Source is this video:
Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D
We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.
Back in ~2010, my first dual boot was an Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to run WoW from Linux and it gave me a solid >15fps while Windows ran at less than 10fps.
I was very young at the time but still aware that this was super impressive with extra compatibility layers. That definitely took part in selling Linux to me.
I could barely get Minecraft to run 20fps on this old laptop I had given to me a few years ago. Loaded Ubuntu on it and Minecraft ran near 60fps. Blew my mind.
Pull the DE out and you could probably squeeze that performance out on a modded instance
Valve won. Maybe it’s lucky timing, or maybe Gabe is actually a genius, but it’s only going to get worse for Windows as there is no way in hell Microsoft shifts resources from AI projects to make Windows better for PC gaming. Recently, Capcom announced that their PC gaming sales surpassed their console sales, and I don’t think it’s likely we’ll see that trend changing, and it’s also likely other publishers will make similar announcements soon (although idk if they count SteamOS as a console). The Switch 2 is coming out soon, but people already say it’s too expensive, and there are controversies surrounding some of their product decisions.
Will this bring about the era of the Linux desktop? Idk, but the era of the Linux gaming PC is inevitable now.
Will Steam do for the gaming PC what porn did for the internet?
That’s interesting. But the second graph is designed to confuse.
Why is it confusing? Maybe I’m confused, not sure.
why is fps labeled with hours and minutes? what is “dead cells” and why is it also labeled hours and minutes?
edit wow i was even more confused about it than i thought. what a terrible graph.
The title is battery life, that’s why it’s hours and minutes. Dead Cells is a video game.
yeah it took me a while, it’s an awful graph and i haven’t had coffee yet
The Legion Go is on top and on the bottom, with the Deck in between. And the color scheme isn’t helping.
i expected a small performance hit.
this is actually very impressive considering it runs through a compatibility layer.
They said make electric cars fast, and you’ll get car guys to buy in. It was true.
Now they’re making linux make video games faster and prettier…
I dont know if there will ever be a year of the linux desktop, but this is the kind of stuff you gotta do to get there.
I dont know if there will ever be a year of the linux desktop
There won’t be. It won’t happen that quickly. If anything there will be a “decade of the Linux computer”.
Which I feel like were are at the beginning of, steam and proton are catalyzing the decade of linux right now.
Now what about windows 10 ltsc iot, the ONLY version of windows worth comparing to linux.
IMHO you shouldn’t have to run a stripped down Windows to get good results. It should just work that way out of the box. LTSC is not supposed to be a consumer OS.
Shouldn’t have to, absolutely, but its done anyway, so I think its can be relevant.
Until that last little bit of stuff I have to use windows for becomes linux native or at least doesn’t have a tutorial to make it work that makes my eyes cross, its just easier for me to use my stripped down windows install because it just works.
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But it comes with consumer devices. Preinstalled, just like Windows does in whatever version they compares here.
So? That still doesn’t change the fact that SteamOS is a stripped down version of Linux that can’t do everything a Linux computer can do.
So the comparison is flawed.
It is like comparing a Swiss army knife to a regular knife. The regular knife is going to be better at cutting, but it won’t do any of the other things a Swiss army knife can do
no.
SteamOS is based on Arch, which is what I’m running right now.
Arch comes with the kernel, a package manager, some generic drivers to get you started, and a CLI. That’s it. Zero bloat. You then add what you need/want on top of it.
It’s not “stripped down”, it’s not hobbled for the sake of extra performance, it actually has more system components than my daily driver. You can get ahold of the recovery ISO and go install it on any box, it’s not really super specialized beyond supporting video games.
hell i have a friend who slaps steamos on everything anymore because it works out of the box everywhere and does everything just fine. it’s absolutely not some hobbled abnormal linux, it’s a fully featured OS that does everything just fine.
