Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

In my purely anecdotal experience over the last few years, performance ranking is as follows:

1. Steam on Linux via Proton + Wayland (Niri)

2. Steam on Linux via Proton + X11 (Xfce)

3. Steam on Windows

4. Games on Linux launched via other means (it's possible I was missing out on certain flags/optimizations, but this is just about the average experience)

The biggest thing I noticed when switching to Linux was an improvement in framerate consistency, i.e. I'd have fewer situations where the framerate would drop momentarily. Games felt more solid and predictable.

The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate. I'd failed this jump many times over the years, so it was notable when I jumped and stayed there earlier this year.

It does feel like games take longer to launch on average, but this makes sense given the fact that it's launching via Proton/Wine.

Interestingly enough, I've had games that had both a native Linux port and Windows version, and the Windows version through Proton ran better than the native Linux version. This ended up being true for Civ5, Civ6 and Cities Skylines (1).

With those admittedly limited examples though, I don't experience the same ranking in performance, but I attribute that to my non-gaming hardware vs. any problem with Linux or Proton/Wine. I play on a laptop with an Nvidia 3050 laptop GPU, and I get much better performance in Windows still. In Cities Skylines, for example, I'll get ~20 fps on Linux via Proton (but I do experience what you said, it's consistent no major spikes or drops) while on Windows I get between 45-60fps up until about 15k population or so.

Other games, despite working, remain unplayable to me due to performance. I can play Diablo 4 on windows no problem on medium settings, but even on low it's just too unresponsive on Linux.

Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.

Linux port if there is one is usually done by a third party porting studio, which is not necessarily at the same quality as the original codebase. Also the devs just don't have the manpower/bandwidth to spare for Linux users given how small this community is.

It's better value for money for both the gamers and the devs if the devs just choose to engage with valve and get their game running perfectly under proton.

> Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.

That’s interesting and good to know. I’m running an 10th gen i9 with an RTX 3090, so I have plenty of headroom performance wise. I’ve been wondering about Linux gaming on lower end hardware for my younger brother’s sake, and hadn’t assumed it would be worse.

One thing to note: I’ve had all kinds of issues with power management impacting performance. If I let the computer sleep/standby, I’ll get 50% slower framerate until I reboot.

Given the fact that you’re on a laptop, I wonder if power management has contributed to the slowness.

To be you should compare the windows version on windows, no proton against the Linux version. DXVK, which proton uses, makes some games run better in windows than "native".

> Anyway, just my anecdotal experience. Those with dedicated gaming rigs will be more than fine with Linux, but those of us on underpowered hardware still seem better off with Windows, unfortunately.

On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.

AFAICT HDR is supported, like on the Steam Deck

Can you even watch decent Netflix on Linux yet?

Doesn't support NVIDIA GPU's!? Is this a display or gaming specific thing?

All the ML people are using NVIDIA GPU's on Linux.

To the extent that Linux doesn’t support nvidia gpu it is actually Nvidia not supporting Linux and keeping their drivers proprietary.

There are indeed nvidia drivers for Linux and they're reasonably good for gaming, but the feature set sometimes lags far behind windows. There is no DLSS 3 for Linux, for instance. (as of a few months ago anyway - I haven't checked recently)

But maybe figure out how to start getting those third party Linux porting studios paid to work on Proton...

Ahh rightio. That's a shame.

Nvidia support across the desktop ecosystem is poor, for example practically nonfunctional in Sway. And just buggy in other Wayland based desktop environments (kde seems to be the best in my experience).

I have a 65 watt ryzen 9 system on chip (8945hs, I think) minipc and make heavy use of it for linux gaming.

My guess is that Nvidia’s linux video drivers are still substandard.

I have a laptop with the same GPU, and Diablo 4 runs really well out of Lutris. Graphics version 570, and the CPU is an AMD with a Radeon 680M integrated. I often play games with FSR on, which probably keeps performance higher?

Side note, Niri is a fantastic WM. When I saw the Phoronix article on HN talking about the addition of overview mode and more, I finally took the plunge and spent an afternoon converting over from Sway.¹ Anecdotally, I've seen less hangups on Niri around fullscreen games and floating windows, perhaps thanks to X11 running in xwayland-satellite.

1: the hardest part was finding a bar that supported i3status-rs; not a fan of GTK bars that eat up CPU. I settled on i3bar-river.

I've been so happy with Niri after many many years bouncing around other WMs. It addresses the main issues I've had with other tiling window managers and has been such a joy to use.

The scrollable aspect just feels so natural and intuitive to me.

Been a Linux gamer for years now and I think you are correct on your frame rate observations in general.

If you use ZFS (single nvme) then you can beat windows load times by a fairly large margin. My husband and I have identical hardware for our gaming computers (he uses Windows and I run Linux), it's not uncommon for my computer to load games 10 seconds faster than his.

Try winewayland + Wayland.

The answer is pretty simple here - hire CodeWeavers to work on supporting your game in Proton/Wine rather than some other porting shop doing an old rewrite-style port.

