I believe it, Windows bloat these days is so bad. I keep telling my friends Tarkov runs better on Linux if they'd just let me play the goddamn multiplayer I'd be golden
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I'm thinking of keeping timer next to me for all the time I waste literally waiting for Windows 11 to load the bloody right click menu (and other things) at work.
I'm really curious to see what kind of performance gains the Xbox-mode or whatever they're calling it is going to provide. I don't know if it'll reach SteamOS levels, but it does legitimately look like they're taking the bloat's hit on gaming seriously with the Xbox-branded ROG Ally.
The reality is that mostly people aren't going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it's still a win.
I think we're beginning to see a serious shift about how people view Linux. I do think valve being on Linux will significantly legitimizes it, and drivers will become much more accessible for it. In the next decade I think we will see a big migration of gamers to Linux. Being on Linux myself, the experience is even more streamlined and less glitchy than just a year ago, just because of the widespread adoption of OS's like steamOS and bazzite.
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They’ve promised that exact same thing for like at least three major windows versions.
And Windows 10 was clearly faster.
Than Windows 11, that is.
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The reality is that mostly people aren't going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it's still a win.
While I mostly agree with this, every time I see this mentioned it reminds me that ~~MS-DOS~~ Windows was not very popular, until a Microsoft employee offered to port Doom to ~~DOS~~ Windows, because he saw that if games ran on a platform people would use it and migrate naturally, that employee was called Gabe Newell. So I do have some hope that there's some bigger migration, and in fact we've seen the numbers steadily rising, and these sort of things tend to be exponential, so I wouldn't be surprised if it picks up speed.
DOS was the most popular OS for gaming at the time and Doom was released first on DOS by id.
Gabe Newell and team ported it to Windows 95.
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Games run faster on SteamOS with proton than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
FTFY. I hate all these articles that downplay the heavy lifting proton (and all the tools that make it up) are doing. But "Proton makes games run better" doesn't get the same attention.
Proton is amazing, but it's entirely overhead translating library/system calls to Linux. It's accurate to say they run better on SteamOS, not to say Proton is making it run better.
Now maybe Proton makes them run better than a janky but native Linux port, but that's a separate statement about games being better optimized on Windows.
Hogwarts legacy, which is a exe, runs on proton but not on windows 10. I'd say proton runs better than windows.
That's hilarious, but not really the same thing.
Proton is amazing, but it’s entirely overhead translating library/system calls to Linux.
That is not at all true.
but that’s a separate statement about games being better optimized on Windows.
Is that though? You can't say X is better than Y when you're changing multiple variables. If windows had a proton equivalent and both games ran through it then yes that would be a direct comparison. But you can't say X + Y is better than Z (by itself)
DXVK is a part of proton that also is available on windows. DXVK alone can get you double digit performance improvements on games. And that's not getting into all the one off tweaks users can do to proton to optimize the game. Enabling pre compiled shaders gave a huge performance boost for Elden Ring.
How is running an extra compatibility layer not overhead?
The compatibility layer is overhead, but the key difference for many games is that DXVK swaps directX for Vulkan, and Vulkan often gets better performance.
The performance gains of using steamOS are twofold, there's less OS load (this is particularly noticeable in low performance games, windows will consume much more battery on a game like Dead Cells than SteamOS will), and there's also a vulkan performance increase for some games. My understanding is if you see a big performance increase in a demanding game, that's usually thanks to vulkan.
Vulkan isn't magic, its power comes from the flexibility it gives developers in its API. If developers are using DirectX, especially older versions, then they're not utilizing that flexibility.
If DirectX code performs better through a Vulkan translation layer than on Windows, it means the driver implementations or OS bloat are what's causing it.
With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers.
With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers.
Yes, from what I've been told that actually does improve performance in many games.
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I’m not sure it’s a Wine/Proton thing, it’s quite likely to be suboptimal at some things because it’s reverse engineered (not to diminish technical marvel that it is and decades of effort). Regular desktop Windows has just way too much overhead coming from everywhere.
As a side note, back in the day when Nvidia released drivers for FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility layer was even faster than Linux for gaming.
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Take aways:
- Sample set is of 5 games
- Lenovo drivers are much slower than Asus
- There are 2 games where windows is neck to neck or better, 3 where SteamOS is far ahead
Some doubts:
- Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation. 99%ile would be helpful.
- I wonder if it makes sense to test DirectX10, 11 and 12 games separately to better understand where Proton has an edge.
- I wonder what all settings can be tweaked in Windows to find potential fixes (core isolation, cpu boost, power profiles).
Point is Microsoft and OEMs need to do better, however not every game or subscription services work on Linux, so in the interim time users should know what they can do to close the gap better.
This is really not surprising to anyone who has used modern windows and Linux recently. Windows is so incredibly bloated, whereas Linux is a true real-time OS basically out of the box.
Unless you use an RT kernel, Linux is not a realtime OS and certainly not a true one.
Because, you know, terms have a meaning.
