Ars Technica recently ran a few Windows vs SteamOS benchmarks, and it shows what we here already know: A lot of ports have worse performance on SteamOS & Linux.
While the benchmark is limited in the selection, and it's only on one system, we've all seen this before ourselves. I would also like to point out SteamOS has a much older Nvidia driver version, and I doubt the Ars guy manually updated the SteamOS driver, so the Windows tests are done on a much newer driver.
It's a shame, but there's no point hiding from the facts. Right now most ports run worse on Linux, a lot of it is down to OpenGL, but porters are also to blame for not optimising enough. I get why porters can't spend all their time optimising, they have to make money after-all and ports need to be pushed out quickly, but it's still annoying.
Vulkan could be SteamOS & Linux only real chance at having a level playing field, I just hope it doesn't take too long for it to come out and be used in games for us.
In regards to the gaps in performance on Valve titles: I saw first-hand how big a performance jump Dota 2 gave with Source 2 having a fully native OpenGL implementation, so I hope Valve have plans to update their other titles.
This bit caught my attention, as it's not down to Valve or Linux developers. It's down to the game developers, the game porters, Nvidia and AMD pushing performance in their drivers and Vulkan coming along to help out too.
What are your thoughts? Personally, I know I'm going to get less performance, but I'm in it for the long-run here.
Windows has pretty much had a monopoly on PC gaming for how many years? It will take time for Linux performance to catch up. Not even getting into all the game-specific optimizations the driver vendors do on Windows. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
While the benchmark is limited in the selection, and it's only on one system, we've all seen this before ourselves. I would also like to point out SteamOS has a much older Nvidia driver version, and I doubt the Ars guy manually updated the SteamOS driver, so the Windows tests are done on a much newer driver.
It's a shame, but there's no point hiding from the facts. Right now most ports run worse on Linux, a lot of it is down to OpenGL, but porters are also to blame for not optimising enough. I get why porters can't spend all their time optimising, they have to make money after-all and ports need to be pushed out quickly, but it's still annoying.
Vulkan could be SteamOS & Linux only real chance at having a level playing field, I just hope it doesn't take too long for it to come out and be used in games for us.
In regards to the gaps in performance on Valve titles: I saw first-hand how big a performance jump Dota 2 gave with Source 2 having a fully native OpenGL implementation, so I hope Valve have plans to update their other titles.
QuoteHopefully, Valve and other Linux developers can continue improving SteamOS performance to the point where high-end games can be expected to at least run comparably between Linux and Windows. Until then, though, it's hard to recommend a SteamOS box to anyone who wants to get the best graphical performance out of their PC hardware.
This bit caught my attention, as it's not down to Valve or Linux developers. It's down to the game developers, the game porters, Nvidia and AMD pushing performance in their drivers and Vulkan coming along to help out too.
What are your thoughts? Personally, I know I'm going to get less performance, but I'm in it for the long-run here.
Windows has pretty much had a monopoly on PC gaming for how many years? It will take time for Linux performance to catch up. Not even getting into all the game-specific optimizations the driver vendors do on Windows. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I think putting majority of blame on porters is kinda unjustified. OpenGL is simply lacking in performance and capability department when it comes to game development - Vulkan cant come soon enough. Also nVidia doesn't even makes their "Game Ready" driver package - which includes tons of game-specific optimizations - availible on Linux. So, only so much porters can do.
But on the other hand...AAA games, natively running on Linux, without Wine or VM - already huge progress.
Last edited by chopdok on 13 November 2015 at 6:25 pm UTC
But on the other hand...AAA games, natively running on Linux, without Wine or VM - already huge progress.
Last edited by chopdok on 13 November 2015 at 6:25 pm UTC
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jedidiah_lnx Nov 13, 2015
Just how many of us here are seriously dedicated to performance anyways? I still haven't gotten myself a "real gaming card". I still have what was at the time the bare minimum card supported for Oil Rush. I'm happy with my 15 pieces of flair.