Steam won't launch for me in xwayland-satellite here... I just assumed steam+wayland = broken. I have a kind of weird setup using sway with xwayland disabled and running xwayland-satellite though.

> The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate.

Was it with any specific game? I just tried the GOG version of The Witcher 3 "Complete Edition" (which is the remastered one) with the Direct3D 12 renderer under both Xorg/Window Maker and Wayland/KDE using umu-run (essentially proton without Steam) and it had identical performance in both cases (i also tried to use Niri but it would launch in 60Hz mode and for some reason wouldn't allow the game to run at a higher framerate with vsync disabled regardless of any option i chose) in either low or high settings (which is basically what i expected since the window system shouldn't be a bottleneck unless something is either broken or you are running at something like 20000fps :-P).

FSR does indeed increase the performance a lot, before FSR 4 with a significant cost to image quality though.

For your system, the integrated graphics should also be quite capable. More so on Linux, thanks to the driver advantage AMD has here.

Up to full HD, depending on what Netflix streams out. But this has nothing to do with graphics drivers or GPU performance.

WRT Nvidia+Sway this was certainly true not so long ago. But since the latest Ubuntu release and with a recent driver I am running this combo and it works flawlessly.

Try running xwayland-satellite in another WM like Niri and see if it works there – for example, Gamescope didn’t work well on Sway, crashing as soon as Steam tried to spawn another window, but it’s working fine in Niri.

> and get their game running perfectly under proton

Even better would be to compile for linux, but use DXVK-Native (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk#dxvk-native) if you think migrating from DirectX to Vulkan requires too much effort.

> On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.

> HDR

Already supported

> Nvidia GPUs

You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue.

> VR

SteamVR works though?

Really! I'm happy to hear it, I'll give it a try on my desktop this weekend. I would love to get all my machines on the same desktop environment once and for all.

> > HDR > Already supported

Is it though? I confess I haven’t tried in a few weeks but until last time I did, to get HDR in games you had to start a session with `gamescope` rather than a DE, and still had to set a bunch of flags - and in some ways have a very subpar experience with problems with mouse movements and other issues I can’t recall.

I exclusively game on Linux and I find the experience far superior than doing anything on the other OS, but last I checked HDR was not actually supported.

I wonder of this might be due to your Linux nvidia driver (nouveau?) pinning the card on baseclock by default while the Windows one will allow it to scale up? Something I heard somewhere that seems applicable here.

In that case it might not be anything the game devs or Steam can do anything about but something you'd have to fiddle with on your system.

I'm doing PCI passthrough of a 1080 to an archaic tiling X11 window manager and so far it Just Works with noeveau. XFCE also worked fine before I decided I don't want a full DE. Rock stable. I will move dists before I move to Wayland by the looks of it.

i3 should be pretty easy switch from sway if you haven't tried.

HDR on Nvidia with Linux is still very glitchy, I've had the driver crash a few times trying to use it.

> X11 running in xwayland-satellite

I wish more Wayland compositors took this option, seems like a cleaner method of keeping X compatibility and not allowing Xwayland to bring down the entire compositor.

It's getting there though. I own a high-end PC with nvidia GPU and I play VR on my Linux setup via ALVR (I own Quest 3) It's not straightforward and full of workarounds I have to do, but once you're in the game it works great

There is though. I'm playing Hitman 3 with all RTX options enabled, DLSS and frame generation

It works on the Deck.

By the time it gets there there will be tons of other new features that Linux won't support.

Doubtful but ok.

It's not lacking features for me, it's lacking polish

Feature-wise the main missing feature is kernel level anticheat which I personally don't care about

Why do you think ZFS helps? I’m guessing you have compression turned on? IME, ZFS is rarely better in terms of raw performance, compared to e.g. XFS.

They probably QA mostly for windows, so they run into bottlenecks and edge-cases of windows APIs during QA. Linux-native APIs probably have different bottlenecks and edge-cases.

I think the reimplementations of Windows APIs in Linux, even though alternative to the original, should have similar bottlenecks and edge-cases. So the extra QA on Windows helps the Proton version more.

Yeah, but it does have to do with graphics in the linux desktop ecosystem and is particularly relevant to those without a dedicated gaming machine.

I have Debian with KDE Plasma 6 and I have enabled HDR

From experience having an L2ARC SSD, especially if it's nvme, can really help with zfs performance. I'm curious if they have that in their setup.

Is there a way of making wayland actually usable with Nvidia GPUs? I never manage to make it work, and it makes the whole system feel slow and sluggish compared to X11

GNOME and KDE support HDR now too, so if you use those DEs you dont need gamescope anymore.

But that doesn't matter. If the feature isn't there, Linux is non-viable if you want/rely on said feature. It doesn't matter whose 'fault' it is.

For gaming and general desktop on Linux AMD is best if you want a dedicated GPU.

If you want a laptop with good battery life Intel is generally the way to go.

A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of effort Valve put into improving the open source AMD drivers, which is what is used on their Steam platform.

Of course if you want CUDA you need Nvidia, but if you use Nvidia to drive your Linux desktop expect some suffering to go along with it.

