works flawlessly.
weiliddat · 7h ago
AFAICT HDR is supported, like on the Steam Deck
thfuran · 6h ago
Can you even watch decent Netflix on Linux yet?
onli · 1h ago
Up to full HD, depending on what Netflix streams out. But this has nothing to do with graphics drivers or GPU performance.
whoisthemachine · 5h ago
I have a laptop with the same GPU, and Diablo 4 runs really well out of Lutris. Graphics version 570, and the CPU is an AMD with a Radeon 680M integrated. I often play games with FSR on, which probably keeps performance higher?
onli · 1h ago
FSR does indeed increase the performance a lot, before FSR 4 with a significant cost to image quality though.
For your system, the integrated graphics should also be quite capable. More so on Linux, thanks to the driver advantage AMD has here.
haswell · 8h ago
> Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
That’s interesting and good to know. I’m running an 10th gen i9 with an RTX 3090, so I have plenty of headroom performance wise. I’ve been wondering about Linux gaming on lower end hardware for my younger brother’s sake, and hadn’t assumed it would be worse.
One thing to note: I’ve had all kinds of issues with power management impacting performance. If I let the computer sleep/standby, I’ll get 50% slower framerate until I reboot.
Given the fact that you’re on a laptop, I wonder if power management has contributed to the slowness.
hedora · 5h ago
I have a 65 watt ryzen 9 system on chip (8945hs, I think) minipc and make heavy use of it for linux gaming.
My guess is that Nvidia’s linux video drivers are still substandard.
0x38B · 4h ago
Side note, Niri is a fantastic WM. When I saw the Phoronix article on HN talking about the addition of overview mode and more, I finally took the plunge and spent an afternoon converting over from Sway.¹ Anecdotally, I've seen less hangups on Niri around fullscreen games and floating windows, perhaps thanks to X11 running in xwayland-satellite.
1: the hardest part was finding a bar that supported i3status-rs; not a fan of GTK bars that eat up CPU. I settled on i3bar-river.
rendaw · 2h ago
Steam won't launch for me in xwayland-satellite here... I just assumed steam+wayland = broken. I have a kind of weird setup using sway with xwayland disabled and running xwayland-satellite though.
0x38B · 32m ago
Try running xwayland-satellite in another WM like Niri and see if it works there – for example, Gamescope didn’t work well on Sway, crashing as soon as Steam tried to spawn another window, but it’s working fine in Niri.
haswell · 4h ago
I've been so happy with Niri after many many years bouncing around other WMs. It addresses the main issues I've had with other tiling window managers and has been such a joy to use.
The scrollable aspect just feels so natural and intuitive to me.
chillfox · 3h ago
Been a Linux gamer for years now and I think you are correct on your frame rate observations in general.
If you use ZFS (single nvme) then you can beat windows load times by a fairly large margin. My husband and I have identical hardware for our gaming computers (he uses Windows and I run Linux), it's not uncommon for my computer to load games 10 seconds faster than his.
badsectoracula · 2h ago
> The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate.
Was it with any specific game? I just tried the GOG version of The Witcher 3 "Complete Edition" (which is the remastered one) with the Direct3D 12 renderer under both Xorg/Window Maker and Wayland/KDE using umu-run (essentially proton without Steam) and it had identical performance in both cases (i also tried to use Niri but it would launch in 60Hz mode and for some reason wouldn't allow the game to run at a higher framerate with vsync disabled regardless of any option i chose) in either low or high settings (which is basically what i expected since the window system shouldn't be a bottleneck unless something is either broken or you are running at something like 20000fps :-P).
shmerl · 2h ago
Try winewayland + Wayland.
jekwoooooe · 6h ago
The last missing piece for full Linux gaming is anticheat. Last I looked into it, the major vendors don’t want to support it due to lack of kernel security and the ones that do, game devs refuse to allow it (destiny for example)
One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming
TheCraiggers · 6h ago
Anti-cheat today is a stop-gap measure at best. For various reasons such as improved OS security and security concerns with this software, ring zero anti-cheat won't be around forever. Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse.
We already have the technology now to do it better. A combination of only sending what info a client should have, and server-side checks. As soon as something like UT ships with that built in we can hopefully forget about this horrible hack we currently have to check for cheats.
armada651 · 5h ago
> Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse.
The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. However since those cheaters are few and far in-between they can be handled through player reports.
The goal is to stop the mediocre cheater who simply downloaded a known cheat from a cheating forum. If you don't stop those you'll get such a large wave of cheaters that you can't keep up with banning them quickly enough.
mmis1000 · 1h ago
With the emergence of AI cheating, cheats don't even need access to memory anymore. The cheat can entirely run on mouse and screen peripherals and the computer will have totally no idea what's going on. The best you can do is behavior analysis. But it always comes with chance of misreports.
alex77456 · 2h ago
DMA hardware and cheats are getting more and more accessible. It's not just chosen few anymore
jsolson · 4h ago
> Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore.
Working on mostly server platforms, I had forgotten that IOMMU enablement (and, where relevant, enforcement) was not the default.
Consumer hardware and software is terrifying.
cwillu · 3h ago
Not sure how that's relevant, unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware.
dwattttt · 21m ago
It's your IOMMU, you can do what you want with it. Maybe you need to write heaps of stuff to take advantage of it, but what's new there?
