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

I believe it, Windows bloat these days is so bad. I keep telling my friends Tarkov runs better on Linux if they'd just let me play the goddamn multiplayer I'd be golden
- I'm really curious to see what kind of performance gains the Xbox-mode or whatever they're calling it is going to provide. I don't know if it'll reach SteamOS levels, but it does legitimately look like they're taking the bloat's hit on gaming seriously with the Xbox-branded ROG Ally.
  The reality is that mostly people aren't going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it's still a win.
  
  I think we're beginning to see a serious shift about how people view Linux. I do think valve being on Linux will significantly legitimizes it, and drivers will become much more accessible for it. In the next decade I think we will see a big migration of gamers to Linux. Being on Linux myself, the experience is even more streamlined and less glitchy than just a year ago, just because of the widespread adoption of OS's like steamOS and bazzite.
  
  They’ve promised that exact same thing for like at least three major windows versions.
  
  The reality is that mostly people aren't going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it's still a win.
  While I mostly agree with this, every time I see this mentioned it reminds me that ~~MS-DOS~~ Windows was not very popular, until a Microsoft employee offered to port Doom to ~~DOS~~ Windows, because he saw that if games ran on a platform people would use it and migrate naturally, that employee was called Gabe Newell. So I do have some hope that there's some bigger migration, and in fact we've seen the numbers steadily rising, and these sort of things tend to be exponential, so I wouldn't be surprised if it picks up speed.
- Tarkov runs on Linux!? I thought they had kernel anticheat that didn't work
  
  Pvp doesn't work yeah, everything else does

Games run faster on SteamOS with proton than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
FTFY. I hate all these articles that downplay the heavy lifting proton (and all the tools that make it up) are doing. But "Proton makes games run better" doesn't get the same attention.
- Proton is amazing, but it's entirely overhead translating library/system calls to Linux. It's accurate to say they run better on SteamOS, not to say Proton is making it run better.
  Now maybe Proton makes them run better than a janky but native Linux port, but that's a separate statement about games being better optimized on Windows.
  
  Hogwarts legacy, which is a exe, runs on proton but not on windows 10. I'd say proton runs better than windows.
  
  They're not only being better optimized on Windows which results that running them through Proton is better. In a lot of cases Windows versions actually run, while native Linux don't, because there's no single stable API (ABI? Idk) on Linux and games break when you update your system.
  
  Proton is amazing, but it’s entirely overhead translating library/system calls to Linux.
  That is not at all true.
  but that’s a separate statement about games being better optimized on Windows.
  Is that though? You can't say X is better than Y when you're changing multiple variables. If windows had a proton equivalent and both games ran through it then yes that would be a direct comparison. But you can't say X + Y is better than Z (by itself)
  DXVK is a part of proton that also is available on windows. DXVK alone can get you double digit performance improvements on games. And that's not getting into all the one off tweaks users can do to proton to optimize the game. Enabling pre compiled shaders gave a huge performance boost for Elden Ring.
- I’m not sure it’s a Wine/Proton thing, it’s quite likely to be suboptimal at some things because it’s reverse engineered (not to diminish technical marvel that it is and decades of effort). Regular desktop Windows has just way too much overhead coming from everywhere.
  As a side note, back in the day when Nvidia released drivers for FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility layer was even faster than Linux for gaming.
- I find they run even faster with Glorious Eggroll fork of proton
- Would love to see tests like this attempting to use DXVK etc (as part of their testing on Windows) to better isolate more factors

Take aways:
Sample set is of 5 games
Lenovo drivers are much slower than Asus
There are 2 games where windows is neck to neck or better, 3 where SteamOS is far ahead
Some doubts:
Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation. 99%ile would be helpful.
I wonder if it makes sense to test DirectX10, 11 and 12 games separately to better understand where Proton has an edge.
I wonder what all settings can be tweaked in Windows to find potential fixes (core isolation, cpu boost, power profiles).
Point is Microsoft and OEMs need to do better, however not every game or subscription services work on Linux, so in the interim time users should know what they can do to close the gap better.
- This is really not surprising to anyone who has used modern windows and Linux recently. Windows is so incredibly bloated, whereas Linux is a true real-time OS basically out of the box.
  
  Unless you use an RT kernel, Linux is not a realtime OS and certainly not a true one.
  Because, you know, terms have a meaning.
  
  While the bloat exists, even debloated windows wouldn't match proton because that's not the only reason. Despite bloat there are two games in this test the actually do similar or better than SteamOS. This means there's a confounding reason for the difference, not the bloat.
  
