16 ms·

Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

445 points by _JamesA_ 1y ago

PaulHoule 1y ago
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.
- homarp 1y ago
  https://www.winehq.org/ https://www.winehq.org/ calls it a compatibility layer that translates calls on the fly. so 'translation layer' is not that unfair.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    If it is forwarding to libc() as opposed to syscalls directly than maybe ‘translation’ is fair.
    - delusional 1y 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 1y ago
        I suppose you could say that Wine has "aged" well :-)
  - Sammi 1y ago
    Clearly they don't want to come out and say that Wine is an "implementation of windows apis", because that would invite legal issues. But clearly this is what Wine really is for a large part. Some stuff are just shallow shims to Linux apis, while other stuff they need to make more of their own implementation of.
    - WorldMaker 1y ago
      "WINE Is Not an Emulator" has always said something exactly like that. It hasn't exactly been a "secret" that Wine is an implementation of Windows APIs (and not an emulator/translator).
- shmerl 1y 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.
- randomNumber7 1y ago
  Does it implement sscanf() with accidental complexity of O(n^2) for compatibility?
- Cloudef 1y ago
  Proton/wine also implements many of those NT syscalls because windows programs do use them directly as well
- fithisux 1y ago
  There is also NanoX. Not fully Win32 replacement, but I think it is a good start.
- anthk 1y ago
  Wine/Proton it's just another Win32 implementation for Unix. Win32 it's a subsystem on top of Windows NT too.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Also, most games are still 32-bit EXEs, so on most PCs today they are running not just in the Win32 subsystem, but the WOW64 subsystem (Windows-on-Windows 64) the compatibility layer of running 32-bit Windows applications on top of 64-bit Windows and its Win32 subsystem (it's still called Win32 on 64-bit, an unfortunate naming bug from massive compatibility break differences between Win16 and Win32 that didn't exist in the 64-bit transition, 64-bit didn't get a new API subsystem, it just upgraded the existing one, mostly).
- Fluorescence 1y ago
  I really have to respect Wine's persistence (with Proton's help). For so long it was one of those "and now you have two problems" technologies and now it looks like it's the slow blade that could actually kill Windows.
jimbob45 1y ago
Borderlands 3? Homeworld 3? Who chose these games? Why not just use the current top 10 on Steam atm?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dabber21 1y 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 1y 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.
    - spartanatreyu 1y 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).
    - energywut 1y 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.
jajuuka 1y 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 1y 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.
vel0city 1y 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 1y ago
  To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for years, and I’ve never noticed any extra visual glitching on Linux.
haswell 1y ago
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.
- shmerl 1y ago
  Try winewayland + Wayland.
- thewebguyd 1y 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 1y ago
Melatonic 1y 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 1y 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
  - out-of-ideas 1y 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 1y 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.
sitkack 1y 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.
- fybe 1y ago
  Not sure Epic, who owns Unreal engine would be happy with optimizing for SteamOS and its API's after the whole debacle with Epic Store vs Steam.
- SchemaLoad 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
chasil 1y ago
Are we surprised? https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936868
mwkaufma 1y ago
Better headline: "Lenovo Windows Drivers Bad for Gaming"
cma 1y ago
How about if installed on Microsoft Dev Drive instead of plain NTFS?
- nullify88 1y 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.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    The file system filter is still queried using exclusions. Eliminating all file system filters yields a faster read/write.
    - nullify88 1y ago
      According to some benchmarking removing the storage filters offers a mild boost when compared to adding an exclusion and you don't have the benefit of some AV protection when other processes are accessing the volume like steam etc. https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2023/11/22/test-driving-windows-11-dev-drive-for-dotnet.html https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2023/11/22/test-driving...
      - cma 1y ago
        In WSL 1, unix find and git status still run about 4x faster on Dev Drive than on NTFS with defender off.
mrcsharp 1y 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 1y ago
  Microsoft's loss is gamers' gain in this area I think. Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right.
  - mrcsharp 1y 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.
    - bbkane 1y ago
      By Microsoft's loss and gamers' gain I mean that Linux used to be nonviable to play games, but Valve put a lot of effort into making games work on Linux (and continues to do so). They saw (and maybe still see?) Microsoft as a threat to Valve's future. So now gamers have gained another platform to play games!
      - mrcsharp 1y ago
        > but Valve put a lot of effort into making games work on Linux Yes! this is competition at its finest, right? It is also what I was talking about in my original comment. > So now gamers have gained another platform to play games! Yup, this is definitely a good thing. Yes gamers get another platform and hopefully gets MS to focus on Windows to make it better and less hostile to users. Gamers are also quite vicious and they will tarnish the reputation of anything that doesn't work well for them. Let's see how Linux will fare in their hands.
Havoc 1y 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