The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".
hypeatei · 6h ago
As long as games are running on user hardware/OS, you'll always deal with cheating. Server-side checks and computation can only go so far.
For example: in competitive shooters (where cheaters are most prevalent) you can't have things appearing out of thin air. The client needs to know about things ahead of time to play sounds and to give other environmental hints.
armada651 · 6h ago
Exactly, nothing short of streaming the entire game fully rendered from the server will stop cheats. And even then you can probably still do aimbotting with modern day computer vision.
userbinator · 4h ago
This reminds me of a discussion around 2 decades ago, where someone showed a picture of his "undetectable aimbot" for a turn-based artillery game: a ruler, a page of charts, and a handheld calculator; followed by a copious amount of discussion of whether that was considered cheating.
ghthor · 2h ago
I hope this was for gunbound, lovers that turn based artillery game.
rowanG077 · 5h ago
How exactly will it stop cheats? Any skill based game can still be cheated. Just analyze the video stream, or go even lower tech, point a camera at your screen. Many games can be effectively cheated like this. For eaxmple Aimbots in counter strike and peak human reflexes in dota/lol.
bloqs · 5h ago
so consoles are better
zrobotics · 1h ago
How would consoles be any more immune to computer vision based cheating? Instead of feeding the output to a spoofed keyboard & mouse, you'd just be feeding it to a controller input. I'm not really seeing any difference in technical challenge here, and you wouldn't even need esoteric hardware since console controllers are USB devices anyways.
armada651 · 5h ago
They are often more convenient and secure. If you don't mind a single-purpose device that severely limits your ability to modify your experience. Better is subjective after all.
jay_kyburz · 5h ago
I've always thought the line about whats cheating, and what's not is unfair and arbitrary. How is it ok that some players can play 4k 200fps and others 1080p at 30fps.
The only way to be really fair is for everybody to Stream the game at the same res, frame rate and latency.
zrobotics · 1h ago
In certain competitive environments framerate is definitely limited. Here [0] are the rules for Fallout 4 any% speed runs, framerate must be capped at 60FPS. AFAIK that rule applies to all games in this engine due to physics behavior. I don't follow tournament FPS games, but it wouldn't shock me if there are rules for competitive play there as well.
If you are asking why games like counterstrike don't have limits on online play, that's mostly a commercial question. Would those games be as popular if they limited performance to what was achievable for minimum specs? I certainly wouldn't want to play at 1920x1080 on my nice widescreen monitor, but setting the minimum to a $1500 monitor and the hardware to drive it would guarantee very few players.
Yeah and in real world people from different countries with vastly different economic backgrounds compete on the same stage, I think video games are fine.
armada651 · 5h ago
This isn't exclusive to video games. Much of the improvements to world records in sports are due to improvements in gear, yet we don't consider those records to have been unfairly achieved.
Some games do impose limits though, for example Overwatch doesn't allow you to use an aspect ratio larger than 16:9 and selecting a wider aspect ratio actually cuts down on your vertical field-of-view rather than granting you more horizontal field-of-view. This lessens the potential advantage of ultra-wide monitors.
Cloudef · 5h ago
Multiplayer games without dedicated servers is dead end anyways. I dont need a "anti-cheat" daemon hooking into kernel scanning files and other memory while playing a game. Communities in dedicated servers are much more efficient at moderating the player base than centralized match making ever will be.
ThatPlayer · 5h ago
Communities with dedicated servers include anti-cheat though. Most people aren't interested in spending time moderating a player base: they'd rather just play the game. So server admins use anti-cheat.
You can see this in existing games with current games with community servers. GTA V's modded FiveM and CS2 Face-IT include more anti-cheats, not less.
SchemaLoad · 5h ago
This is where I'm at with gaming. Even outside of cheating, it's not fun to me to be dumped in a game with screaming children/manchildren. If I'm playing a game I want it to be with my actual friends. And then I don't have to worry about them running cheats because I trust them.
Once you get to match making, global ranks, etc it's just getting too sweaty and ruined by cheating/low trust/etc.
kgwxd · 5h ago
Yeah, but it's very time consuming/impossible to find similarly skilled players for a fun lobby. The only competitive game I care to play on Linux is Rocket League, which is nearly impossible to cheat at, so it doesn't currently have anti-cheat, but I wouldn't be surprised if Epic decides to put their beloved EAC in it at some point anyway, maybe even just because they hate Linux so much.
alex77456 · 2h ago
There are rumours of next xbox generation supporting steam platform and 386 architecture. I know it's a bit off topic, but it could be an elegant solution to the cheating problem, gradually move to standardised consoles. This could solve the dma problem too
0x38B · 4h ago
This is problem for me and my brother right now. He's up at a remote job site and we want to play Siege or Apex together¹, but both require anti-cheat and don't support Linux. And I'm loathe to devote space on my SSD to Windows.
¹: Rainbow Six: Siege and Apex Legends, respectively.
ryukoposting · 1h ago
Don't forget the ancillary applications that gamers want. If you follow Discord's website, you're gonna end up installing a DEB file manually. Then, every couple weeks, Discord won't launch until you go download another DEB file and install that. Oh, and good luck getting Discord screen sharing working on Wayland. I tried for hours, gave up, and switched to X11. So, just in Discord, we've already run into two hideous workflows that no Windows native is going to take in stride.
boston_clone · 4h ago
interestingly, I have no issues with the anti-cheat within Marvel Rivals; however, games that embedded an anti-cheat prior to the steam deck popularity don’t work as you described (PUBG, apex legends).
runako · 6h ago
Back in the Windows XP days, I discovered that running Windows in a VMWare VM, hosted on Linux, was faster than running the same version of Windows bare on the same machine.