“De-bloating” and “stripping down” are things Windows users do, because Windows is bloated and fucky and awful. That’s just not a thing on Linux dude.
this is the funniest thing i’ve read all week. Arch comes with the kernel, some generic drivers, BASH, and the package manager. there’s nothing to strip down, the only way to start with less is to download the kernel and roll your own from scratch.
Arch is a stripped down version of Arch.
Linux isn’t monolithic like Windows, so it can be purpose built for anything.
Windows LTSC is designed for things like kiosks, ATMs, etc that have a long service life. It’s not made for gaming. It doesn’t even include things like DirectX by default, IIRC. You have to add it.
I think it’s a valid comparison request due to some things just flat out not being compatible with Linux.
Pretty much everything will run on Linux now. It’s just the companies behind the games being dumbasses and blocking it with their anti-cheat.
There is plenty of software that doesn’t, and plenty of games that don’t run on Linux, even beyond anticheat games. If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t need protondb telling us what is and isn’t. You can advocate for Linux all day, but you have to admit there is still software that is 100% Windows only.
I was specifically referring to games as a subset of software in general. Generally, I haven’t run into a game that doesn’t “just work” on Linux unless the developer has non-working anti cheat. Are there any major games you’ve tried that that wasn’t the case?
As for all software, we still have work to do there.
I was going to put an explanation on why I can’t use Linux, but it doesn’t matter. I’m someone who can’t make the leap yet with the software and game services I use. I want to be, but I just can’t yet.
This is why the original commenter shouldn’t get downvoted for asking about 10 iot benchmarks because I, too, am looking to convert to this version when consumer 10 support ends this year. If it works on my desktop well, I’d likely try it on my Rog Ally.
Why? Isn’t SteamOS a stripped down version of Linux?
SteamOS is a full Linux build, it’s just a different distro like Fedora, Ubuntu, mint, etc, etc
Like a distro with certain bloat disabled to optimize for gaming?
SteamOS is purpose built for gaming. Windows LTSC is specifically not for gaming, but many shoehorn it into it.
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Linux Dev’s anti Sony bias shows front and center
/s
Sorry, what’s this got to do with Sony?
Read the charts?
Notice any difference in the results?
The only game in the main post photo where Windows beats Linux is Spiderman 2, published by Playstation Publishing, owned by Sony.
Ah, I missed that. Thanks for explaining 👍
Battery Life:
Battery life doubled in some games? Now that is even more impressive than 10-20% performance gain.
I also find it interesting that the Steam Deck OLED has a smaller battery but gets longer life on the same OS
Valve did a lot of work to tune the APU in the steam deck for efficiency. It’s custom silicon at the end of the day.
AMD just kinda took one of their existing laptop APUs and threw it into handhelds instead of laptops.
The Deck also has a weaker but lower wattage chip and worse display, that makes a big difference.
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Can it play MH Wilds?
The processor is not terribly power, so probably not.
If you want something capable of running at an actually steady frame rate I’m not sure any computer can accomplish that without some serious tweaking.
Also if you’re wanting to play on deck you might try this guide.
“any computer”? Come on, what is that hyperbole? My desktop runs Wilds stable just fine.
I was kinda joking, but the game still stutters and has fps drops regardless of the hardware it’s run on. Digital Foundry has a pretty scathing performance review of it.
It’s certainly playable on good hardware (assuming you aren’t super bothered by dips), but it also performs way worse than it should at any hardware level.
I don’t consider the game a good performance benchmark for any piece of hardware because it’s performance is abnormally bad, and there’s no hardware where it can run without issues.
thanks, bookmarked for when it goes on sale. none of my hardware is acceptable enough for the specs.
So for real though, while it’s disappointing and I am nowhere near the 500+ hours i have put in previous titles, the hardware is not going to do it. The game eats VRAM like my brother’s ex ate cake.
But, I get about 5 fps @2k and 9FPS@1080p better on my Ubuntu image than my Windows 10 image.
