With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows
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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.
Because they aren't just optimizing for gaming.
Any change they make would influence their other markets as well, like general and office use.
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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.
Why? Isn't SteamOS a stripped down version of Linux?
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Spoderman no
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So a specialized OS wins over a general OS in their specific tasks?
Amazing ...
If I had a trillion dollars, and no desire to add telemetry bloat to my OS, and I'm incentivized to compete in the market...
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So a specialized OS wins over a general OS in their specific tasks?
Amazing ...
It’s impressive that’s still the case when SteamOS is running a translation layer that Windows doesn’t have to.
Also, SteamOS is actually a pretty fully-featured OS, and it’s based off of Linux, so it’s not that specialized, besides the UI.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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Even gamers do more than just game on their PC, though.
I personally like using my Legion Go for LLM training /s
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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
For every game that you claim runs worse on Proton you can find dozens that run better or at least as well as Windows.
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Windows Gamers (who will never switch to Linux): Linux still isn't ready for mass adoption
My partner and I have been transitioning to Linux over the past month or so, dual booting for now.
Linux still isn't ready for mass adoption.
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Even gamers do more than just game on their PC, though.
That's fair, but unless what you do requires windows in some way (like, say, Photoshop), Linux tends to be better for productivity as well, if you learn it
But of course, I understand that it takes some upfront work and learning to change your workflow, so I don't blame people for not doing it
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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.
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Why? Isn't SteamOS a stripped down version of Linux?
SteamOS is purpose built for gaming. Windows LTSC is specifically not for gaming, but many shoehorn it into it.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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It’s impressive that’s still the case when SteamOS is running a translation layer that Windows doesn’t have to.
Also, SteamOS is actually a pretty fully-featured OS, and it’s based off of Linux, so it’s not that specialized, besides the UI.
Yeah it's basically Arch with KDE Neon/gamescope that runs Steam in Big Picture mode with an immutable file system. That's why Bazzite is able to make a StramOS-like experience. The hardest things are the hardware-specific tweaks.
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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
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That's fair, but unless what you do requires windows in some way (like, say, Photoshop), Linux tends to be better for productivity as well, if you learn it
But of course, I understand that it takes some upfront work and learning to change your workflow, so I don't blame people for not doing it
i’m using photogimp and haven’t looked back, it’s surprisingly robust
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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.
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So a specialized OS wins over a general OS in their specific tasks?
Amazing ...
SteamOS is able to launch a desktop environment where you can do anything you want. It is just an OS like Windows, but better.