Some of the games I play often that saw improvements: The Finals, Overwatch, Rocket League, Helldivers.

> (i also tried to use Niri but it would launch in 60Hz mode and for some reason wouldn't allow the game to run at a higher framerate with vsync disabled regardless of any option i chose)

I had some issues early on related to refresh rate, and it turned out I didn't have an output defined for the correct display. The steps I took:

1. Run `niri msg outputs` to identify the Display ID and available modes. In my case: "DP-3" and "2560x1440@143.964"

2. Set up an output in niri's confid.kdl as follows:

  output "DP-3" {
    mode "2560x1440@143.964"
    variable-refresh-rate 
  }

Try avoiding the open source kernel modules, I had a similar issues.

Has he tried DevDrive in async mode or with filters disabled entirely?

> It does feel like games take longer to launch on average, but this makes sense given the fact that it's launching via Proton/Wine.

Also anecdotal, but I feel like Steam games on Linux compile shaders on the CPU, and maybe not super optimized, compared to Windows where they either ship with precompiled shaders, or it might use the GPU?

Still, the very same games runs better on Wayland+Linux too for me, than on Windows, way less stutters in particular as you mention.

But I'm not sure if it's because of OS differences, or that it's so much easier to end up bloating a Windows install. I can't say I treat them the same, as one is mostly a work environment and the other one purely entertainment and creative usage.

Happens with whisky and macos in my experience. It is like as soon as a game is installed and you do something like chuck a grenade, no explosion the first time ever you do that.

These ports are also not usually source ports, so they're not much "more native" than the Proton ports. They often use the same kind of API translation layer, probably also built on WINE. I think as Proton sees more investment and becomes more advanced, it's probably becoming difficult for competing compatibility layers to keep up.

A source port that is optimized as lovingly as its Windows counterpart will probably be faster than the Windows version running via Proton, but the incentives aren't generally there to justify the costs/difficulties. Maybe some day it will be! That would be wonderful.

But until then, Proton seems like an increasingly compelling option for these compatibility layer-based ports of Windows games.

It doesn't have anything to do with graphics in the Linux ecosystem. Netflix specifically blocks Linux from having decent quality so it's kind of pointless to discuss. If you want high quality, you can pirate it or rip from disc. Dirt cheap n100 minipcs are capable of playing UHD bluray rips in Linux just fine for example, so Netflix's relatively low bitrate media aren't an issue.

It does to me. I don't buy their products, simple as that.

The Deck runs Gamescope.

For what it’s worth I’ve been using an RTX 3090 and it’s been mostly smooth sailing for a couple years now.

Running NixOS with a pretty vanilla configuration and it has been hassle free.

I did have to disable power management at the system level because framerate suffers severely if the system sleeps and wakes back up, but I shut the system down when I’m not using it, so this was a non factor for me.

Not an issue except for any of the couple hundred million people who subscribe to Netflix at any rate.

Not an ecosystem issue at all. There's no "yet". Linux computers even on the very low end are already perfectly capable of playing 4k Netflix videos. You can easily prove this to yourself by downloading one via torrent (you can generally get exact stream rips with DRM removed if you want). Netflix just won't send UHD streams to Linux users. That's a political choice, not a technology problem, and it's easy enough to get the media elsewhere DRM-free if it's that important to you since Netflix evidently specifically does not want Linux users as customers.

> noeveau

Hasn't Nvidia locked most functionality away from the open source drivers?

You either have the choice of using drivers that work well with Linux, or drivers that are fully featured.

Hm, i tried it and i could set up the higher refresh rate but Niri was forcing vsync on the game that capped the framerate to my monitor's refresh rate (165Hz) even though in the game i have vsync disabled. This seems to be an issue with Niri as KDE Plasma Wayland disabling vsync works fine.

At "ultra" settings i got around 115fps which is ~5 fps lower than 117-120fps i got from Xorg/Window Maker and KDE/Wayland, though i'm pretty sure that was just the forced vsync, so in practice it seems that the window system doesn't matter much.

Did you use XFCE's desktop compositor? AFAIK XFCE's compositor isn't particularly great, some years ago when i was working on a custom game engine i had to add an explicit option to use the X11 "override redirect" flag instead of the window hint for fullscreen windows because XFCE's compositor wouldn't disable itself otherwise and the game would feel a bit laggy/inconsistent. Not sure if this has been fixed nowadays but in general it gave me a bad impression for XFCE's compositor as other compositors didn't seem to have the same issue.

Factorio and Minecraft (Java edition) are two of the few games that come to mind where the Linux port got comparable effort to the Windows port, and I don't think people are in a rush to play either of them in Proton.

Your latest AAA open world RPG on the other hand? Yeah, you're probably going to have better luck in Proton even if it gets a native Linux port.

Yep, compression is on and I think that's what does it considering how large games are these days.

I stay away from XFS, every time I have used it in the past my entire drive have ended up scrambled within a few months. It's by far the worst file system I have ever used, not even FAT32 was that unstable for me.