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Quoting: chopdokI think putting majority of blame on porters is kinda unjustified.
Who's doing that? I'm not.
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If that wasn't enough SteamOS (2.0) performs worse than SteamOS (1.0) itself.
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Ars has never been a fan of linux tbh. But with what they wrote in the quote proves they don't understand how the ecosystem works either, pinning all of it on valves shoulders as it were.
Anyone know if the fact geekbench been compiled with clang 3.3(2013) would effect it with regards steamos using the 4xx kernel ? seem to remember reading some good gains in the last few versions of llvm/clang.
Anyone know if the fact geekbench been compiled with clang 3.3(2013) would effect it with regards steamos using the 4xx kernel ? seem to remember reading some good gains in the last few versions of llvm/clang.
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This has such a huge meh behind it though. The numbers aren't all that different, Steam OS is NOT Linux, it's an hijacked Ubuntu where the developers still haven't taken their time to actually optimize the platform they run on. And they completely ignore Aspyr's ports. Nor do they consider the actual load of some games and the nasty quirks that windowses have had in the past. I would really take this with a grain of salt.
Also, don't forget about a post made in the past by valve themselves showing that L4D2 runs faster on Linux than it does on windows. So the fact that they are showing 4 valve games doing worse than the Linux counterpart is iffy to say the least.
Also, don't forget about a post made in the past by valve themselves showing that L4D2 runs faster on Linux than it does on windows. So the fact that they are showing 4 valve games doing worse than the Linux counterpart is iffy to say the least.
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Apparently they did not benchmark a wide spectrum of games.
If you look at the benchmarks done by our colleagues at Phoronix, who did a Windows 10 VS Ubuntu shootout a couple of weeks ago, you will see that the well ported OpenGL games and benchmarks perform a lot better on Linux with sometimes 30fps difference! http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-win10-ubuntu15&num=3
If you look at the benchmarks done by our colleagues at Phoronix, who did a Windows 10 VS Ubuntu shootout a couple of weeks ago, you will see that the well ported OpenGL games and benchmarks perform a lot better on Linux with sometimes 30fps difference! http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-win10-ubuntu15&num=3
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Me, I'm laying part of the blame on two things:
Last edited by DrMcCoy on 13 November 2015 at 6:51 pm UTC
- Drivers. Graphics card drivers have been known to directly optimize for specific games, even going so far as to monitor the name of the executable file to figure out which game is currently running, and then enabling special hacks. Because the driver devs have observed how the game in question works, they know it won't do anything that these hacks would break. "Have you tried renaming your game to Quake.exe?" (and similar) are common joke replies to performance complains by now.
- The games have been written with DirectX in mind, and so are optimized for the common DirectX flow. Porters often won't completely rip apart the renderer to restructure everything, only either add an abstraction ontop, or add a shim that makes it look like it's still DirectX to the rest of the game. The general structure will still be in a format more native to DirectX, and this will have performance repercussions.
Last edited by DrMcCoy on 13 November 2015 at 6:51 pm UTC
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Looks like Polygon picked up on it now too: http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/13/9728888/steam-valve-steamos-framerate-windows
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Quoting: reaVerThis has such a huge meh behind it though. The numbers aren't all that different, Steam OS is NOT Linux, it's an hijacked Ubuntu where the developers still haven't taken their time to actually optimize the platform they run on. And they completely ignore Aspyr's ports. Nor do they consider the actual load of some games and the nasty quirks that windowses have had in the past. I would really take this with a grain of salt.
Also, don't forget about a post made in the past by valve themselves showing that L4D2 runs faster on Linux than it does on windows. So the fact that they are showing 4 valve games doing worse than the Linux counterpart is iffy to say the least.
SteamOS is actually based on Debian, not Ubuntu.
Aspyr ports also suffer a big performance drop compared with Windows.
Valve games do not run faster on Linux, that's really old information, their benchmarks even showed Valve games.
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