  I recently switched from windows (with a debloat scrpit ran on it) to linux mint and I was shocked at how much faster it booted. When I turn my pc on I usually get up and do something else for a bit (not because windows is THAT slow but because I could spend the minute it takes to turn on to make lunch or something) and linux booted before I was out of my chair.
- Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation.
  Why should the author rule it out? Honest question. If shader compilation leads so worse real world experience for gamers on Windows than SteamOS, it is a valid point to include.
  
  Because I'm more curious about why things are the way they are just like the author, and would like to understand this with more data points, only making the comparison more helpful. I'm not saying author "should" consider impact of shader compilation, but I'm saying had they done, we'd understand the difference better.
  They added asus vs Lenovo drivers data points, which alone tells us that driver optimization is responsible to a great extent. All I'm saying here is more data is more helpful.
  Maybe even after taking care of that, the difference is huge, which will tell us its not enough to have precompilation of shaders. Maybe it does reduce the gap, telling us that potentially dx11 games might tend to do similarly.
  Saying "RTX 5060 is better than 9060 XT" with 5 games tested is one level of comparison, but if they are grouped into RT and non RT games, games with 8gb and 16gb VRAM requirements, games with and without nVidia partnership, isn't that just more detailed and an even better comparison point?
- Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation
  Really grasping at straws there, eh? I'm no big fan of Ars but I hope we can assume they're not quite that incompetent.
  
  Methodology is important to a robust result. It's weird that you take issue with their considerations there.
  
  It's not a slight, as I said it's a doubt, not criticism. I'm not saying "did the author EVEN ..."

Look... Regardless of metrics saying one is faster, Linux is where everyone should be. I say that knowing full well the anger it'll cause.
These corporations do not respect the user. They shovel ads, AI, spyware and half baked software down our throats. They restrict what you can do with your own hardware with artificial barriers. They force reliance on "industry standard" bs when they're the industry benefiting. The only power we have is our money and our choices, and choosing to take the abuse because of fucking Fortnite or Photoshop is as pathetic as it comes.
- Preach. Studios that make games with anti cheats and what not should reconsider how they handle Linux as they'll only get even more players, who'll probably be even more loyal due to their Linux compatibility. I know cheating is a big issue in online games, but adding invasive kernel level code to detect that is just adding system level vulnerabilities just to prevent cheaters from cheating seems like an overkill. It's not like cheating mouse and keyboards don't exist and cheaters have evaporated entirely due to anti cheat.

Yes but Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit on my Linux laptop. Checkmate atheists.
- 😭😭😭 Sadly, Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit everywhere
  
  But have you tried Outlook (NEW) and Teams (NEW)?? Microsoft made changes to deeply integrate copilot into them, while making the UI unintelligible and broken as well. It's a much more authentic Windows experience
  
  I was using Teams on Firefox and I've been thinking that FF is the problem that Teams's working horribly, but man, it works horrible on chromium as well

I found the same thing on CachyOS (another Arch fork). The increase for me was staggering. Lies of P went from an unstable 144fps on windows 11 with an overclock (OC) on my GPU to 200fps in Cachy. Settings were all maxed out at 1440p. I noticed a similar jump from other games. Modded and vanilla NBA 2K25 went a stuttery mess at 172fps (frequent dips down to 72fps) to a steady 180fps with NO dips (that’s my monitor’s limit). I like to test things on The First Descendent, and it went from an unstable 79fps with maxed settings to 119fps. And while I don’t have numbers for it, The Witcher 3 Next Gen (vanilla and heavily modded) run a lot smoother. But after ten years, that game has been optimized out the ass.
I did notice, however, that the increase in performance diminished greatly as I turned down settings. On Windows 11, I would notice a way “higher” increase in frames. For Example, I could tweak settings in the First Descendent like Global illumination and increase frames in Windows 11 to 109fps, but still unstable. In Cachy, if I did these things, I didn’t really notice a meaningful impact.
RT also performs slightly worse on Linux. But I figure anyone using Linux might be the same type of person to not care about RT.
My hypothesis is that without the CPU resources being eaten up by things like Windows Defender, the CPU is able to process more data quicker, reducing GPU wait time. I don’t have data on that, I would need something as in depth as presentmon from Intel for testing. Arch has forks of that, but nothing nearly as in depth, and PresentMon has declined any Linux support in the foreseeable future.
I should mention, the OVERALL jump is ~40% going to CachyOS. And we know that the jump from Windows 10 to 11 saw a ~27% hit due to the new Windows Defender.
My system is 64GB of SK Hynix DDR5, 9070xt (on my Windows Partition it’s OC’d, but on CachyOS I leave it stock), and a 9800x3D that has been manually OC’d in the bios and a 240mm AIO. I leave the panels off my O11 D Mini. The motherboard is a Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite (2x8 pins for the CPU delivery).
For all the FPS data, I pulled it from Steam on Cachy which uses presented frames instead of actual frames. Basically, the frames the GPU is presenting to the monitor, not necessarily what your eyes are seeing.
On my Ally, I also noticed a difference swapping to SteamOS. Something to keep in mind with anyone planning to do that, you can allocate up to 6GB of RAM to the iGPU before Arch/SteamOS gets affected. I just don’t see anyone telling you you can do this.
Edit one day later- I played Enshrouded on CachyOS. I will report that my 9070xt underperforms at max settings. Unstable 80fps with dips down to 50fps, but the Frame Time Pacing makes it feel worse. It stutters like it’s running at 50. Turning down settings again only increased frames by 5fps, which is not marginal at these rates, but did not help with the stuttering issues. I think it’s rendering things similar to Minecraft. The comparison I have is my 7800xt, which at max settings a year ago was able to run in Windows 11 at 70fps, but equally unstable. Therefore, I’d hypothesize that if I ran present on I’d just see high GPU wait times.
- Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!
- RT = Rollercoaster Tycoon?
  
