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

i wonder how much of that is simply due to how incredible dxvk is. I think intel even uses it as part of their windows drivers to translate some older dx version games to vulkan because it performs so much better on their cards.

I’m hearing that Microsoft has done a shitty job of tuning windows for the Lenovo device. Someone last week cited commentary that Microsoft has been working on it and they think they can reduce the Windows overhead by TWO GIGABYTES. Why is the fucking operating system using 2 gigabytes of memory in the first place, let alone enough more than that to be able to reduce memory usage by 2 GB.

I wonder how much better DXVK-native (without wine) Games would work.

Compatibility is a big answer.

Windows 8 tried to divorce more of the compatibility layers (start them up only as needed) of "The Old Desktop" to a lot of flak from the development community (and some user confusion), but if you were paying attention and used almost exclusively Windows 8 "Store" apps at the time you could get some serious memory usage wins.

Windows 8.1 walked so much of that back and made the Desktop/Explorer and all of its compatibility layers boot first again, but there was a small period where Windows 8 shined.

Presumably this sort of stuff is what the new Windows Xbox efforts are doing again, but the "boots to a full screen experience without 'a Desktop'" expectations of games and game-focused hardware makes it easier to boot the Desktop only if needed in a way that makes sense to game players that didn't make sense to general Windows users with a long tail of ancient applications that they didn't or couldn't "just" upgrade to new ones.

As I recall there were services that were part of the desktop experience that they didn’t shut off. One of them being the desktop wallpaper. Which with high res desktops being the rage these days may actually be a large part of that size win.