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

Posted by _JamesA_ 6 days ago

Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds(arstechnica.com)

440 points | 276 commentspage 3

ghushn3 5 days 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.

elsonrodriguez 5 days ago||

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

tmtvl 5 days 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 5 days 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.

dottjt 5 days 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.

easyThrowaway 5 days 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

dottjt 5 days ago||

I would have to disagree. Those same games that didn't work on SteamOS worked flawlessly on Windows 11.

easyThrowaway 5 days ago||

It's definitely game-dependent. In a few cases I've found it was easier to rebuy a game on GOG, like Dino Crisis or '98 Resident Evil 2 (whose re-releases indeed run on win11 flawlessly while they're quite problematic on Proton) rather than messing with their original cd/dvds.

On the other hand the Sega arcade ports from the same time period (Sega Rally 1&2, Daytona USA Deluxe, Manx TT Superbike Virtua Striker, etc.) are definitely less problematic on Wine/Proton rather than Win11.

scheeseman486 5 days 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.

zrobotics 5 days 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.

eviks 5 days ago||

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

TheBozzCL 5 days 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.

ncr100 5 days ago||

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

Fluorescence 5 days 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 4 days 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?

hajimuz 5 days 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.

cma 5 days ago||

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

nullify88 5 days 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 4 days ago||

The file system filter is still queried using exclusions. Eliminating all file system filters yields a faster read/write.

nullify88 4 days 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...

cma 4 days ago||

In WSL 1, unix find and git status still run about 4x faster on Dev Drive than on NTFS with defender off.

SirMaster 5 days 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.

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