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

I can definitely believe this on low power machines.

I got a N150 Mini PC the other week, and it comes with Win 11. It thrashed around at 100% CPU doing updates and virus checks and fuck knows what other background tasks Windows considers more essential than whatever I tell it to do. Case was red hot.

So I popped the latest Ubuntu on it. Is it perfect? No. I had to mess around with Firefox "snap" for ages and type arcane commands to make it find the N150's tiny GPU. And it still can't play videos using the hardware. But other than that, it just works, just the bare essentials, and then gets out the way. Sits at about 2% CPU use when idle.

MS seriously need to cut bloat.

What a shock

Shitty OS is shitty.

I guess things run faster without the spyware, logging, and other general bullshit running in the background. Who could've guessed?

Device made with software specifically for purpose performs better than generic machine with generic software designed to do a wide range of things. All of my machines are on Linux distros, but this just seems like a no brainer to me. It's like years ago when the mustang had a 4.6L V8. It was the same engine used in the Ford explorer. Will the Mustang beat the Explorer to 60, of course. But the Explorer will also transport 5 people to the beach with coolers and beach gear and drive in the sand.
It's good that SteamOS is doing well, but the variety of tasks people are using Windows for cannot be performed on SteamOS.
- So handhelds made specifically for windows are obviously going to run worse with windows since they are actually specially created for linux. Oh and also pcs that 99% all run windows, are made and designed for windows actually run games worse with windows since obviously they're made for linux. The OS that is basically not designed at all for gaming.
  are you fucking insane?
- I assume you mean corporate workstations? The EU is currently on that.
  Other than that a handful of games and legacy software/hardware.
- What?
  SteamOS is just an immutable version of Arch Linux, with some Valve flavor and preinstalled apps.
- SteamOS is a full fat Linux distro. I use the desktop mode every day
- Device made with software specifically for purpose performs better than generic machine with generic software designed to do a wide range of things. All of my machines are on Linux distros, but this just seems like a no brainer to me. It’s like years ago when the mustang had a 4.6L V8. It was the same engine used in the Ford explorer. Will the Mustang beat the Explorer to 60, of course. But the Explorer will also transport 5 people to the beach with coolers and beach gear and drive in the sand.
  Exactly. I don't think the comparison is very good here. A better article would say - how to performance tune Windows 11 on a Legion Go S for gaming and compare the results to Steam OS, which is already tuned for gaming. I expect the results would be close enough that the OS choice is less of a concern about performance than what games you want to play and any other uses you might have for the device.

Running a windows game using Proton-GE 10.4 and a Wayland desktop is even faster still.

This reminds me of when I got Spore on Optical disc for my (brand new at the time) Intel iMac. The disc was ISO9660 with both Joliet and HFS extensions, so if you put it in Windows, it would show up natively and if you put it in a Mac, it would also be native.

After a few games in MacOSX I was disappointed with the performance so I started to dig and realised it was the Windows Binary with some sort of WINE-like translation layer. I assumed it would run better natively in Windows.

I installed Bootcamp and a stripped-down version of Windows Vista and then installed the native Windows version. It installed a Root kit that broke most of Vistas security and the game ran even worse and crashed constantly.

I don’t think that Microsoft deserves all the blame for games running like shit natively. The users who pirate games and the studios who don’t trust Windows users to not pirate games deserve the blame as well.

Microsoft (and Post-Jobs Apple) definitely do deserve a lot of blame for allowing their platforms to get so bloated with so many features that users don’t want. Copilot should have been laughed out of the boardroom and Apple Intelligence is an underperforming, overly obnoxious know-nothing know-it-all.

Apple Intelligence is completely disabled on my Mac.
- Me too, and Copilot is disabled on my work computer (and then magically reenabling itself)
  Please tell me how to disable Data Detectors on MacOS, sometimes a number is just a numerical string and is not a Phone number; actually it it quite unusual for it to ever be a phone number. Even if it is a phone number, I would love to be able to just copy and paste it without it trying to connect to my phone and prank call some poor sucker.

But what you gain in performance you lose in data mining. Imagine not being graped for personal information after you paid extra to get it.

I think you're mixing it up; the study shows that SteamOS has better performance than Windows, not the other way around. Seems to be a lose-lose for Windows.
- I think you missed the joke.

I think a far more likely reason for any slow down is Lenovo's Windows drivers suck, or Windows defaults to a power saving mode that improves battery life but impacts performance, or Windows has antivirus or some other impactful service running that they didn't turn off. Since the article neglects to say if they tweaked Windows I have to assume they didn't.

This might be true, but at the end of the day I don't care. I just want things to work out of the box.
It was already shown that SteamOS is way better in terms of battery performance than Windows. So if Windows uses power saving mode by default, these results are even more damning:
There might be some tweaks to mitigate some of the short comings of Windows, but that doesn't changed that the script has flipped. Before it was Linux that required tweaking and Windows would have a decent out of the box experience. Now SteamOS works great out of the Box while Windows needs tweaks. And at that point there is no reason for sticking with Windows unless your software specifically demands it.
In my headcanon the debloated custom kernel version of windows that runs as well as linux means that the avarage npc who installs stock win11 and boots up the game gets the same framerate.

Just to be clear, this is testing the same handheld on both Steam and Windows and is in line with previous findings on a small set of AAA games.

Best guess, as someone who runs both Linux and Windows on both handhelds and desktop gaming PCs, the issue here is probably memory and driver optimizations around them. Windows is just heavier than SteamOS and, while the 32 GB in the Legion Go should be enough for at least some of these tested games, they are shared between CPU and GPU. I don't have a Go S, but I've seen significant performance improvements on Windows handhelds by manually assignign more VRAM in heavy games like these.