runako 1y 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 1y ago
  Cache. Disk cache, to be precise.
  - AbuAssar 1y ago
    please elaborate
    - vanderZwan 1y ago
      I am guessing that they're implying that a VM effectively loaded the "hard drive" that Windows uses into a RAM-disk, so one would be comparing loading dlls and whatnot from RAM vs loading it from spinning rust. I'm not sure how true that is, because in the Windows XP days most of us wouldn't have had enough RAM to spare to do that.
      - runako 1y ago
        More to the point, if the VM could do that caching, why wouldn't Windows be able to do the same level of caching on bare metal?
        lotharcable 1y ago
        Sorta. The devil in the details here. Depending on the VM technology they use they offer a variety of different caching mode and configurations, but the basic three approaches that most everybody offers are going to be something like; "writeback" means that when the guest's storage data ends up in the host's cache it is reported back to the guest as 'written'. This means that from the guest's perspective the disk is written to, but in actuality the data is still floating around in memory. If the guest wants data to be 'safe' they need to issue additional flush commands. "writethrough" means that the host is using its memory for caching file system, but that writes are reported as 'competed' only when they have been committed to actual disk. and "none" means the cache is used as little as possible. So if your guest's virtual disk is in 'writeback' mode it isn't actually writing to real disk. It is writing to memory. Which is going to be very fast up to the point were the cache on the host is exhausted. Certainly Windows could lie to applications and not write information to disk and keep it in memory much longer then it normally would but that would defeat some of the assurances that file systems are supposed to offer to applications. 'writeback' would be closer to what Windows already implements on the OS level, but because Linux is just plain faster it should improve performance somewhat. Microsoft can only work in improving the performance of Windows to get the same results, but Linux is pretty hard to beat. 'none' is what I use when running Linux on Linux because having two layers of cache is just kinda wasteful and doesn't result in real improved performance.
jekwoooooe 1y 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
- fooqux 1y 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.
  - hypeatei 1y 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 1y 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.
      - rowanG077 1y 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.
Thaxll 1y 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 1y 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.
TheBozzCL 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lenerdenator 1y 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 1y 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.
  - windward 1y ago
    You'd also need a sane filesystem.
    - p_ing 1y ago
      Windows has NTFS and ReFS. Both are quite sane and performant.
      - windward 1y ago
        I know. Neither are either. git is noticeably slower, the locking is untenable, the case-insensitivity is a source of bugs.
        p_ing 1y ago
        Both file systems support case sensitivity. Use DevDrive in a virtual disk or secondary volume, there are significant performance gains for things like git, nodejs modules, etc. It helps to know the system. The perf would be an issue with any file system on Windows due to the file system filter architecture. Locking is a function of the NT executive and not of the file system. It was a design decision. I’ll see if I can dig up the reasoning later.
dankwizard 1y 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 1y 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.
elsonrodriguez 1y ago
Anecdote: In the days of Quakeworld, for important games, I would reboot into linux for the match. Framerate and ping were better.
smallstepforman 1y 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.
flaminHotSpeedo 1y 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 1y 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: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q And it’s $130 cheaper.
- zrobotics 1y ago
  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.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    > cel-shaded Borderlands is not cel-shaded. People keep making that mistake for quite a while though.
eviks 1y ago
Surprisingly big difference, is there a more detailed overview of the root causes?
ghushn3 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
- scheeseman486 1y ago
  I've actually found the opposite in my experience, though I would assume it's very much case-by-case. A recent example was Hyperbowl, a turn of the century game that broke on every version of Windows post-XP. Works fine on Linux with recent Proton and dgvoodoo2, though. There's also DOSBox (which is quite capable at running win9x now, with Voodoo emulation) and 86box to fill those compatibility gaps too.
- easyThrowaway 1y ago
  Can't say that Windows 11 compatibility on this regard is any way better. Anything pre Dx-9 is somewhat broken one way or another. I've recently found about Dreamm[1] by AAron Giles (a well known emulator developer) which is basically a very lightweight os-indipendent reimplementation of some windows and directx calls specifically for some Lucasarts games written during that time period, It would be nice to see a similar project expanding in such direction without having to reinvent Wine and/or Proton. https://dreamm.aarongiles.com https://dreamm.aarongiles.com
schmorptron 1y 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 1y 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.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Compatibility is a big answer. Windows 8 tried to divorce more of the compatibility layers (start them up only as needed) of "The Old Desktop" to a lot of flak from the development community (and some user confusion), but if you were paying attention and used almost exclusively Windows 8 "Store" apps at the time you could get some serious memory usage wins. Windows 8.1 walked so much of that back and made the Desktop/Explorer and all of its compatibility layers boot first again, but there was a small period where Windows 8 shined. Presumably this sort of stuff is what the new Windows Xbox efforts are doing again, but the "boots to a full screen experience without 'a Desktop'" expectations of games and game-focused hardware makes it easier to boot the Desktop only if needed in a way that makes sense to game players that didn't make sense to general Windows users with a long tail of ancient applications that they didn't or couldn't "just" upgrade to new ones.