I never came up with a good explanation for that.
userbinator · 4h ago
Cache.
Disk cache, to be precise.
schmorptron · 1h ago
i wonder how much of that is simply due to how incredible dxvk is. I think intel even uses it as part of their windows drivers to translate some older dx version games to vulkan because it performs so much better on their cards.
hinkley · 51m ago
I’m hearing that Microsoft has done a shitty job of tuning windows for the Lenovo device. Someone last week cited commentary that Microsoft has been working on it and they think they can reduce the Windows overhead by TWO GIGABYTES. Why is the fucking operating system using 2 gigabytes of memory in the first place, let alone enough more than that to be able to reduce memory usage by 2 GB.
lenerdenator · 4h ago
When SteamOS and Ganoo/L00nockz become first-class gaming citizens, that's when I'm building a gaming PC for the first time since 2012.
I'm a Mac guy now mainly because of my job and I like UNIX-y stuff now, but of course, gaming is even more lacking than Linux.
We're so close. Once AAA releases and GPU drivers get there, it's over the cliff, and I could see that being in the next five years.
arvinsim · 3h ago
I have always wanted Windows to move to Unix so that I can have the best of both worlds(software development and video games). Glad that we are close to that reality.
flaminHotSpeedo · 2h ago
Quote:
Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11
That's not just a buried lede, this title is straight up wrong (or at least, not backed up by data)
With SteamOS coming to arbitrary hardware, that is a very bold claim to make. And not one that ars has data to back up, apparently.
It's also an embarrassment of an article because they were gifted the steam version of the handheld, then compared that performance against them installing windows... on the steam version of the handheld. Why not buy the version with Windows by default?
Personally I'm nearly certain that SteamOS would give better apples to apples performance than windows, but we shouldn't give an article that shits on both the scientific method and journalistic integrity the light of day
hinkley · 1h ago
This story has been floating around for weeks already. I’ve seen two different videos talking about this already including one claiming Microsoft has already stated they are working on it. It’s not just that the games run faster but that battery life is also better. On a handheld system battery life will change minds more than frame rates.
Correction: it’s been a month and they had both devices:
The choice of games is also super strange. Why include borderlands 3? A 2019 cel-shaded release that isn't super demanding seems odd. Homeworld and returnal also seem odd, they're a little more modern but I don't typically see them used as graphical benchmarks. The only game on their list that I typically see for benchmarking is cyberpunk 2077, the rest of the list honestly looks like they did some cherry picking with their selection to massage the data.
sitkack · 7h ago
Given that Windows games run faster via Proton on SteamOS, developers should prioritize targeting SteamOS APIs—not Windows. This ensures compatibility with Windows while maximizing performance. Game engines like Unity and Unreal must adopt SteamOS as the primary target, with CI systems rigorously testing both platforms. SteamOS, not Windows, should be the baseline for optimization.
Does Valve run a SteamOS CI/CD farm? I could see a Rust based template and library for calling into this set of APIs that you could upload your well structured project and it would build and test for all platforms. Rust would just be the skeleton, your game logic could be in anything Rust could link to.
SchemaLoad · 7h ago
I'm not sure that makes sense since the Windows API is the source of truth for how something works. If you make a game that works on Windows but not in Proton, Valve will push a fix that makes Proton work the same as Windows. But if you make your game work with Proton, but not Windows, you are relying on some quirk of Proton which isn't guaranteed to work in to the future and as soon as something else needs it to work the same as Windows, your game will break.
Test your game to make sure it works on the Steam Deck and avoid features that don't work on Proton, but you still have to primarily target Windows.
sitkack · 6h ago
You would need to test on both of course. I am arguing that one should target the fast happy-path on Proton as Proton is a subset of the Windows APIs that runs faster than Windows.
SchemaLoad · 5h ago
Proton isn't a subset of the Windows APIs though. It's very likely that you could end up depending on behaviors which only exist in Proton.
MindSpunk · 4h ago
Ignoring that, you know, 99% of users are running Windows and not SteamOS. Test on what your users run. Proton is just an implementation of Win32, you're still just targeting Windows.
Might be unfair to call Proton a "translation layer" because the Win32 API is not defined in terms of system calls but rather a set of functions exported from a DLL.
Proton supplies a DLL that implements the Win32 API using Linux syscalls. Windows supplies a DLL that implements that Win32 API using Windows syscalls that you're not really supposed to use directly.
If it is forwarding to libc() as opposed to syscalls directly than maybe ‘translation’ is fair.
delusional · 9h ago
I think that's how it started out, and also how a lot of developers still conceptualize it. Wine has had to massively expand that scope to reach the maturity it has now. I think it's kind of straddling the line between "Implementation" and "translation".
Philosophically its still a translation layer though. It doesn't really care about correctness if the no apps depend on it. Success is in meaningfully running client software. The implementation of the Windows Libraries are just a way to get there.
