4 ms·

Depends on your definition of "responsive". SteamOS (based on Debian) is widely criticized for running games at lower frame rates than the same machine running

by city41 10y ago

Depends on your definition of "responsive". SteamOS (based on Debian) is widely criticized for running games at lower frame rates than the same machine running Windows for example. X11 is a dog in many regards, harming the Linux experience. Wayland can't come soon enough.

ekianjo 10y ago
SteamOS is not a desktop Linux distro, it's a distro made for running Steam and it goes through their own compositor. You can boot into a GNOME session but it's extremely barebones compared to any regular distro, even the terminal is broken by default. Next, there are a bunch of reasons why Linux distros run games slower than Windows. Most games are made for Windows in mind in the first place, so unless someone does a whole conversion of the graphics code base to optimize it for OpenGL, DirectX ends up wrapped or translated with loss of performance. This has nothing to do with how much the desktop feels "responsive", and it completely off topic here. Wayland is not the Messiah and is not going to provide massive performance improvement. Already confirmed with the alpha/beta out. And it brings a ton of problems too since each application cannot access information from other applications (screensavers, screen capture programs would not work in Wayland). That's why they have the XWayland project. And X11 is not a dog. That's a lot of history in it, nad it may be bloated, but it can still perform very well - there are a few games ported from Windows that run faster on Linux (Dirt Showdown is one).
vamur 10y ago
This has nothing to do with SteamOS, X11 or Wayland. Game performance on Linux has everything to do with the quality of the port and/or game engine and hardware drivers. For example, Rocket League performance on Linux is on par with Windows while Tomb Raider has 20-30% less. In any case, there is no perceivable difference if you have a modern $200 GPU. BTW, X11 with DRI3 has the same performance as Wayland.

by city41 10y ago

ekianjo 10y ago

SteamOS is not a desktop Linux distro, it's a distro made for running Steam and it goes through their own compositor. You can boot into a GNOME session but it's extremely barebones compared to any regular distro, even the terminal is broken by default. Next, there are a bunch of reasons why Linux distros run games slower than Windows. Most games are made for Windows in mind in the first place, so unless someone does a whole conversion of the graphics code base to optimize it for OpenGL, DirectX ends up wrapped or translated with loss of performance. This has nothing to do with how much the desktop feels "responsive", and it completely off topic here. Wayland is not the Messiah and is not going to provide massive performance improvement. Already confirmed with the alpha/beta out. And it brings a ton of problems too since each application cannot access information from other applications (screensavers, screen capture programs would not work in Wayland). That's why they have the XWayland project. And X11 is not a dog. That's a lot of history in it, nad it may be bloated, but it can still perform very well - there are a few games ported from Windows that run faster on Linux (Dirt Showdown is one).

vamur 10y ago

This has nothing to do with SteamOS, X11 or Wayland. Game performance on Linux has everything to do with the quality of the port and/or game engine and hardware drivers. For example, Rocket League performance on Linux is on par with Windows while Tomb Raider has 20-30% less. In any case, there is no perceivable difference if you have a modern $200 GPU. BTW, X11 with DRI3 has the same performance as Wayland.