Ryzen 9 5900x Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB 32GB DDR4, both images are on different 1TB nvme drives
So while, no you can’t, it’s closer.
the gains come from the reduced overhead that linux has compared to windows
literally the next line
…the games here are being run through proton
I really hate the dismissal of the heavy lifting proton does. Proton is what makes gaming on Linux so great. So many native linux games perform worse on Linux vs their windows counterparts. Then again, I’d expect nothing less from Dave2D
I really hate the dismissal of the heavy lifting proton does.
What part of this did you interpret as a dismissal?
I mean, yeah, but if Proton is doing an absolutely flawless job, then it has 0 performance penalty compared to Windows. All the actual gains still do come from Linux having less overhead. So, both are true, that Proton is killing it and that the gains come from Linux.
DXVK (which also runs on windows) alone gives you a huge performance benefit. Playing world of warcraft on windows I’ll see about a 30% reduction in CPU usage and higher performance.
Proton doesn’t just get you to almost matching Windows’ performance. Proton easily outperforms windows even on higher end hardware where windows bloat isn’t a concern.
While proton enables that, that’s still just vulkan outperforming DirectX.
So technically proton isn’t improving performance here, it’s just allowing the game to run on better performing systems (like Linux and vulkan).
It’s just Vulkan outperforming DirectX by translating DirectX to Vulcan. If you’re comparing the default experience with Windows and Linux, how can you say Proton isn’t technically improving performance? What would you call that if a performance increase is caused by running through Proton?
As pointed out higher up this thread DXVK and Vulkan also work in Windows (without Proton) were they give performance improvements.
Further, it’s perfectly possibly to run Windows games via DXVK and Vulkan in Linux without Proton - just use plain Wine (of which Proton is a branch) instead - and you also get the performance improvements (certainly that’s my perception in my system since I tend to get my games from GoG instead of Steam when available and thus run them via Wine instead of Proton).
So that’s at least two situations were the performance improvements are present without Proton, hence you cannot logically claim they’re due to Proton, even indirectly.
Logically the place most likely to yield performance improvements is the full implemention of a rendering stack directly on top of the hardward which even has its own architecture - Vulkan - since there’s a lot more room to improve usage of hardware resources at that level, though things like pre-conversion and caching of Vulkan shaders from DirectX shaders, which are done at a higher level (Proton or DXVK), can also improve performance.
It’s possible that Proton itself is delivering some performance improvements (for example, via the trick of, pre-converting shaders from DirectX to Vulkan before game start, uploading the generated shaders to the Steam servers and then other users just download the converted shaders and do not require that step, which should speed up game start tough I have at least one game were it actually can slow down A LOT game start because the generated shaders are massive) versus solutions using DXKV + Vulkan without Proton, but that’s not really enough to sustain a claim that the performance improvements are mainly thanks to Proton in the face of also seing the performance improvements when Proton isn’t there.
So that’s at least two situations were the performance improvements are present without Proton, hence you cannot logically claim they’re due to Proton, even indirectly.
Except these tests were almost certainly being run on SteamOS using WINE with Proton. We can’t know what the numbers would be with any other setup without doing it. Would a Protonless DXVK for WINE run just as well? We can’t know from these figure.
Also, Proton does not require running through Steam. I play Epic, GoG, and otherwise sources games with Proton not through Steam all the time. It’s also more than just DXVK. That’s a big part of it though.
No one is arguing that DXVK isn’t important or anything like that. They’re just saying Proton is a piece of this, which includes DXVK. I don’t know why you’re arguing.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Proton is incredible obviously, but by itself it doesn’t make games run better. Using vulkan instead of DirectX could improve performance, but presumably most of the performance gain is from not running windows in the background.
It’s a bit of both, along with the Linux AMD drivers being superior in many cases to the Windows drivers.
I also wonder how much of it is RADV vs AMDGPU drivers. Wonder what the result would have been if the Deck used the AMDGPU drivers instead. Saying it is just “the magic of Linux” papers over a lot.
I think it doesn’t really matter, in the end the question is, do I get a better experience as a consumer on Linux or Windows?
For every game that you claim runs worse on Proton you can find dozens that run better or at least as well as Windows.
