Wow, some of these are showing huge gains with Steam OS
Imagine if Valve decided to ship HL3 only on SteamOS :)
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)
Android is just fancy Linux. iOS is just fancy BSD. I guess neither can be a monopoly.
Whataboutism seems to be admission of truth these days.
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Android is, at its core, an open source mobile operating system. What Google has done with it is monopolize all of the software for the platform. There are competitors (read: GrapheneOS, F-Droid) which are also based on the Android Operating System but outcompeted by Googles market position
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iOS shouldn’t even be in this conversation, not open source & completely walled garden
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“Whataboutism seems to be an admission of truth these days” HUH? At what point did I engage in whataboutism, i simply pointed to other companies that have set standards for gaming accessibility in the market.
Valve:
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Has Steam, the largest videogame platform on PC. You claim it’s a monopoly but it’s not because it has direct competitors in Epic Games (Fortnite is not a small game), Riot Games (League and Valorant are not small games), Battle.net (WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch are not small games), etc
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Developed the proton translation layer (which you yourself made this post for), and released it open source so anyone can use it. I myself leverage Proton for Linux gaming on a daily basis (I do NOT run SteamOS)
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Released SteamOS, which is a fork of Arch Linux, as a means of helping gamers break away from the real monopoly of Microsoft/Windows
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Is not creating a walled garden the likes of which we have seen in every xbox, playstation, and nintendo console. If Epic, Riot, Blizzard, etc wanted to release a launcher for Linux (and subsequently SteamOS) they could. They just choose not to, because they feel it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do that.
Developed the proton translation layer (which you yourself made this post for), and released it open source so anyone can use it. I myself leverage Proton for Linux gaming on a daily basis (I do NOT run SteamOS)
Proton stands on the shoulders of giants like Wine and DXVK. What Valve did is still impressive but they didn’t start from scratch.
Definitely, and I’ll never try and make the argument against that. However what they did was definitely a significant improvement on these pre-existing translation layers.
Linux gaming can be clearly defined as pre-proton and post-proton because it was such a huge improvement to the experience (one-click installs, large number of support in games, gaming via proton counting as a Linux sale in publisher metrics, etc)
And I’m speaking from personal experience, before proton I had a hard time getting pretty much every game I tried to play working on Linux (and tbf a large part of this is probably me fumbling the installation but I’m not an untechnical person either, so I’m sure this was the experience for many)
I’ve had this discussion enough times here that I’m bored of it and will get dogpiled as always. I’m mostly bored of explaining what a monopoly is because the rest of your argument is that Valve is a benevolent company. I’ll just say they sell gambling games to children which should be enough measure of their benevolence and it extends to their other self-serving activities.
Valve fans are the only video game tribe on Lemmy that actively applauds monopolistic practices. I’m blocking you now because you guys are so boring. Goodbye.
Go ahead and block me 💀 your post history shows you having this same argument and taking the same action every time.
You defend this point endlessly and the minute the conversation starts to pile up, you block the other person.
✌️ Enjoy the echo chamber you’re creating for yourself
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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.
They’re already going to only ship it through Steam. As long as you’re using Steam, they don’t care.
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
Yes but Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit on my Linux laptop. Checkmate atheists.
😭😭😭 Sadly, Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit everywhere
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
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
Games run faster with LMDE6 than they did with Windows 10 on my 5800X3D/7900XTX PC.
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 believe everyone can, it just takes practice and is only relevant for 120hz games. Or VR.
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.
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
The closest thing they had to internet explorer dominance is saying that it was manditory to be installed in every OS. The OS had market dominance, and you couldn’t uninstall internet explorer.
But actual usage? Everybody used Netscape.
This is your rose tinted hindsight fantasy.
People who knew what they were doing with computers used Netscape until it died, those people went to Mozilla suite and then Firefox (well, Phoenix then Firebird then Firefox). But that was a shrinking minority of people on the internet at the turn of the millennium.
Practically everyone else used IE (90%+ of web traffic at its peak) and continued to do so until Google released Chrome and shone a light on how little Microsoft had been doing for nearly a decade.
Dominance was dominance however they got it, and they pissed it away through complacency, somewhat similarly to what they’re doing now.
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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.
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 …”
Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won’t run on SteamOS. It’s only that one that is outright ridiculous.
Biased to what? Point of comparison is to figure out why things are the way they are and use that information to get the best of both worlds? It’s not very helpful if the conclusion stops at “x is better than y”.
Going deeper into “why” Proton is doing better in 3/5 games but not in 2/5 will only help users of both operating systems to make better informed decisions and get everyone closer to root cause other than “bloated windows” or “just use linux”, potentially even leading to improvements to both sides.
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.
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.
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.
Right but switching to an RT kernel is trivial for basically any mainstream distro. You can do it from the package manager.
True, I just wanted to clarify that by default Linux doesn’t run on an RT kernel.
And tbh, an RT kernel is really not desirable for most applications, which is why it’s not default. All these RT guarantees cost a lot of performance, and in most cases a guaranteed latency is not worth losing performance over.
In fact, using an RT kernel would be just the opposite of what you’d want on a gaming system.
That’s still without NTSYNC patches, right?
I heard they are irrelevant for Proton as it has its own fsync.
Windows games used to run better on wine 15 years ago and Windows bloat/telemetry has only gotten worse since then.
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.
And the sky is blue.
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? 🤔
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.
Would love to see tests like this attempting to use DXVK etc (as part of their testing on Windows) to better isolate more factors
I find they run even faster with Glorious Eggroll fork of proton
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.
That’s hilarious, but not really the same thing.
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.
(ABI? Idk)
Application Brogramming Interface?
Almost. Application Binary Interface
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.
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In the same way that talking to a presidential translator is faster for a diplomat than talking to Trump. The translation layer can communicate more concisely and effectively.
entirely
It’s not just overhead.
Shh just let him wear himself out.
The compatibility layer is overhead, but the key difference for many games is that DXVK swaps directX for Vulkan, and Vulkan often gets better performance.
The performance gains of using steamOS are twofold, there’s less OS load (this is particularly noticeable in low performance games, windows will consume much more battery on a game like Dead Cells than SteamOS will), and there’s also a vulkan performance increase for some games. My understanding is if you see a big performance increase in a demanding game, that’s usually thanks to vulkan.
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With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers.
Yes, from what I’ve been told that actually does improve performance in many games.
There is overhead but Vulkan allows you to batch draw calls in a far more efficient manner. It can also generally use multi threading to feed a GPU even if the game isn’t coded with that in mind. Basically Vulkan offers so many improvements to efficiency and parallelization that the overhead is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall speedup in draw call optimization alone.
But you can’t say X + Y is better than Z (by itself)
I mean, yeah, you absolutely can. Especially when X + Y and Z are both common configurations, and using X or Y by themselves is uncommon or a known bad setup.
Sure, you can’t be certain which of X or Y is making the differences in the comparison, but the comparison can absolutely be made.
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.
