Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 285 posts

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

#231

Post by WorldMaker »

viraptor wrote: post #153
zrobotics wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The choice of games is also super strange. Why include borderlands 3? A 2019 cel-shaded release that isn't super demanding seems odd. Homeworld and returnal also seem odd, they're a little more modern but I don't typically see them used as graphical benchmarks. The only game on their list that I typically see for benchmarking is cyberpunk 2077, the rest of the list honestly looks like they did some cherry picking wit…

> cel-shaded Borderlands is not cel-shaded. People keep making that mistake for quite a while though.

It's not a terrible description of what Borderlands complex web of shaders are doing. A base layer part of it is effectively a cell-shader, but Borderlands is doing more other things, too.

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.

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

#232

Post by WorldMaker »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #29
Melatonic wrote: post #19

Windows 11 is also bloated as hell by default. Curuios how they compare to a very optimized and debloated windows 11? 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…

There's little point benchmarking a debloated windows 11 since: 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

Related to 1, Microsoft did announce a gaming-focused "debloated" Windows 11 experience especially for gaming handhelds to release "sometime next year". It will be interesting to see what it is like as a standard, but obviously it is not out yet.

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

#233

Post by haswell »

lotharcable wrote: post #204
preisschild wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc. > HDR Already supported > Nvidia GPUs You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue. > VR SteamVR works though?

For gaming and general desktop on Linux AMD is best if you want a dedicated GPU. If you want a laptop with good battery life Intel is generally the way to go. A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of effort Valve put into improving the open source AMD drivers, which is what is used on their Steam platform. Of course if you want CUDA you need Nvidia, but if you use Nvidia to drive your Linux desktop expect some…

For what it’s worth I’ve been using an RTX 3090 and it’s been mostly smooth sailing for a couple years now.

Running NixOS with a pretty vanilla configuration and it has been hassle free.

I did have to disable power management at the system level because framerate suffers severely if the system sleeps and wakes back up, but I shut the system down when I’m not using it, so this was a non factor for me.

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

#234

Post by lotharcable »

runako wrote: post #213
lotharcable wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta. The devil in the details here. Depending on the VM technology they use they offer a variety of different caching mode and configurations, but the basic three approaches that most everybody offers are going to be something like; "writeback" means that when the guest's storage data ends up in the host's cache it is reported back to the guest as 'written'. This means that from the guest's perspective the disk is…

So if I understand correctly, you're suggesting that in essence the VM lied to Windows to improve performance? It's been many years, but I don't imagine I would have chosen an option like that. I am very surprised VMWare would default to such behavior.

> So if I understand correctly, you're suggesting that in essence the VM lied to Windows to improve performance?

Pretty much. Just speculating because I don't know how your systems was configured back in the day.

But all of what I said applies to most VM solutions.

If you are dealing with enterprise-grade hardware it isn't a bad things. Keep in mind that typically OSes are going to assume that they are the only things operating on storage. So if you have like 30 windows boxes all trying to write to shared disk at the same time it can lead to some bad behavior if you are not using a write cache.

The system has battery backup and typically they expect you to use shared SAN or NAS with multipath and/or bonded network interfaces for redundancy as well as having backups. So the chances of data loss is a lot less then typical consumer hardware and it gives the hosting OS better chances at optimizing and scheduling writes properly.

Also remember the guest OS still has the option to send a 'flush' command to disk, which would ensure the writes complete regardless.

> It's been many years, but I don't imagine I would have chosen an option like that. I am very surprised VMWare would default to such behavior.

This is pretty normal. You'll see the same sort of options with hardware RAID devices and such things with their own internal battery-backed cache.

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

#235

Post by cwillu »

dwattttt wrote: post #124
cwillu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how that's relevant, unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware.

It's your IOMMU, you can do what you want with it. Maybe you need to write heaps of stuff to take advantage of it, but what's new there? The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".

Okay, but he's specifically brought it up in the context of a computer's owner doing something that the software vendor (and also myself as another gamer harmed by cheating) would prefer he did not.

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

#236

Post by thfuran »

ndriscoll wrote: post #224
thfuran wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it does have to do with graphics in the linux desktop ecosystem and is particularly relevant to those without a dedicated gaming machine.

It doesn't have anything to do with graphics in the Linux ecosystem. Netflix specifically blocks Linux from having decent quality so it's kind of pointless to discuss. If you want high quality, you can pirate it or rip from disc. Dirt cheap n100 minipcs are capable of playing UHD bluray rips in Linux just fine for example, so Netflix's relatively low bitrate media aren't an issue.

Not an issue except for any of the couple hundred million people who subscribe to Netflix at any rate.

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

#237

Post by pixelpoet »

flohofwoe wrote: post #131

Tbf, this mainly seems to compare shitty/outdated 3rd-party Windows drivers against a vertically integrated system where Valve has complete control over both the hardware and software. E.g. the difference between the Lenovo and Asus Win11 drivers is sometimes bigger than the difference of the faster Windows driver to Linux. It's also not all that surprising though, there's a lot of very smart people working on Proton…

They even have the audacity to use quotes for "official" drivers. At least it's an obvious indicator of the author's bias...

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

#238

Post by ndriscoll »

thfuran wrote: post #236
ndriscoll wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have anything to do with graphics in the Linux ecosystem. Netflix specifically blocks Linux from having decent quality so it's kind of pointless to discuss. If you want high quality, you can pirate it or rip from disc. Dirt cheap n100 minipcs are capable of playing UHD bluray rips in Linux just fine for example, so Netflix's relatively low bitrate media aren't an issue.

Not an issue except for any of the couple hundred million people who subscribe to Netflix at any rate.

Not an ecosystem issue at all. There's no "yet". Linux computers even on the very low end are already perfectly capable of playing 4k Netflix videos. You can easily prove this to yourself by downloading one via torrent (you can generally get exact stream rips with DRM removed if you want). Netflix just won't send UHD streams to Linux users. That's a political choice, not a technology problem, and it's easy enough to get the media elsewhere DRM-free if it's that important to you since Netflix evidently specifically does not want Linux users as customers.

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

#239

Post by Self-Perfection »

About 10-15 years ago I played a game on Windows system and was dual booting to Linux.

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.

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

#240

Post by meibo »

p_ing wrote: post #198
sitkack wrote: post #22

Given that Windows games run faster via Proton on SteamOS, developers should prioritize targeting SteamOS APIs—not Windows. This ensures compatibility with Windows while maximizing performance. Game engines like Unity and Unreal must adopt SteamOS as the primary target, with CI systems rigorously testing both platforms. SteamOS, not Windows, should be the baseline for optimization. Does Valve run a SteamOS CI/CD farm…

The only stable ABI on SteamOS is Win32. Targeting anything else is asking for it to break over time.

Valve actually ships "stable ABI" Linux runtimes that Linux games and Proton are built against, so that they don't have to rely on distribution packages, similarly to Flatpak. They renew them every few years but they stay stable so that games built against a specific runtime keep working.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

Post reply on HN