What does proton do?
I only vaguely understand it as “thing that makes game playable on other thing.”
(And also I have six versions installed on my steam deck whydoIneedsixofthese?)
Proton is the compatibility layer that valve makes that lets you run games on Linux. Proton uses DXVK a program that converts Direct X API calls (windows only) to Vulkan API calls (runs on anything). DXVK alone gives you huge performance benefits (especially on older DirectX 11 and older games) and you can run it on windows.
Proton gives you a ton of other tools that can make huge performance differences.
Hopefully not a dumb question: If Vulkan runs on anything, assuming their game isn’t a Windows (Xbox?) exclusive, why don’t more people program their games to use Vulkan instead?
Vulkan is designed to be closer to the metal than something like DirectX 11 or OpenGL, which makes the API more explicit and difficult to use. This means it requires a great deal more care to use properly. And to complicate matters more, subtle bugs that are very difficult to debug are very easy to introduce.
But, this applies mostly to devs who build their own tech. Most of them these days are just using 3rd party engines like Unity or Unreal, so it comes down to whether or not the person making the game decides to check the box to use Vulkan and just how good those render backends are. Engine developers of 3rd party tech have to build their stuff to be as generic as possible. That’s likely gonna add a lot of bloat that might not be fully optimized for every game developer’s use case.
TLDR: It’s tough and time consuming for someone writing it themselves. And for the ones who aren’t, they’re having to place a lot of trust in a renderer that is probably a black box and might be buggy/slow.
Because DirectX is more than a graphics API.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX
A fair amount of what used to make DirectX an everything API has been deprecated, but if you are already using Windows stuff for networking and audio, then you may as well use the graphics APIs too.
That my friend, is entering operating system politics.
But the TLDR is: resistance to change, lack of support, bribery, a combination of all 3, features, and much much more!
It’s becoming more common, but it mostly comes down to available tooling. At this point all three of the big game engines have a Vulkan backend available, but that’s a fairly recent development. And if a developer isn’t using a game engine, writing their own openGL renderer is easy, and writing a Vulkan renderer is a nightmare.
Also a lot of old proprietary game engines were written either specifically for DirectX or additionally for DirectX because in the olden times it was the most advanced and compatible rendering software.
Then, those developers move forward in time to work on other engines and focus primarily on DirectX because it’s still good, compatible, and it’s what they know best. OpenGL languished and it took a while for Vulkan to come out, catch up, and standardize their API.
I’ll add for completeness that vkd3d-proton handles DX12 titles, and of course OGL and Vulkan are supported natively.
Most simply put, it’s a layer that allows a computer program expecting windows to run on Linux. It isn’t emulating anything, just sorta like translating.
Think of it like a language. Windows speaks English, so a program expects to talk in English. But let’s pretend like Linux talks Spanish. Proton translates the English commands to Spanish for Linux to understand and execute, and then Proton converts the responses back to English for the program.
The big thing though about Proton is that it’s not an additional translation/emulation layer. It doesn’t translate into Spanish for Linux, as that would be slow, it makes Linux talk English.
So in your example, imagine you, the English speaking program, want to catch a taxi in Madrid/Linux but all taxi drivers speak only Spanish. An emulation layer would be “translating”, so you would have an additional guy in the taxi that you could talk to that talks to the Spanish driver. Proton is not that, it’s an English-speaking taxi driver.
I think the example you’re using is closer to emulation.
I’m not an expert by any means, most of my technology experience comes from hardware. But Proton isn’t changing the Linux ecosystem, and the programs are still expecting a windows environment when they’re run via Proton.
From what I recall, Linux and windows can both do the same stuff, they just have different names or different ways to ask for resources. And Proton receives the request for whatever and converts it to the Linux equivalent.
It’s not nearly as bad as it was in the past, now that the graphics APIs are system agnostic.
Well, technically speaking, neither would be emulation because both systems are running on x86.