  Yes /s
  
  Ray tracing is my guess
  
  "Hello everyone, and welcome to another video"
  Marcel Vos
- You could use Nsight, it has a Linux version and is very in depth (shows every draw call, also has one that shows very detailed CPU tasks)
  Of course harder to use than presentmon

It is more impressive when you realize that those games were meant for Windows and require a translation layer (Wine and DXVK).

We'll have to see if that's the same with the Xbox Ally.
I'll be laughing if its still outperformed
- The XBox Ally could still be worthwhile if it ran XBox One and backwards compatible XBox 360 and XBox games. I don't know why Microsoft didn't do that.
  
  We don't know that yet. Allegedly some old Xbox console only games like prototype and the darkness are showing up on the PC Xbox app so who knows

Wow, some of these are showing huge gains with Steam OS

Windows runs better on Linux than on Windows…
- Linux runs better on Windows than Windows.
  
  Are you saying we should run Linux Subsystem inside Windows inside a VM on Linux for maximum performance? 🤔

Imagine if Valve decided to ship HL3 only on SteamOS :)
- They're already going to only ship it through Steam. As long as you're using Steam, they don't care.
- Imagine leveraging your monopoly in attempt to gain market share in another market.
  
  Except they wouldn't be? SteamOS is just fancy Linux, so they wouldn't be directly gaining market share & I don't see how them releasing a game only on one (free and open source) platform is suddenly wrong? In a world where virtually every PC game already does that, just for Windows
  Have you forgotten about Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony (actual monopolies: controls hardware, software, marketplace, etc)
  
  Yeah I really don't think they would do that. At least right now, in the middle of the year 2025, valve still seems to be making very consumer-friendly choices.

Linux desktop compositors are still behind windows. Until my weird setup works just as well I can't switch without being annoyed. HDR 4k120hz and 1080p360hz both gysnc. Always seem to have issues with vrr in Linux and multi monitor. And HDR support is strange
- I'm glad I'm one of those people who can't seem to percieve any difference above 60Hz
  Having low standards is pretty convenient
  
  I can notice things like mouse movement being smoother at high refresh rates, but it's totally not a deal breaker. 60hz is more than good enough for everyday use.
  
  I believe everyone can, it just takes practice and is only relevant for 120hz games. Or VR.

Oh dear Microsoft, you had everything and you pissed it away again
- I last checked in December. At that time Linux had an all time high usage rate of 5.6%. For a platform that's existed since the early 90s, 5.6% is the highest they'd ever achieved.
  So I wouldn't exactly say microsoft EVER pissed it away. They still have, and always have had, dominant market share of users. And they do so by charging hundreds of dollars as opposed to a free alternative.
  
  They had internet explorer dominance, they pissed that away
  They had PC gaming OS dominance, they're now pissing that away

That's still without NTSYNC patches, right?
- I heard they are irrelevant for Proton as it has its own fsync.

Games run faster with LMDE6 than they did with Windows 10 on my 5800X3D/7900XTX PC.

Windows games used to run better on wine 15 years ago and Windows bloat/telemetry has only gotten worse since then.

I like to see this.
This is not my experience out of the box (in debian so not truly a comparison) on legacy hardware. (Which shouldn't be running win 11 anyways).
We are definitely most of the way there with proton but game devs/publishers have a lot of room of improvement.

Lol. Lmao, e--

And the sky is blue.