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While the bloat exists, even debloated windows wouldn't match proton because that's not the only reason. Despite bloat there are two games in this test the actually do similar or better than SteamOS. This means there's a confounding reason for the difference, not the bloat.
I recently switched from windows (with a debloat scrpit ran on it) to linux mint and I was shocked at how much faster it booted. When I turn my pc on I usually get up and do something else for a bit (not because windows is THAT slow but because I could spend the minute it takes to turn on to make lunch or something) and linux booted before I was out of my chair.
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Look... Regardless of metrics saying one is faster, Linux is where everyone should be. I say that knowing full well the anger it'll cause.
These corporations do not respect the user. They shovel ads, AI, spyware and half baked software down our throats. They restrict what you can do with your own hardware with artificial barriers. They force reliance on "industry standard" bs when they're the industry benefiting. The only power we have is our money and our choices, and choosing to take the abuse because of fucking Fortnite or Photoshop is as pathetic as it comes.
Preach. Studios that make games with anti cheats and what not should reconsider how they handle Linux as they'll only get even more players, who'll probably be even more loyal due to their Linux compatibility. I know cheating is a big issue in online games, but adding invasive kernel level code to detect that is just adding system level vulnerabilities just to prevent cheaters from cheating seems like an overkill. It's not like cheating mouse and keyboards don't exist and cheaters have evaporated entirely due to anti cheat.
Yes but Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit on my Linux laptop. Checkmate atheists.
I found the same thing on CachyOS (another Arch fork). The increase for me was staggering. Lies of P went from an unstable 144fps on windows 11 with an overclock (OC) on my GPU to 200fps in Cachy. Settings were all maxed out at 1440p. I noticed a similar jump from other games. Modded and vanilla NBA 2K25 went a stuttery mess at 172fps (frequent dips down to 72fps) to a steady 180fps with NO dips (that’s my monitor’s limit). I like to test things on The First Descendent, and it went from an unstable 79fps with maxed settings to 119fps. And while I don’t have numbers for it, The Witcher 3 Next Gen (vanilla and heavily modded) run a lot smoother. But after ten years, that game has been optimized out the ass.
I did notice, however, that the increase in performance diminished greatly as I turned down settings. On Windows 11, I would notice a way “higher” increase in frames. For Example, I could tweak settings in the First Descendent like Global illumination and increase frames in Windows 11 to 109fps, but still unstable. In Cachy, if I did these things, I didn’t really notice a meaningful impact.
RT also performs slightly worse on Linux. But I figure anyone using Linux might be the same type of person to not care about RT.
My hypothesis is that without the CPU resources being eaten up by things like Windows Defender, the CPU is able to process more data quicker, reducing GPU wait time. I don’t have data on that, I would need something as in depth as presentmon from Intel for testing. Arch has forks of that, but nothing nearly as in depth, and PresentMon has declined any Linux support in the foreseeable future.
I should mention, the OVERALL jump is ~40% going to CachyOS. And we know that the jump from Windows 10 to 11 saw a ~27% hit due to the new Windows Defender.
My system is 64GB of SK Hynix DDR5, 9070xt (on my Windows Partition it’s OC’d, but on CachyOS I leave it stock), and a 9800x3D that has been manually OC’d in the bios and a 240mm AIO. I leave the panels off my O11 D Mini. The motherboard is a Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite (2x8 pins for the CPU delivery).
For all the FPS data, I pulled it from Steam on Cachy which uses presented frames instead of actual frames. Basically, the frames the GPU is presenting to the monitor, not necessarily what your eyes are seeing.
On my Ally, I also noticed a difference swapping to SteamOS. Something to keep in mind with anyone planning to do that, you can allocate up to 6GB of RAM to the iGPU before Arch/SteamOS gets affected. I just don’t see anyone telling you you can do this.
Edit one day later- I played Enshrouded on CachyOS. I will report that my 9070xt underperforms at max settings. Unstable 80fps with dips down to 50fps, but the Frame Time Pacing makes it feel worse. It stutters like it’s running at 50. Turning down settings again only increased frames by 5fps, which is not marginal at these rates, but did not help with the stuttering issues. I think it’s rendering things similar to Minecraft. The comparison I have is my 7800xt, which at max settings a year ago was able to run in Windows 11 at 70fps, but equally unstable. Therefore, I’d hypothesize that if I ran present on I’d just see high GPU wait times.
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It is more impressive when you realize that those games were meant for Windows and require a translation layer (Wine and DXVK).
We'll have to see if that's the same with the Xbox Ally.
I'll be laughing if its still outperformed
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Wow, some of these are showing huge gains with Steam OS
Windows runs better on Linux than on Windows…
Linux desktop compositors are still behind windows. Until my weird setup works just as well I can't switch without being annoyed. HDR 4k120hz and 1080p360hz both gysnc. Always seem to have issues with vrr in Linux and multi monitor. And HDR support is strange
I'm glad I'm one of those people who can't seem to percieve any difference above 60Hz
Having low standards is pretty convenient
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