Proton uses Wine, which is a Windows system call API translation layer for Linux. In other words, it translates commands for the Windows kernel into calls for the Linux kernel.
So it’s kind of an emulator and kind of not, but regardless the metaphor of a translator is fine. As a lightweight translator, you might say it’s like using Google Translate on your phone to translate back and forth quickly and automatically, rather than having a person in the middle who needs to think about it.
In Software Design terminology, Wine and DXVK are “adaptor” layers (each convert one kind of API interface into a different kind - Wine doing Windows API to Linux API conversion and DXVK doing DirectX API to Vulkan API - and nothing more) whilst Proton is more a controller that just manages those things and adds some more functionality on top such as Steam integration for ease of use.
Without Proton users would have to know a bunch of command lines parameters and environment setup to launch all the right components with the right configuration so that they can first install and then run their Windows game in Linux. In fact this is the situation if you use Wine directly without something like Lutris to do a similar work as Proton.
Personally I prefer Lutris since it’s more flexible - for example I can configure it to run games sandboxed with networking disabled - and it’s not tightly bound to a single games store.
I used to use Lutris, but I found Heroic more consistent and convenient for filling the same purpose. It’s quite good at downloading just the diff needed for GoG game updates these days, for instance, which is key for big games like Baldur’s Gate 3.
I’d say it’s something like a babelfish. You speak English, I hear Spanish.
I think it’s what Valve has branded their fork of Wine. It translates win32 calls to Linux ones, and DirectX to Vulkan. Probably some other stuff too idk
Proton is Wine plus DXVK and VKD3D, as well as a big pile of little tweaks and out of tree changes that Valve maintains to specifically maximize game compatibility and performance.
It sounds a lot like what the GPU driver providers used to do (and probably still do, despite all DX12 and Vulkan’s promises of making that unnecessary) on top of making the drivers.
And that is basically “fixing badly written games so they perform well on the hardware”.
As far as I can tell, Intel has been using
Proton’s fixesDXVK to get their drivers working on older games on WindowsDXVK is not “Proton’s fixes”. It exists as a separate entity whose development Valve has helped fund and who Valve devs have directly contributed to.
Proton’s fixes are out-of-tree tweaks to DXVK, Wine and VKD3D that, put together, make games work much more seamlessly and smoothly than they otherwise would.
Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.
I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.
I do think Proton gets a little too much credit.
Why? Valve has been sponsoring all these projects for a really long time. While wine existed before that, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the shape thats its currently in because gaming was not its main focus. There have been loads of gaming bugs and sharp edges that have been around wine for a long time until Valve put in the money and devs to fix them.
Agreed. Proton is important as a bit of an “iPhone moment” where all this tech comes together in a way where non-techies “get it” in the sense where they understand why it’s useful, even if they’ll never bother to learn the details of why or how.
Valve doubling down on Linux as the default OS on the Steam Deck was such a great decision. It obviously has given them a massive competitive edge. Windows has become so horribly bloated, and Microsoft has almost zero interest in making it run more efficiently.
Personally I feel what it gave them - primarily - was the ability to be independent of Microsoft, not beholden to them in any way whatsoever, and not having to pay them any license fees.
The fact that after putting so much work into making Proton and that whole toolchain amazing it actually turned out faster than Windows, well, that’s juat the delicious icing on the cake, from a commercial perspective.
The speed of Linux is unmatched!
Hmm, it’s like having spyware constantly run in the background slows down the computer?
A performance uplift plus double or tripled battery life compared to running on Windows…hot damn that’s impressive.
Get rekt Windows.
What’s nice is that Microsoft today doesn’t have capability to improve in the short or even medium term. They could drop a billion dollars into it and it would still take them years to improve their offering, if they can at all.
And why would they? They’re printing so much money, this niche probably doesn’t make a dent.
It doesn’t matter if Windows is the best system for gaming. It just matters if people believe it is.
You can always justify using Windows. “How do I get Game Pass to work on my handheld?” is probably something people care about.
