With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows
-
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 find it interesting that the Steam Deck OLED has a smaller battery but gets longer life on the same OS
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
-
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?
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.
-
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.
Now what about windows 10 ltsc iot, the ONLY version of windows worth comparing to linux.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
A performance uplift plus double or tripled battery life compared to running on Windows.....hot damn that's impressive.
Get rekt Windows.
-
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.
The speed of Linux is unmatched!
-
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.
-
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.
I think it's a valid comparison request due to some things just flat out not being compatible with Linux.
-
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.
thanks, bookmarked for when it goes on sale. none of my hardware is acceptable enough for the specs.
-
I think it's a valid comparison request due to some things just flat out not being compatible with Linux.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
-
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.
So I'm not insane. Monster Hunter Wilds and Helldiver's II both run better on my Ubuntu image with the same hardware than my Windows 10 image.
Does that mean that Proton and Vulkan are far more efficient than Direct3D?
-
So I'm not insane. Monster Hunter Wilds and Helldiver's II both run better on my Ubuntu image with the same hardware than my Windows 10 image.
Does that mean that Proton and Vulkan are far more efficient than Direct3D?
My understanding is that vulkan is generally more efficient than directX.
-
Can it play MH Wilds?
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 drivesSo while, no you can't, it's closer.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