    - hinkley 1y ago
      As I recall there were services that were part of the desktop experience that they didn’t shut off. One of them being the desktop wallpaper. Which with high res desktops being the rage these days may actually be a large part of that size win.
- 1y ago
ncr100 1y ago
Is this testing the same graphics performance / i.e. screenshot-accurate comparison vs Windows?
- Fluorescence 1y ago
  Shame you have been downvoted. That's a reasonable question no matter where you stand. Motion is important too, not just static screen-shots. I am 100% team Linux but cross-platform benchmarking is rife with problems. Differences are often from not testing the exactly same thing or different defaults that trade-off safety/quality/perf and can in theory be changed. No point measuring only one side of a triangle whose ratios are a matter of taste. A responsible benchmark would try and prove fidelity.
  - ncr100 1y ago
    <3 and, sharing internet +1 coinage to you too. (this is Hacker News after all, seems like a reasonable question to me too) I had not thought about Motion...good one. Agreed regarding a responsible benchmark. All that exploration could help illuminate (ha) the path to a user-first "Desired frames per second" Graphical Setting in game set-ups. "I just want 60 / 120 / don't-care 30 is okay". With nVidia going bonkers with new AI interpolation features the users may want a "minimum 60 please". It's a soft feature that Consoles have, IMO, though with variable rate refresh panels I feel it's less of a draw. Does Linux have workable VRR support?
flohofwoe 1y ago
Tbf, this mainly seems to compare shitty/outdated 3rd-party Windows drivers against a vertically integrated system where Valve has complete control over both the hardware and software. E.g. the difference between the Lenovo and Asus Win11 drivers is sometimes bigger than the difference of the faster Windows driver to Linux. It's also not all that surprising though, there's a lot of very smart people working on Proton while the general quality level in the Windows ecosystem is slowly but steadily declining. I also wouldn't be all that surprised if running a D3D11 or D3D12 game on a Proton-layer on Windows would be faster than running that same game without Proton. Sometimes Proton might have workarounds for 'API abuse' problems of specific games which the native D3D implementation or driver doesn't have.
- rf15 1y ago
  afaik the Steam Deck is by no means "vertically integrated" as e.g. Apple Products are. This is really more a quality thing on the side of Proton.
- pixelpoet 1y ago
  They even have the audacity to use quotes for "official" drivers. At least it's an obvious indicator of the author's bias...
  - nulltype 1y ago
    Where do they use quotes for the official drivers?
deleted 1y ago
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andreldm 1y ago
Valve has done an amazing job turning Linux gaming a reality, I really admire their efforts. Unfortunately I had to switch back to Windows on my gaming rig due to a Steam bug which unnecessarily downloads the shader cache of several game every single day, disabling the cache hurts the performance. That’s been plaguing many users for years and surprisingly Valve hasn’t fixed it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10285 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1028...
tmtvl 1y ago
As a semi-related aside: I often read of people complaining that Fallout New Vegas crashes constantly for them, but under GNU/Linux using Proton I get none of that, I can play it for hours on end without any notable instability.
- ChoGGi 1y ago
  Those are likely people that don't check the pcgamingwiki, one of the first things it mentions is installing dxvk and the 4gb patch.
mystified5016 1y ago
I don't think this is because Steam, Proton, or Linux are particularly good on their own (they are, extremely so) but more that windows is just so awful. My observation is that windows is slow at everything. I think because of Defender, but I'm not certain. If you set up a Linux VM on a Windows machine, most tasks run much faster than an identical task on the host OS. It's insane. I run my C++ compiler in a linux VM because running it on windows is, no exaggeration, twice as slow.
pier25 1y ago
I was expecting something like 20-30% of difference not 200-300%. Microsoft really needs to release a gaming version of Windows without the bloat. I only use Windows to launch Steam these days.
- NoPicklez 1y ago
  I want games to run optimally too, but I don't think they should release a gaming version of Windows. Ultimately gamers want to do more with their PC's than just game. They should focus on optimizing the current OS to more optimally run games rather than segmenting the OS.
hajimuz 1y ago
But on Windows you’re guaranteed that any game can be run without any extra configuration, which still is a big win. I know that proton handles most cases but it’s still frustrating when corner issue happens.
SirMaster 1y ago
That's all well and good, but until I can actually play the games I want to on Linux it's really a non-starter to me.
Self-Perfection 1y ago
About 10-15 years ago I played a game on Windows system and was dual booting to Linux. I made about 100-200 save files in a game, so opening a screen with list of saves took about 10 seconds. But when I used the same save folder in the same game installed under wine in Linux, its loading screen took half the time. Even though NTFS is not native for Linux. I have no idea why. Windows was without antivirus software.
scriu 1y ago
I did some tests a while ago on w8 vs w11 for bootup time and w8 was faster. This doesnt surprise me.
lincon127 1y ago
Ok, but what about indie games,m? Does every game just work on SteamOS now? Or is that game dependent?