Melatonic · 8h ago
I suppose you could say that Wine has "aged" well :-)
Cloudef · 5h ago
Proton/wine also implements many of those NT syscalls because windows programs do use them directly as well
randomNumber7 · 8h ago
Does it implement sscanf() with accidental complexity of O(n^2) for compatibility?
shmerl · 9h ago
Wine is translating Windows ABIs (not APIs) into underlying Linux OS and userland. Translation simply means that normally Windows ABIs are meant to be used on Windows, they aren't native on Linux.
Surprisingly big difference, is there a more detailed overview of the root causes?
Havoc · 6h ago
Recently switched as well (Arch not steamOS, which is arch based) and it's been pretty solid.
Not out of box - games require mild tweaking but nothing wildly challenging. Add parameter to launch command line etc. The proton database & comments on there usually explain what tweaks the game needs
Don't think I'll switch back
ghushn3 · 1h ago
Gamepass is the only thing holding me on Windows, and in October, Windows 10 hits EoL. I think that puts a pretty clear end date on the end of my Gamepass subscription as I don't want to upgrade to a new Windows version.
If folks can figure out how to run Gamepass on Linux before then, I'll bounce, but I understand it's pretty tightly coupled to the Windows OS.
dottjt · 1h ago
The main pain point I have with SteamOS is game compatibility, in particular with older games (90s/2000s).
Maybe 60% of games work and it's such a headache trying to get it working, if it can be fixed at all.
Modern games however tend to work really well.
zrobotics · 1h ago
I mean, I keep a physical vintage winXP machine around for games of that vintage because I find they don't tend to play super nice with modern hardware on windows either. I haven't switched my main personal desktop away from win10 yet due to compatibility with my Cad program, but playing games from that vintage was a nightmare IME. I dunno, maybe I'm unlucky with my selection not playing nice, but I found it way easier to just have a decent 2000's vintage PC hooked up with a KVM to my 3rd 1080p monitor for that. Bonus is that, since I'm playing those games for nostalgia anyway, it's better running them under XP anyway. I haven't gone as far as hooking up a CRT, just due to the space. But the second desktop is tucked away under the desk, so the only real downside is having a low red monitor hooked up. No big loss there, the tertiary monitor is mostly for slack and a media player otherwise so it doe3need to be nicer. Just something to consider, since PCs of that vintage aren't that expensive unless you want a high-end example.
jajuuka · 9h ago
Seems more like a test of the hardware than Windows 11 and SteamOS since they ran into driver issues immediately. Not to mention those frame rates are terrible across the board. Just not very good hardware.
vel0city · 9h ago
It's the same hardware on each test. The only difference are the drivers and OS in question. Lenovo has been slow to officially ship updated GPU drivers for this device, but the exact same SoC is used on a number of handhelds.
As for the performance, its a 15W handheld trying to play games that 600W PCs and 300W consoles struggled with just a few years ago.
mwkaufma · 7h ago
Better headline: "Lenovo Windows Drivers Bad for Gaming"
elsonrodriguez · 3h ago
Anecdote: In the days of Quakeworld, for important games, I would reboot into linux for the match. Framerate and ping were better.
ncr100 · 40m ago
Is this testing the same graphics performance / i.e. screenshot-accurate comparison vs Windows?
Melatonic · 8h ago
Windows 11 is also bloated as hell by default. Curuios how they compare to a very optimized and debloated windows 11?
Anybody know if Steam and games in general refuse to install in Windows LTSC? Its basically the stripped down ultimate lean version of windows. Boots insanely fast - no tracking bullshit - no windows store or candy crush. Battery life hugely improved. No big updates - security only - and for a longer supported time.
I know Adobe has forced their installers now to refuse to outright install on LTSC (for no real reason) which is annoying as hell. First they stopped it installing on Windows Server.....
Hopefully we do not see the same thing with graphics drivers and Steam and games because right now its the ultimate gaming OS (especially if you are running it as a second OS while daily driving Linux or MacOS)
spartanatreyu · 7h ago
There's little point benchmarking a debloated windows 11 since:
1. There is no standard debloated windows 11 to compare against since Microsoft adds more bloat each month.
2. Users aren't going to be running a debloated windows 11 anyway
eviks · 2h ago
2. Many are if this makes their game playable and there is an easy way to debloat
out-of-ideas · 6h ago
and 3: its also windows 11 on the handheld - its not comparing a desktop (edit- or many desktops for that matter) with steamos on it vs some windows. (though i can see somebody debloating 11 and dropping it on the device - why not?)
> We then installed Windows 11 on the handheld, downloaded updated drivers from Lenovo's support site, and re-ran the benchmarks on the same games downloaded through Steam for Windows.
spartanatreyu · 4h ago
You can be sure that gamers are going to install SteamOS onto their desktops once it supports more kinds of hardware.
