Posted by _JamesA_ 5 days ago
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.
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.
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)
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
> 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.
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.
The foreground application gets a priority boost, it's threads are going to take a larger slice than any background thread, and with the number of cores available to the OS, they will likely run just fine concurrently.
This as some evidence of bloat equaling poor performance isn't justified. It's Ars' using 6 month old display drivers.
I'm not claiming newer drivers will solve the performance problems entirely or at all, but for the purposes of accurate testing, they should have updated them rather than stick with what the ODM is providing, which are always out of date.
The selling point is compatibility with anti-cheat and Game Pass. These aren't targeted for me, I'm not big into competitive shooters, I prefer a la carte and I main Linux, but I can imagine it would be for a lot of people.
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.
Besides, MSFT is almost $500, so they're doing something right.
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.
So now gamers have gained another platform to play games!
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.
While I agree with the basic sentiment, racism really doesn't deserve a place here, please don't do this.
Grow up and stop finding racism in everything.
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
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
Correction: it’s been a month and they had both devices:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q
And it’s $130 cheaper.
Borderlands is not cel-shaded. People keep making that mistake for quite a while though.
Relatedly, cell-shading and other shaders are sometimes very heavy GPU compute workloads (which would also be far more expensive if they needed to run on the CPU due to a bad graphics card or driver). It seems funny to dismiss cell-shading as "not super demanding", when cell-shading was a technical dream or expensive technical demo thing to do for quite a while in the time before modern GPU shaders.
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.
Microsoft really needs to release a gaming version of Windows without the bloat. I only use Windows to launch Steam these days.
They should focus on optimizing the current OS to more optimally run games rather than segmenting the OS.
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.