445 points by _JamesA_ 1y ago

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.

homarp 1y ago
https://www.winehq.org/ https://www.winehq.org/ calls it a compatibility layer that translates calls on the fly. so 'translation layer' is not that unfair.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  If it is forwarding to libc() as opposed to syscalls directly than maybe ‘translation’ is fair.
  - delusional 1y 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 1y ago
      I suppose you could say that Wine has "aged" well :-)
- Sammi 1y ago
  Clearly they don't want to come out and say that Wine is an "implementation of windows apis", because that would invite legal issues. But clearly this is what Wine really is for a large part. Some stuff are just shallow shims to Linux apis, while other stuff they need to make more of their own implementation of.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    "WINE Is Not an Emulator" has always said something exactly like that. It hasn't exactly been a "secret" that Wine is an implementation of Windows APIs (and not an emulator/translator).
shmerl 1y 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.
randomNumber7 1y ago
Does it implement sscanf() with accidental complexity of O(n^2) for compatibility?
Cloudef 1y ago
Proton/wine also implements many of those NT syscalls because windows programs do use them directly as well
fithisux 1y ago
There is also NanoX. Not fully Win32 replacement, but I think it is a good start.
anthk 1y ago
Wine/Proton it's just another Win32 implementation for Unix. Win32 it's a subsystem on top of Windows NT too.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Also, most games are still 32-bit EXEs, so on most PCs today they are running not just in the Win32 subsystem, but the WOW64 subsystem (Windows-on-Windows 64) the compatibility layer of running 32-bit Windows applications on top of 64-bit Windows and its Win32 subsystem (it's still called Win32 on 64-bit, an unfortunate naming bug from massive compatibility break differences between Win16 and Win32 that didn't exist in the 64-bit transition, 64-bit didn't get a new API subsystem, it just upgraded the existing one, mostly).
Fluorescence 1y ago
I really have to respect Wine's persistence (with Proton's help). For so long it was one of those "and now you have two problems" technologies and now it looks like it's the slow blade that could actually kill Windows.