Yes gamers could install Bazzite right now, but those that are open to switching away from Windows aren't going to if they don't have a large company that can fund the support focused primarily on the issues that gamers are going to experience.
jitl · 5h ago
Microsoft is partnering with Asus to make the ROG Xbox Ally, which will run a stripped down Windows 11 that boots straight into the "Xbox" app, and you can switch to "desktop mode" much like how SteamOS / Steam Deck works. At least on Deck, it only boots the KDE desktop environment up when you switch to desktop mode so you aren't wasting resources on a windowing system you'll never see. It sounds like Microsoft is planning a similar setup, but only time will tell how much they manage to avoid enshittifying the plan.
zrobotics · 34m ago
What's the advantage for a consumer here though? I honestly don't get the selling point of why I would want Win11 specifically on a handheld. The desktop UI sucks with a touchscreen, so having a windows vs a Linux desktop on the hardware doesn't seem like a difference. I get why MS wants to try to compete here, but I just don't get what they could possibly offer. I don't believe Win11 can be stripped down enough to compete on performance, currently I can't get a machine with 4GB of RAM and a SATA SSD to perform adequately with a web browser in Win11. The OS just consumes huge amounts of resources on stupid background tasks that can't be disabled without registry tweaks and the undefined behavior that comes with that.
jitl · 25m ago
Idk I’m not a Microsoft enjoyer. I gave it a good shot with Surface Pro for a bit but it’s just not for me.
mrheosuper · 4h ago
i've been daily drive ltsc windows for a while, don't see any software installation problem.
nullify88 · 2h ago
I'm on Windows 10 LTSC which will receive updates until 2032. You'll likely have to add stuff to the OS to install the Windows Store and UWP apps but otherwise regular apps just work.
mrheosuper · 2h ago
yeah i did not install windows store, but i recall installing Steam and other software like that is smooth.
mrcsharp · 7h ago
On the one hand I hope with the proliferation of such articles and sentiment that Microsoft would start paying more positive attention to Windows as an Operating System instead of an AI and Advertisement Machine.
But then I remember that it's Nutella at the helm over there and he'll gladly give up ground to focus more on hype and share price.
What a waste.
bbkane · 2h ago
Microsoft's loss is gamers' gain in this area I think.
Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right.
mrcsharp · 1h ago
> Microsoft's loss is gamers' gain in this area I think.
Care to expand on this? Or did you just want to make a random statement?
> Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right
This very reductive way of thinking is exactly why everything is getting enshitified to the max.
TheBozzCL · 5h ago
I’ve been gaming on Linux for quite a while, and it’s overall been a great experience.
I mean, at least until last week, when I bought myself a new top-of-the-line laptop. I’ve been distro-hopping trying to find something that works and everything failed in its own annoying way. Part of it is because I stubbornly decided to stick to Wayland because I really wanted to use my laptop’s HDR display to the fullest.
Nobara KDE had serious issues handling hybrid GPU mode. The SDR color profile of my built-in display got completely borked - worked fine in HDR or plugged in to a display. But then I had serious graphical artifacts when I plugged in my display with VRR disabled! They went away when I enabled VRR, but the flickering was really bad. All of this went away if I switched my laptop to dGPU mode, but grub stopped showing anything and I couldn’t reach the UEFI anymore unless I removed the SSD.
Next I tried Garuda Dragonized Gaming. The styling is atrocious IMO, but I really liked the OS management tools. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to recognize the dGPU, so I moved on.
Next I tried Bazzite. I was very impressed by how well everything worked and performed! Atomic Linux made some of my regular setup more complicated, but the challenge was interesting. But then I decided to unplug it from my dock, and I discovered that the kernel was rebooting the built-in keyboard constantly, making it impossible to type anything.
I decided to go back to my go-to safe choice, Pop!_OS. Installation went smoothly as usual, I even followed a tutorial to use Btrfs which I really like. Everything worked great until I plugged in my monitor and the whole system started stuttering.
I decided to give up for now, I installed Windows again and applied Atlas OS to it to trim down the annoying stuff. After some tweaking I got the battery life to something that seems reasonable. Games work as expected, and I’m mostly done finding alternatives to some of my personal setup quirks.
I want to be clear: my switch to Windows is temporary until fixes for the issues I experienced start to surface. My laptop model is very recent, and I don’t have the know how or time to dig deeply into all of these issues. I’ll probably be sick of Windows in 6 months, ready for round 2.
No comments yet
cma · 7h ago
How about if installed on Microsoft Dev Drive instead of plain NTFS?
nullify88 · 2h ago
You can also achieve nearly the same level of performance by adding exclusions to Windows defender. I typically exclude the game process as I still would want folders scanned when updates / downloads are running. There's a noticable improvement to load times, streaming texture latency, and CPU utilisation.
I don't believe ReFS is contributing so much to the performance improvements seen when using Dev Drives. Removing storage filters from volumes can go a long way.
vel0city · 9h ago
Some of these games are practically neck and neck for performance. I'm wondering if it's a similar situation to early Proton comparisons, where framerates were higher in Proton but when comparing still for still you could tell it just wasn't actually doing certain effects. Are there features that are being attempted in the Windows version that are just not functional and thus effectively disabled on the Proton one?
But even then, assuming that is true, if they're pretty much the same would people care about maybe some fog looks a little different but you get an extra 15-20fps in a game? I think a lot of people would still prefer the boost in frames.
brirec · 8h ago
To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for years, and I’ve never noticed any extra visual glitching on Linux.
dankwizard · 3h ago
This just in, Games on a Gaming OS developed by a Gaming Business perform better than an OS not explicitly for that.
More news at 11.
ghushn3 · 2h ago
You recognize, of course, that the conventional wisdom up until today (and even still in most people's minds) was that Windows was the OS to install if you want to play games. There's genuinely a movement right now that's saying, "Linux might actually be the all around better desktop OS if you are a gamer".
That's absolutely noteworthy.
Thaxll · 5h ago
Those benchmark don't show anything interesting, where is the 2k, 4k, raytracing etc.. show us modern UE5 games, Ubisoft / EA games ect ...