Granted this is an expensive way to lock customers into your platform, but they’re already doing it anyways, so no need to pour money into the OS experience when you can just sell services building on customer data.
It’d be great if they truly believed this, but that’s just the image they like to project, the truth is that this has them deathly afraid.
You’ve got mainstream media covering it, folks like digital foundry openly talking about how Windows is the worst part of Windows handhelds. They can’t let this stand, so they’re actively working against it.
Just like the faster zombies blog post in 2012 scared them into boosting d3d development and eventually led to the release of d3d12, this will make them actually invest in gaming for a change.
All the chatter about xbox branded handhelds is an easy tell, but like the blog post we might not discover the true extent until years later.
I am sure that MS is very concerned. If i take my usecase, the things that held me on windows from dos5/Win3.1 up to Windows10 were gaming and that i grew up with it. I sometimes dabbled in linux, but since there was no meaningful way to use my game library, i switched back, because even dualbooting made no sense (what for? just so i can boot back after browsing a few web pages?)
This time after 3 days i deleted my windows partition, even while i was still fighting a bit with the Wayland/NVidia combo - that was shortly after the explicit sync drivers were available.
The young’ins want to play their games, and now they can without ever coming into contact with microsoft at all if not for the anticheat-outliers (who knows, maybe there’s some money flowing that stops them from activating linux support? i know most anticheat in theory does work under linux). And if they start playing on Linux, there’s no reason for them to switch over to Windows at all.
It’s not about the short term, it’s about the long term.
Windows should consider proton and steam an existential threat.
MS (and APR) give away their keystone software windows, office, etc in order to “get them young” and make sure that young kids grow up using their software.
Majority of kids interactions with computers is mobile, gaming, and schoolwork.
MS has nothing in mobile, gaming is getting more crowded and school both Apple and Google are muscling in
I’d wager they could cut a lot of cruft from a handheld gaming device specific version of Windows.
I bet Antimalware Service Executable is still randomly springing it’s way to the top of task manager in this build. All sorts of crap that just doesn’t need to be running. On my PC right now I can see Service Host: DNS Client at 1-4% all the fucking time. Random driver update checks that run in fucking Electron for some godforsaken reason. That kind of shit.
Because they aren’t just optimizing for gaming.
Any change they make would influence their other markets as well, like general and office use.
Realistically the design goals of a gaming OS vs a general desktop OS aren’t that different. You want to balance performance, batterlife/power consumption, and making sure it withstands insane abuse by users and software doing anything you could never imagine that nobody should have ever tried to do. About the only design goal that separates SteamOS from Windows is fleet manageability features
You are forgetting backwards compatibility with ancient software that Windows still supports after 30+ years.
A lot of businesses need that in order to function.
They made an attempt. It’s called Windows RT. It’s a sandbox more locked down than iOS.
The Win32 desktop environment isn’t built to support stuff like “timer coalescing” for all the API calls which all the software is designed to run continously in the background. Changing how it idles would change so many things which all kinds of software depends on that it would barely be the same OS anymore.
It’s worse than that. MS could quickly turn the boat around. They have the cash. They have the manpower (well, have recently fired). The only thing they don’t have is THE ABILITY TO THINK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT AI AI AI AI GOTTA HAVE AI AIIIIIIII. The brainrot has eaten Nadella, and eaten the whole board.
I disagree. Take Windows, remove the bloat, slap a game-focused GUI on it, call it XBOX and Bob’s your uncle.
There are rumors they plan to do this with the first Xbox handheld.
If Xbox Series S would have run all my Steam games, I’d have bought one in a heartbeat.
Goes to show how much bloat is in Windows that it kills hardware like this.
Maybe I need Cortana, Microsoft Excel, and OneDrive while I play Doom Eternal. You don’t know me.
Me looking up from my speed-running Excel sheets: “what”
Thibking bout that time a discord admin told me windows and linux use the same amount of resources and she knows cause she works in it.
Well yeah duh windows and Linux use the same resources. I don’t put more memory in my computer when I boot into Linux…