jimbob45 1y ago

Borderlands 3? Homeworld 3? Who chose these games? Why not just use the current top 10 on Steam atm?

deleted 1y ago
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dabber21 1y 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 1y 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.
  - spartanatreyu 1y 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).
  - energywut 1y 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.

jajuuka 1y 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 1y 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.

vel0city 1y 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 1y ago
To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for years, and I’ve never noticed any extra visual glitching on Linux.

haswell 1y ago

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.

shmerl 1y ago
Try winewayland + Wayland.
thewebguyd 1y 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 1y ago

Melatonic 1y 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 1y 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
- out-of-ideas 1y 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 1y 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.

sitkack 1y 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.

fybe 1y ago
Not sure Epic, who owns Unreal engine would be happy with optimizing for SteamOS and its API's after the whole debacle with Epic Store vs Steam.
SchemaLoad 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

chasil 1y ago

Are we surprised? https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936868

mwkaufma 1y ago

Better headline: "Lenovo Windows Drivers Bad for Gaming"

cma 1y ago

How about if installed on Microsoft Dev Drive instead of plain NTFS?

nullify88 1y 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.
- p_ing 1y ago
  The file system filter is still queried using exclusions. Eliminating all file system filters yields a faster read/write.
  - nullify88 1y ago
    According to some benchmarking removing the storage filters offers a mild boost when compared to adding an exclusion and you don't have the benefit of some AV protection when other processes are accessing the volume like steam etc. https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2023/11/22/test-driving-windows-11-dev-drive-for-dotnet.html https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2023/11/22/test-driving...
    - cma 1y ago
      In WSL 1, unix find and git status still run about 4x faster on Dev Drive than on NTFS with defender off.

mrcsharp 1y 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 1y ago
Microsoft's loss is gamers' gain in this area I think. Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right.
- mrcsharp 1y 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.
  - bbkane 1y ago
    By Microsoft's loss and gamers' gain I mean that Linux used to be nonviable to play games, but Valve put a lot of effort into making games work on Linux (and continues to do so). They saw (and maybe still see?) Microsoft as a threat to Valve's future. So now gamers have gained another platform to play games!
    - mrcsharp 1y ago
      > but Valve put a lot of effort into making games work on Linux Yes! this is competition at its finest, right? It is also what I was talking about in my original comment. > So now gamers have gained another platform to play games! Yup, this is definitely a good thing. Yes gamers get another platform and hopefully gets MS to focus on Windows to make it better and less hostile to users. Gamers are also quite vicious and they will tarnish the reputation of anything that doesn't work well for them. Let's see how Linux will fare in their hands.

Havoc 1y 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

runako 1y 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 1y ago
Cache. Disk cache, to be precise.
- AbuAssar 1y ago
  please elaborate
  - vanderZwan 1y ago
    I am guessing that they're implying that a VM effectively loaded the "hard drive" that Windows uses into a RAM-disk, so one would be comparing loading dlls and whatnot from RAM vs loading it from spinning rust. I'm not sure how true that is, because in the Windows XP days most of us wouldn't have had enough RAM to spare to do that.
    - runako 1y ago
      More to the point, if the VM could do that caching, why wouldn't Windows be able to do the same level of caching on bare metal?
      - lotharcable 1y ago
        Sorta. The devil in the details here. Depending on the VM technology they use they offer a variety of different caching mode and configurations, but the basic three approaches that most everybody offers are going to be something like; "writeback" means that when the guest's storage data ends up in the host's cache it is reported back to the guest as 'written'. This means that from the guest's perspective the disk is written to, but in actuality the data is still floating around in memory. If the guest wants data to be 'safe' they need to issue additional flush commands. "writethrough" means that the host is using its memory for caching file system, but that writes are reported as 'competed' only when they have been committed to actual disk. and "none" means the cache is used as little as possible. So if your guest's virtual disk is in 'writeback' mode it isn't actually writing to real disk. It is writing to memory. Which is going to be very fast up to the point were the cache on the host is exhausted. Certainly Windows could lie to applications and not write information to disk and keep it in memory much longer then it normally would but that would defeat some of the assurances that file systems are supposed to offer to applications. 'writeback' would be closer to what Windows already implements on the OS level, but because Linux is just plain faster it should improve performance somewhat. Microsoft can only work in improving the performance of Windows to get the same results, but Linux is pretty hard to beat. 'none' is what I use when running Linux on Linux because having two layers of cache is just kinda wasteful and doesn't result in real improved performance.

jekwoooooe 1y 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

fooqux 1y 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.
- hypeatei 1y 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 1y 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.
    - rowanG077 1y 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.

