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

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.

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).

> (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 
  }