From my personal experience overall games run much much better on Windows ( 10 or 11 ).
Edit: ok I just noticed the title is missleading, it's for handled device not pc.
jitl · 5h ago
It doesn't make sense to benchmark a handheld gaming device w/ a native screen resolution of 1920x1200 at 2k or 4k. Likewise setting any graphics settings "extreme" like raytracing - it will run at slideshow speeds no matter what operating system. Besides, DOOM: The Dark Ages is a top tier graphics title released a month and a half ago; I think the selection of titles is decent for capability of the device.
jimbob45 · 9h ago
Borderlands 3? Homeworld 3? Who chose these games? Why not just use the current top 10 on Steam atm?
dabber21 · 9h ago
"To test the performance impact of this operating system choice, we started with the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S (provided by Lenovo) and tested five high-end 3D games released in the last five years using built-in benchmarking tools..."
those games come with benchmark tools
jimbob45 · 8h ago
Borderlands 3 was 2019. Homeworld 3 has a 38% on Steam and sold poorly. I highly doubt it ever received patches or optimizations. Again, these feel unbelievably arbitrary, as if someone just wanted to push a narrative.
energywut · 6h ago
Steam favorability percentages are famously vulnerable to review bombing. HW3 got swept up in culture war nonsense around LGBTQ representation.
I'm a hardcore Homeworld fan. I've run campaigns of their TTRPG, modeled their ships, played the old games to death. I found my own experience with 3 to be "mixed", it's hardly the best entry in the series, but the reviews absolutely are artificially low due to brigading.
Aside, an unoptimized game is actually one I'd want included in my benchmark. Games that have the teams and budgets to really polish will likely perform well no matter what. But how does OS level changes affect those other games, games where the developers didn't put in the care? Does one OS make those games worse? Or does it help with the shortcomings? It's valuable to have entries like that in your dataset.
spartanatreyu · 6h ago
Homeworld 3 received a terrible rating because its story and delivery was a massive departure to what users wanted, not because of it's gameplay or tech.
It would have been chosen for the same reason ashes of the singularity was chosen as a benchmark for so long: because it looks good, it comes with a benchmark, and it's really good at stressing out a particular part of the computer (for AoS: async rendenring, for HW3: CPU).
Now, maybe you cut out Bongo Cat and Wallpaper Engine, those aren't games. Next on the list we'd have Apex Legends (2020) and Warframe (2013).
Few of these games tell you much about performance. And I don't think many of them have ways to get a consistent, quick performance measurement. I think the article authors made a pretty good set of choices, tbh.
smallstepforman · 2h ago
Every simple code base / API is faster than mature API’s due to the fact they do less. A simple string handling library which isnt biderectional, doesnt cater to people with accessibility, doesnt take locale formatting into account, doesnt cover 100% unicode spec will always be faster than complex code that does.
Code and kernels that target known hardware doesn’t need dynamic conditional code to handle unpredictable hardware. This will be faster.
General purpose operating systems handle printing events, background updates, periodic online checks, network discovery, maintenance jobs etc, all these operations consume resources and time.
Yes, Steam deck on Linux will run faster than equivalent games on Windows. But Steam deck on a smaller OS like Haiku will run even faster than Linux.
Engineering is a compromise. A F1 car can corner faster than a passanger car. But it probably sucks to reverse park. Also, I cannot imagine using a sports car for grocery shopping and hauling furniture from Ikea.
1. Steam on Linux via Proton + Wayland (Niri)
2. Steam on Linux via Proton + X11 (Xfce)
3. Steam on Windows
4. Games on Linux launched via other means (it's possible I was missing out on certain flags/optimizations, but this is just about the average experience)
The biggest thing I noticed when switching to Linux was an improvement in framerate consistency, i.e. I'd have fewer situations where the framerate would drop momentarily. Games felt more solid and predictable.
The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate. I'd failed this jump many times over the years, so it was notable when I jumped and stayed there earlier this year.
It does feel like games take longer to launch on average, but this makes sense given the fact that it's launching via Proton/Wine.
With those admittedly limited examples though, I don't experience the same ranking in performance, but I attribute that to my non-gaming hardware vs. any problem with Linux or Proton/Wine. I play on a laptop with an Nvidia 3050 laptop GPU, and I get much better performance in Windows still. In Cities Skylines, for example, I'll get ~20 fps on Linux via Proton (but I do experience what you said, it's consistent no major spikes or drops) while on Windows I get between 45-60fps up until about 15k population or so.
Other games, despite working, remain unplayable to me due to performance. I can play Diablo 4 on windows no problem on medium settings, but even on low it's just too unresponsive on Linux.
Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.
It's better value for money for both the gamers and the devs if the devs just choose to engage with valve and get their game running perfectly under proton.
Even better would be to compile for linux, but use DXVK-Native (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk#dxvk-native) if you think migrating from DirectX to Vulkan requires too much effort.
On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
> HDR
Already supported
> Nvidia GPUs
You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue.
> VR
SteamVR works though?
All the ML people are using NVIDIA GPU's on Linux.
For your system, the integrated graphics should also be quite capable. More so on Linux, thanks to the driver advantage AMD has here.
That’s interesting and good to know. I’m running an 10th gen i9 with an RTX 3090, so I have plenty of headroom performance wise. I’ve been wondering about Linux gaming on lower end hardware for my younger brother’s sake, and hadn’t assumed it would be worse.