Thaxll 1y 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 1y 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.

TheBozzCL 1y 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.

deleted 1y ago
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lenerdenator 1y 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 1y 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.
- windward 1y ago
  You'd also need a sane filesystem.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    Windows has NTFS and ReFS. Both are quite sane and performant.
    - windward 1y ago
      I know. Neither are either. git is noticeably slower, the locking is untenable, the case-insensitivity is a source of bugs.
      - p_ing 1y ago
        Both file systems support case sensitivity. Use DevDrive in a virtual disk or secondary volume, there are significant performance gains for things like git, nodejs modules, etc. It helps to know the system. The perf would be an issue with any file system on Windows due to the file system filter architecture. Locking is a function of the NT executive and not of the file system. It was a design decision. I’ll see if I can dig up the reasoning later.

dankwizard 1y 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 1y 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.

elsonrodriguez 1y ago

Anecdote: In the days of Quakeworld, for important games, I would reboot into linux for the match. Framerate and ping were better.

smallstepforman 1y 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.

flaminHotSpeedo 1y 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 1y 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: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q And it’s $130 cheaper.
zrobotics 1y ago
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.
- viraptor 1y ago
  > cel-shaded Borderlands is not cel-shaded. People keep making that mistake for quite a while though.

eviks 1y ago

Surprisingly big difference, is there a more detailed overview of the root causes?

ghushn3 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
scheeseman486 1y ago
I've actually found the opposite in my experience, though I would assume it's very much case-by-case. A recent example was Hyperbowl, a turn of the century game that broke on every version of Windows post-XP. Works fine on Linux with recent Proton and dgvoodoo2, though. There's also DOSBox (which is quite capable at running win9x now, with Voodoo emulation) and 86box to fill those compatibility gaps too.
easyThrowaway 1y ago
Can't say that Windows 11 compatibility on this regard is any way better. Anything pre Dx-9 is somewhat broken one way or another. I've recently found about Dreamm[1] by AAron Giles (a well known emulator developer) which is basically a very lightweight os-indipendent reimplementation of some windows and directx calls specifically for some Lucasarts games written during that time period, It would be nice to see a similar project expanding in such direction without having to reinvent Wine and/or Proton. https://dreamm.aarongiles.com https://dreamm.aarongiles.com

schmorptron 1y 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 1y 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.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Compatibility is a big answer. Windows 8 tried to divorce more of the compatibility layers (start them up only as needed) of "The Old Desktop" to a lot of flak from the development community (and some user confusion), but if you were paying attention and used almost exclusively Windows 8 "Store" apps at the time you could get some serious memory usage wins. Windows 8.1 walked so much of that back and made the Desktop/Explorer and all of its compatibility layers boot first again, but there was a small period where Windows 8 shined. Presumably this sort of stuff is what the new Windows Xbox efforts are doing again, but the "boots to a full screen experience without 'a Desktop'" expectations of games and game-focused hardware makes it easier to boot the Desktop only if needed in a way that makes sense to game players that didn't make sense to general Windows users with a long tail of ancient applications that they didn't or couldn't "just" upgrade to new ones.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    As I recall there were services that were part of the desktop experience that they didn’t shut off. One of them being the desktop wallpaper. Which with high res desktops being the rage these days may actually be a large part of that size win.
1y ago

ncr100 1y ago

Is this testing the same graphics performance / i.e. screenshot-accurate comparison vs Windows?

