Linux/SteamOS: a better Windows than Windows

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 have no doubt that “bare metal” games’ performance is better under Linux but what about things like cpu scheduling for multicore or directstorage?

You know you are doing something wrong when even Mainstream Media wanks off about windows being shit

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.

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.

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.

Half of Windows 11 is probably coded by Copilot at this point.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

Nah, more like, Linux has better process scheduling, better CPU scheduling and better I/O scheduling.

Not if you have a slightly older Nvidia GPU. I am seeing 10%-15% lower frame rates in many of the games I tested.

Yep, the Windows compositor is actually a pretty big resource hog all things considered. Plus it fucks with frame pacing

I’m sure the lack of constantly running ai spyware has a little to do with it.