Shame, I've been waiting for more thorough testing (more games, desktop hardware references and a deeper look at memory management in Windows, but this is pretty superficial still.

EDIT: For what it's worth, and I DON'T have the time or the setup to do a full set of benchmarks, but running South of Midnight on both Linux and Windows, same settings, same PC, just dual booting I got almost 2x the fps on Windows. That's suspicious the other way, I'd expect the difference to be less dramatic, so there may be some resolution stuff going on here. Or perhaps the DLAA I'm running on both runs slower on the Nvidia Linux drivers? I'll give one more game a try with no DLSS before I call it an experiment.

EDIT 2: Damn, this is why benchmarking modern games sucks. I tried Marvel's Midnight Suns (just because it was there on both) and... well, the performance is the same on both, but Windows is clearly bugged and stutters for like a second every couple of seconds, consistently. So it's really nice on Linux but entirely unplayable on Windows (on this machine, at least).

If I'm learning anything from this is that despite modern advances PC gaming is still a tinkerer's game and that I really wish Linux/Windows drive sharing was less flaky because it's increasingly obvious that dual booting is a great tool for gaming, given how temperamental modern big games are.

Ive had monster hunter world bsod, crash and lag on windows while it runs perfectly through compatability layer on an os not designed for gaming using a gpu it doesnt actually have first party drivers for.
Windows has stopped being "everything just works out of the box instantly" os for a while now.
- And nothing has replaced it.
  That's what I was saying, it's all shaky right now. Wilds runs about as well on both, but it's noticeably less stuttery for me under Linux. Other stuff, particularly when leaning hard into Nvidia features, is either performing poorly or has features disabled on Linux. Plus the compatibility issues.
  There is just no one-size-fits-all solution on PCs thede days, even before you start considering the weirdness of running the same games in ridiculous 1000W powerhouses and 15W handhelds at the same time.
  PC gaming has become a LOT less plug-and-play this last decade, and I don't know that it'll go back to where it was any time soon.
Drivers and "other stuff" have more impact than the OS itself. I would expect if you installed Windows 11 from a USB stick onto this device that it probably puts performance into "balanced" mode for example, fires up antivirus/malware protection, runs a bunch of esoteric services, throws in a WHQL (stable but crappy) GPU driver etc.
I think the article would have been fairer and more useful to install Windows, and optimize the life out of it and then compare performance and other factors (e.g. battery, heat, fan noise etc.)
- That depends. In this case, where the Lenovo drivers are clearly outdated and kinda broken, definitely they're the bottleneck for at least some games. That much they've shown, by installing newer drivers and showing a massive performance upgrade.
  Although I'd caveat that by saying that their flashier results with big updates across OSs and driver variants are running at outright unplayable settings. They are benchmarking on settings resulting on framerates in the teens. When they say they saw 12% performance increases on the newer drivers they mean going from 14 to 16 fps in some cases.
  Benchmarking properly is hard, I guess is my point.
Maybe wine/proton is just better at Windowsing than Windows is.
- Very unlikely that has anything to do with it.
- It is in some ways. I can tell you I tried to run Prototype 2 on a handheld today and it didn't run natively on Windows 11 because it's old but putting it into a Proton session and keeping it contained did wonders for it and the Deck ran it maxed out at 90fps (you forget it can do that if you insist on playing modern games on it, but man, does it look nice on the OLED).
  So hey, it certainly Windows 8s better than Windows 11. There is that.
  But it's not magic, so I'd still like to figure out what we're seeing in these examples.
The Legion Go only has 16GB of RAM natively.
- The Legion Go 1 yeah, this was on the Legion Go S, which has 32, apparently.
  I'd say if you're buying a handheld these days you should aim at 32 and look into having at least 8 available for the GPU.
Idk if I'd call pc gaming still a tinkerers game, it's 2025, console games have pretty glaring issues too.
- Hah. Sure, but you can't do much about those, so no tinkering.

If I can’t use it on PC… :’)

Duh

So does the application menu

Never mind. You people are children.

Never mind. You people are children.
Says the tantrum thrower? Taking your ball and going home kinda shows the reverse here.
The amazing thing is that there is often a translation layer involved and it still runs faster. And as it was pointed out, this can also be achieved with a "normal" Linux system.
Linux runs games faster even outside of Steam OS.
The fact that a 3rd party offers better performance than the platform’s creators is a pretty big indictment of Microsoft’s stewardship of Windows.
Never mind. You people are children.
There's nothing else in your comment anymore. Why say anything in the first place if you're just going to change your mind about it and give up? There's something to be said for making up your mind before you talk. All your comment really says is "I have no convictions".
That's just a stupid claim, SteamOS is Linux based, and every Linux distro generally have the same optimizations SteamOS has.
Windows is simply not as efficient as Linux is.
For instance multi threading has traditionally worked better in Linux, but there has also been made massive improvements in the kernel to improve graphics card performance, with entirely new technologies introduced a few years ago to achieve that.
These things also benefit CAD and other 3D-software, so it's not just a "gaming" thing. Linux is simply generally more efficient than Windows, at mostly any task.
Valve has done a lot to help improve game performance on Linux, and these improvements are merged into the respective main projects, like kernel and drivers and graphics libraries. The same is simply not possible in Windows, because Windows is proprietary.
Windows used to have a clear advantage in that all optimizations by GPU vendors and game developers were made primarily for Windows and Linux was just an afterthought. Also games were made for DirectX which is native for Windows, and a compatibility layer for Linux.
So for decades games made for both generally ran better on Windows.
So it is absolutely impressive that Linux can now run games faster than Windows. Despite having only a fraction the marketshare.
Cry more :)