One thing to note: I’ve had all kinds of issues with power management impacting performance. If I let the computer sleep/standby, I’ll get 50% slower framerate until I reboot.
Given the fact that you’re on a laptop, I wonder if power management has contributed to the slowness.
My guess is that Nvidia’s linux video drivers are still substandard.
1: the hardest part was finding a bar that supported i3status-rs; not a fan of GTK bars that eat up CPU. I settled on i3bar-river.
The scrollable aspect just feels so natural and intuitive to me.
If you use ZFS (single nvme) then you can beat windows load times by a fairly large margin. My husband and I have identical hardware for our gaming computers (he uses Windows and I run Linux), it's not uncommon for my computer to load games 10 seconds faster than his.
Was it with any specific game? I just tried the GOG version of The Witcher 3 "Complete Edition" (which is the remastered one) with the Direct3D 12 renderer under both Xorg/Window Maker and Wayland/KDE using umu-run (essentially proton without Steam) and it had identical performance in both cases (i also tried to use Niri but it would launch in 60Hz mode and for some reason wouldn't allow the game to run at a higher framerate with vsync disabled regardless of any option i chose) in either low or high settings (which is basically what i expected since the window system shouldn't be a bottleneck unless something is either broken or you are running at something like 20000fps :-P).
One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming
We already have the technology now to do it better. A combination of only sending what info a client should have, and server-side checks. As soon as something like UT ships with that built in we can hopefully forget about this horrible hack we currently have to check for cheats.
The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. However since those cheaters are few and far in-between they can be handled through player reports.
The goal is to stop the mediocre cheater who simply downloaded a known cheat from a cheating forum. If you don't stop those you'll get such a large wave of cheaters that you can't keep up with banning them quickly enough.
Working on mostly server platforms, I had forgotten that IOMMU enablement (and, where relevant, enforcement) was not the default.
Consumer hardware and software is terrifying.
The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".
For example: in competitive shooters (where cheaters are most prevalent) you can't have things appearing out of thin air. The client needs to know about things ahead of time to play sounds and to give other environmental hints.
The only way to be really fair is for everybody to Stream the game at the same res, frame rate and latency.
If you are asking why games like counterstrike don't have limits on online play, that's mostly a commercial question. Would those games be as popular if they limited performance to what was achievable for minimum specs? I certainly wouldn't want to play at 1920x1080 on my nice widescreen monitor, but setting the minimum to a $1500 monitor and the hardware to drive it would guarantee very few players.
[0] https://www.speedrun.com/fallout_4?h=Any-Full-game&rules=gam...
Edit:typo
Some games do impose limits though, for example Overwatch doesn't allow you to use an aspect ratio larger than 16:9 and selecting a wider aspect ratio actually cuts down on your vertical field-of-view rather than granting you more horizontal field-of-view. This lessens the potential advantage of ultra-wide monitors.
You can see this in existing games with current games with community servers. GTA V's modded FiveM and CS2 Face-IT include more anti-cheats, not less.
Once you get to match making, global ranks, etc it's just getting too sweaty and ruined by cheating/low trust/etc.
¹: Rainbow Six: Siege and Apex Legends, respectively.
I never came up with a good explanation for that.
Disk cache, to be precise.
I'm a Mac guy now mainly because of my job and I like UNIX-y stuff now, but of course, gaming is even more lacking than Linux.
We're so close. Once AAA releases and GPU drivers get there, it's over the cliff, and I could see that being in the next five years.
With SteamOS coming to arbitrary hardware, that is a very bold claim to make. And not one that ars has data to back up, apparently.
It's also an embarrassment of an article because they were gifted the steam version of the handheld, then compared that performance against them installing windows... on the steam version of the handheld. Why not buy the version with Windows by default?
Personally I'm nearly certain that SteamOS would give better apples to apples performance than windows, but we shouldn't give an article that shits on both the scientific method and journalistic integrity the light of day
Correction: it’s been a month and they had both devices:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q
And it’s $130 cheaper.
Does Valve run a SteamOS CI/CD farm? I could see a Rust based template and library for calling into this set of APIs that you could upload your well structured project and it would build and test for all platforms. Rust would just be the skeleton, your game logic could be in anything Rust could link to.
Test your game to make sure it works on the Steam Deck and avoid features that don't work on Proton, but you still have to primarily target Windows.
Proton supplies a DLL that implements the Win32 API using Linux syscalls. Windows supplies a DLL that implements that Win32 API using Windows syscalls that you're not really supposed to use directly.
so 'translation layer' is not that unfair.
Philosophically its still a translation layer though. It doesn't really care about correctness if the no apps depend on it. Success is in meaningfully running client software. The implementation of the Windows Libraries are just a way to get there.
https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936868
Not out of box - games require mild tweaking but nothing wildly challenging. Add parameter to launch command line etc. The proton database & comments on there usually explain what tweaks the game needs
Don't think I'll switch back
If folks can figure out how to run Gamepass on Linux before then, I'll bounce, but I understand it's pretty tightly coupled to the Windows OS.
Maybe 60% of games work and it's such a headache trying to get it working, if it can be fixed at all.
Modern games however tend to work really well.
As for the performance, its a 15W handheld trying to play games that 600W PCs and 300W consoles struggled with just a few years ago.
