With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows
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I think there's in play also background activity from Windows' bloat.
wrote last edited by [email protected]They say I/O schedulers on Windows are weird.
Edit: or was it CPU schedulers? I'm sure i've read something about this forever ago.
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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.
makes a lot of sense honestly. I never knew the numbers behind it (tks for sharing). when I was ripping witcher 3 on nobara and then changed my OS back to Windows due to work related issues, I felt a SIGNIFICANT performance drop. the game became laggy, when it used to run top on Linux with the same settings. good share - the time for Linux gaming is now.
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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.
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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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.
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Does this look optimized to you, Windows side?
wrote last edited by [email protected]While I get it, it does look pretty damning, skepticism when we haven't been presented with rigorous documented testing is always good. I don't think ex: gamersnexus is going to find different results, but I'm pretty damn sure they'll at least be comparing chipsets to ensure the hardware actually is identical (and making sure that things like system settings are configured to be as fair as possible). Lets not be apple fans and leap to the top of the superiority heap just because a good looking infographic said we should.
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They say I/O schedulers on Windows are weird.
Edit: or was it CPU schedulers? I'm sure i've read something about this forever ago.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yes/no.
The linux scheduler is a work of art - heuristics to dynamically determine resource access priority, checks for resource locking that are some of the most elegant pieces of code written by humanity, incredibly adaptable and clever. It took me the better part of a year before I really understood the underlaying mechanics, and even now I could by no means reproduce it on my own. It's truly an amazing bit of mathematics.
...
Windows solves the same problem by randomly elevating processes to maximum priority. That's it, that's the whole algorithm.Depressingly, they're equally effective.
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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.
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.
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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]So a specialized OS wins over a general OS in their specific tasks?
Amazing ...
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Windows Gamers (who will never switch to Linux): Linux still isn't ready for mass adoption
wrote last edited by [email protected]Even gamers do more than just game on their PC, though.
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Does this look optimized to you, Windows side?
No, because Windows isn't optimized for games. It is for general use, including games.
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I think there's in play also background activity from Windows' bloat.
You'd think anyone techliterate would disable the bloat.
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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.
