Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
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My partner runs Windows, I run two separate distros not by choice but by driver support. I was messing around on her computer the other day, had to pull something up. I was startled by just how sluggish the entire experience was. Mind you, one of the distros I run is a destroyer of ram. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I was hanging out on a computer with fifty viruses and the pop-ups were coming for me.
I run Windows 10 on my own laptop and Windows 11 on my work laptop. Sluggish is the right word for W11: every action seems to take more clicks, more time and more effort. I suspect it’s partly because the animations are slower because it needs to load more bullshit.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve’s free operating system.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Linux has many performance benefits over Windows on the count of there being much less bloat and unnecessary garbage included but also SteamOS has the extra benefit of running games and apps independently in gaming mode with little to no background processes, kind of like how games run on a Console. Background apps and the Desktop do chew up resources which won’t be used by the games.
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What surprises me is that when windows is faster the difference isn’t that significant but that when Linux is faster it’s by a lot.
For example 59.1 vs 59.8 FPS in Borderlands isn’t that significant of a difference but 52.4 vs 44.6 FPS in Cyberpunk certainly is.Really makes you wonder just how badly Microsoft fucked up Windows for things to end up like this.
Half of Windows 11 is probably coded by Copilot at this point.
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I have no doubt that “bare metal” games’ performance is better under Linux but what about things like cpu scheduling for multicore or directstorage?
I’ve never heard about directstorage before, and by the description it’s an xbox api, does windows even support it?
The goal is to enable handling of up to 50,000 requests per second while using at most 10% of a single CPU core
That’s not really impressive, you get 100k iops without any tweaking at all and cpu shouldn’t even blink at it.
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What surprises me is that when windows is faster the difference isn’t that significant but that when Linux is faster it’s by a lot.
For example 59.1 vs 59.8 FPS in Borderlands isn’t that significant of a difference but 52.4 vs 44.6 FPS in Cyberpunk certainly is.Really makes you wonder just how badly Microsoft fucked up Windows for things to end up like this.
FPS is not that meaningful of a metric if you get worse graphics or flitches due to wine not implementing something. It might be something that you can’t see of course.
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I’ve never heard about directstorage before, and by the description it’s an xbox api, does windows even support it?
The goal is to enable handling of up to 50,000 requests per second while using at most 10% of a single CPU core
That’s not really impressive, you get 100k iops without any tweaking at all and cpu shouldn’t even blink at it.
And linux has io_uring which can handle millions of syscalls from a single thread without breaking a sweat. In my experience, I/O on Windows is just really slow, every file operation takes 10s to 100s of times longer than on any Unix-like kernel (1000s if windows defender is enabled)
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I’ve never heard about directstorage before, and by the description it’s an xbox api, does windows even support it?
The goal is to enable handling of up to 50,000 requests per second while using at most 10% of a single CPU core
That’s not really impressive, you get 100k iops without any tweaking at all and cpu shouldn’t even blink at it.
Yes it runs on windows, if I recall it’s to pass data from storage to the GPU directly without passing through the CPU. Which lowers CPU usage and speeds up things like game loading or texture streaming for example. You probably found references to Xbox because it was implemented there first with the launch of the current gen consoles.
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Yes it runs on windows, if I recall it’s to pass data from storage to the GPU directly without passing through the CPU. Which lowers CPU usage and speeds up things like game loading or texture streaming for example. You probably found references to Xbox because it was implemented there first with the launch of the current gen consoles.
Interesting, there is no support of direct io from wine, and it’s a different to what linux does (50k iops is still laughable tbh) altogether.
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FPS is not that meaningful of a metric if you get worse graphics or flitches due to wine not implementing something. It might be something that you can’t see of course.
Is this an actual concern or a theoretical one? I think I heard that some nvidia specific features don’t work out of the box in some games but never heard issues due to wine ‘not implementing something’. I feel like that would just cause a crash, no?
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I’ve never heard about directstorage before, and by the description it’s an xbox api, does windows even support it?
The goal is to enable handling of up to 50,000 requests per second while using at most 10% of a single CPU core
That’s not really impressive, you get 100k iops without any tweaking at all and cpu shouldn’t even blink at it.
Yeah it’s a Windows (11?) feature. AFAIK it’s only supported explicitly by a handful of games, but it does appear to make a major difference for those games if the hardware used is up to the task.
It might just be a feature in the same category as “Nvidia hairFX” or w/e as a marketing gimmick though.
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Linux has many performance benefits over Windows on the count of there being much less bloat and unnecessary garbage included but also SteamOS has the extra benefit of running games and apps independently in gaming mode with little to no background processes, kind of like how games run on a Console. Background apps and the Desktop do chew up resources which won’t be used by the games.
Nah, more like, Linux has better process scheduling, better CPU scheduling and better I/O scheduling.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve’s free operating system.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Not if you have a slightly older Nvidia GPU. I am seeing 10%-15% lower frame rates in many of the games I tested.
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Linux has many performance benefits over Windows on the count of there being much less bloat and unnecessary garbage included but also SteamOS has the extra benefit of running games and apps independently in gaming mode with little to no background processes, kind of like how games run on a Console. Background apps and the Desktop do chew up resources which won’t be used by the games.
Yep, the Windows compositor is actually a pretty big resource hog all things considered. Plus it fucks with frame pacing
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Nah, more like, Linux has better process scheduling, better CPU scheduling and better I/O scheduling.
I’m sure the lack of constantly running ai spyware has a little to do with it.
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I’m sure the lack of constantly running ai spyware has a little to do with it.
That too.
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Is this an actual concern or a theoretical one? I think I heard that some nvidia specific features don’t work out of the box in some games but never heard issues due to wine ‘not implementing something’. I feel like that would just cause a crash, no?
Actual concern, had these subtle issues with wine games multiple times. Often they aren’t game breaking just annoying.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve’s free operating system.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
This has been the case for a while now. Few care.
It’s the usability issues. For the love of God, valve might just fix Linux desktop.
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I run Windows 10 on my own laptop and Windows 11 on my work laptop. Sluggish is the right word for W11: every action seems to take more clicks, more time and more effort. I suspect it’s partly because the animations are slower because it needs to load more bullshit.
Parts of the 11 start menu are actually a react native app.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve’s free operating system.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Not in niche games. Rimworld and Stellaris (for instance) are dramatically faster on Windows, hence I keep a partition around. I’m talking 40%ish better simulation speeds vs Linux native (and still a hit with Proton, though much less).
Minecraft and Starsector, on the other hand, freaking love Linux. They’re dramatically faster.
These are kinda extreme scenarios, but the point is AAA benchmarks don’t necessarily apply to the spectrum of games across hardware, especially once you start looking at simulation heavy ones.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve’s free operating system.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
A lighter weight OS designed for this specific use case is more efficient than a general purpose OS. This isn’t surprising.