Anybody know if Steam and games in general refuse to install in Windows LTSC? Its basically the stripped down ultimate lean version of windows. Boots insanely fast - no tracking bullshit - no windows store or candy crush. Battery life hugely improved. No big updates - security only - and for a longer supported time.
I know Adobe has forced their installers now to refuse to outright install on LTSC (for no real reason) which is annoying as hell. First they stopped it installing on Windows Server.....
Hopefully we do not see the same thing with graphics drivers and Steam and games because right now its the ultimate gaming OS (especially if you are running it as a second OS while daily driving Linux or MacOS)
1. There is no standard debloated windows 11 to compare against since Microsoft adds more bloat each month.
2. Users aren't going to be running a debloated windows 11 anyway
> We then installed Windows 11 on the handheld, downloaded updated drivers from Lenovo's support site, and re-ran the benchmarks on the same games downloaded through Steam for Windows.
Yes gamers could install Bazzite right now, but those that are open to switching away from Windows aren't going to if they don't have a large company that can fund the support focused primarily on the issues that gamers are going to experience.
But then I remember that it's Nutella at the helm over there and he'll gladly give up ground to focus more on hype and share price.
What a waste.
Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right.
Care to expand on this? Or did you just want to make a random statement?
> Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right
This very reductive way of thinking is exactly why everything is getting enshitified to the max.
I mean, at least until last week, when I bought myself a new top-of-the-line laptop. I’ve been distro-hopping trying to find something that works and everything failed in its own annoying way. Part of it is because I stubbornly decided to stick to Wayland because I really wanted to use my laptop’s HDR display to the fullest.
Nobara KDE had serious issues handling hybrid GPU mode. The SDR color profile of my built-in display got completely borked - worked fine in HDR or plugged in to a display. But then I had serious graphical artifacts when I plugged in my display with VRR disabled! They went away when I enabled VRR, but the flickering was really bad. All of this went away if I switched my laptop to dGPU mode, but grub stopped showing anything and I couldn’t reach the UEFI anymore unless I removed the SSD.
Next I tried Garuda Dragonized Gaming. The styling is atrocious IMO, but I really liked the OS management tools. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to recognize the dGPU, so I moved on.
Next I tried Bazzite. I was very impressed by how well everything worked and performed! Atomic Linux made some of my regular setup more complicated, but the challenge was interesting. But then I decided to unplug it from my dock, and I discovered that the kernel was rebooting the built-in keyboard constantly, making it impossible to type anything.
I decided to go back to my go-to safe choice, Pop!_OS. Installation went smoothly as usual, I even followed a tutorial to use Btrfs which I really like. Everything worked great until I plugged in my monitor and the whole system started stuttering.
I decided to give up for now, I installed Windows again and applied Atlas OS to it to trim down the annoying stuff. After some tweaking I got the battery life to something that seems reasonable. Games work as expected, and I’m mostly done finding alternatives to some of my personal setup quirks.
I want to be clear: my switch to Windows is temporary until fixes for the issues I experienced start to surface. My laptop model is very recent, and I don’t have the know how or time to dig deeply into all of these issues. I’ll probably be sick of Windows in 6 months, ready for round 2.
No comments yet
I don't believe ReFS is contributing so much to the performance improvements seen when using Dev Drives. Removing storage filters from volumes can go a long way.
But even then, assuming that is true, if they're pretty much the same would people care about maybe some fog looks a little different but you get an extra 15-20fps in a game? I think a lot of people would still prefer the boost in frames.
More news at 11.
That's absolutely noteworthy.
From my personal experience overall games run much much better on Windows ( 10 or 11 ).
Edit: ok I just noticed the title is missleading, it's for handled device not pc.
those games come with benchmark tools
I'm a hardcore Homeworld fan. I've run campaigns of their TTRPG, modeled their ships, played the old games to death. I found my own experience with 3 to be "mixed", it's hardly the best entry in the series, but the reviews absolutely are artificially low due to brigading.
Aside, an unoptimized game is actually one I'd want included in my benchmark. Games that have the teams and budgets to really polish will likely perform well no matter what. But how does OS level changes affect those other games, games where the developers didn't put in the care? Does one OS make those games worse? Or does it help with the shortcomings? It's valuable to have entries like that in your dataset.
It would have been chosen for the same reason ashes of the singularity was chosen as a benchmark for so long: because it looks good, it comes with a benchmark, and it's really good at stressing out a particular part of the computer (for AoS: async rendenring, for HW3: CPU).
Now, maybe you cut out Bongo Cat and Wallpaper Engine, those aren't games. Next on the list we'd have Apex Legends (2020) and Warframe (2013).
Few of these games tell you much about performance. And I don't think many of them have ways to get a consistent, quick performance measurement. I think the article authors made a pretty good set of choices, tbh.
Code and kernels that target known hardware doesn’t need dynamic conditional code to handle unpredictable hardware. This will be faster.
General purpose operating systems handle printing events, background updates, periodic online checks, network discovery, maintenance jobs etc, all these operations consume resources and time.
Yes, Steam deck on Linux will run faster than equivalent games on Windows. But Steam deck on a smaller OS like Haiku will run even faster than Linux.
Engineering is a compromise. A F1 car can corner faster than a passanger car. But it probably sucks to reverse park. Also, I cannot imagine using a sports car for grocery shopping and hauling furniture from Ikea.