Fluorescence 1y ago
Shame you have been downvoted. That's a reasonable question no matter where you stand. Motion is important too, not just static screen-shots. I am 100% team Linux but cross-platform benchmarking is rife with problems. Differences are often from not testing the exactly same thing or different defaults that trade-off safety/quality/perf and can in theory be changed. No point measuring only one side of a triangle whose ratios are a matter of taste. A responsible benchmark would try and prove fidelity.
- ncr100 1y ago
  <3 and, sharing internet +1 coinage to you too. (this is Hacker News after all, seems like a reasonable question to me too) I had not thought about Motion...good one. Agreed regarding a responsible benchmark. All that exploration could help illuminate (ha) the path to a user-first "Desired frames per second" Graphical Setting in game set-ups. "I just want 60 / 120 / don't-care 30 is okay". With nVidia going bonkers with new AI interpolation features the users may want a "minimum 60 please". It's a soft feature that Consoles have, IMO, though with variable rate refresh panels I feel it's less of a draw. Does Linux have workable VRR support?

flohofwoe 1y ago

Tbf, this mainly seems to compare shitty/outdated 3rd-party Windows drivers against a vertically integrated system where Valve has complete control over both the hardware and software. E.g. the difference between the Lenovo and Asus Win11 drivers is sometimes bigger than the difference of the faster Windows driver to Linux. It's also not all that surprising though, there's a lot of very smart people working on Proton while the general quality level in the Windows ecosystem is slowly but steadily declining. I also wouldn't be all that surprised if running a D3D11 or D3D12 game on a Proton-layer on Windows would be faster than running that same game without Proton. Sometimes Proton might have workarounds for 'API abuse' problems of specific games which the native D3D implementation or driver doesn't have.

rf15 1y ago
afaik the Steam Deck is by no means "vertically integrated" as e.g. Apple Products are. This is really more a quality thing on the side of Proton.
pixelpoet 1y ago
They even have the audacity to use quotes for "official" drivers. At least it's an obvious indicator of the author's bias...
- nulltype 1y ago
  Where do they use quotes for the official drivers?

deleted 1y ago

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andreldm 1y ago

Valve has done an amazing job turning Linux gaming a reality, I really admire their efforts. Unfortunately I had to switch back to Windows on my gaming rig due to a Steam bug which unnecessarily downloads the shader cache of several game every single day, disabling the cache hurts the performance. That’s been plaguing many users for years and surprisingly Valve hasn’t fixed it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10285 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1028...

tmtvl 1y ago

As a semi-related aside: I often read of people complaining that Fallout New Vegas crashes constantly for them, but under GNU/Linux using Proton I get none of that, I can play it for hours on end without any notable instability.

ChoGGi 1y ago
Those are likely people that don't check the pcgamingwiki, one of the first things it mentions is installing dxvk and the 4gb patch.

mystified5016 1y ago

I don't think this is because Steam, Proton, or Linux are particularly good on their own (they are, extremely so) but more that windows is just so awful. My observation is that windows is slow at everything. I think because of Defender, but I'm not certain. If you set up a Linux VM on a Windows machine, most tasks run much faster than an identical task on the host OS. It's insane. I run my C++ compiler in a linux VM because running it on windows is, no exaggeration, twice as slow.

pier25 1y ago

I was expecting something like 20-30% of difference not 200-300%. Microsoft really needs to release a gaming version of Windows without the bloat. I only use Windows to launch Steam these days.

NoPicklez 1y ago
I want games to run optimally too, but I don't think they should release a gaming version of Windows. Ultimately gamers want to do more with their PC's than just game. They should focus on optimizing the current OS to more optimally run games rather than segmenting the OS.

hajimuz 1y ago

But on Windows you’re guaranteed that any game can be run without any extra configuration, which still is a big win. I know that proton handles most cases but it’s still frustrating when corner issue happens.

SirMaster 1y ago

That's all well and good, but until I can actually play the games I want to on Linux it's really a non-starter to me.

Self-Perfection 1y ago

About 10-15 years ago I played a game on Windows system and was dual booting to Linux. I made about 100-200 save files in a game, so opening a screen with list of saves took about 10 seconds. But when I used the same save folder in the same game installed under wine in Linux, its loading screen took half the time. Even though NTFS is not native for Linux. I have no idea why. Windows was without antivirus software.

scriu 1y ago

I did some tests a while ago on w8 vs w11 for bootup time and w8 was faster. This doesnt surprise me.

lincon127 1y ago

Ok, but what about indie games,m? Does every game just work on SteamOS now? Or is that game dependent?