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 Nov 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 Nov 2015 at 6:25 pm UTC
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jedidiah_lnx 13 Nov 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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I 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 Nov 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 Nov 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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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.
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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Seriously WTF? Why do they benchmark with a GTX 660 and a dual core processor at a resolutions of 2560x1600 and 1792x1120? Doesn't that look like they tested all combinations and choose the one that was worst for SteamOS. They have a GTX 980 Ti benchmark PC (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/09/building-the-ultimate-x99-gaming-and-benchmarking-pc/) why didn't they use this one?
Also, the processor Intel Pentium G3220 have integrated graphics and SteamOS does not support multiple GPUs, if it's active that would explain the bad performances.
Also there isn't a 4.1.0-0 version of SteamOS, and the NVidia drivers 358.91 are not available right now on SteamOS, so this test could have been made ages ago because we have no information whatsoever on when it was made and on which version of SteamOS.
Also I would add that the guy who wrote this is not clean at all, he have been part of a scandal involving gaming journalists of big gaming sites colluding together on how to shape the opinion by choosing what to cover and how to cover it in a private mailing list : http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/ I should add that the guy that made the Polygon article is also part of this.
Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:08 pm UTC
Also, the processor Intel Pentium G3220 have integrated graphics and SteamOS does not support multiple GPUs, if it's active that would explain the bad performances.
Also there isn't a 4.1.0-0 version of SteamOS, and the NVidia drivers 358.91 are not available right now on SteamOS, so this test could have been made ages ago because we have no information whatsoever on when it was made and on which version of SteamOS.
Also I would add that the guy who wrote this is not clean at all, he have been part of a scandal involving gaming journalists of big gaming sites colluding together on how to shape the opinion by choosing what to cover and how to cover it in a private mailing list : http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/ I should add that the guy that made the Polygon article is also part of this.
Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:08 pm UTC
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Also I would add that the guy who wrote this is not clean at all, he have been part of a scandal involving gaming journalists of big gaming sites colluding together on how to shape the opinion by choosing what to cover and how to cover it in a private mailing list : http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/
That's reading an awful lot into a journalist asking colleagues to show some compassion towards a developer who has recently been harassed by an Internet mob out to get her.
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As long as games will be *ported* there'll be a performance gap. Games should be developped with cross platform in mind from the start. I don't think many people would be able to tell on Windows that a game uses OpenGL instead of DirectX. But at least, the total amount of work would be much less than developping for windows then *porting*.
What I'm worried about is that *porters* may encourage such bad behavior by telling game devs not to change anything, continue developping only for windows, so then *porters* could sell their expertise and/or DX to OGL layer framework. The end of the tunnel for us is far far far... :/
What I'm worried about is that *porters* may encourage such bad behavior by telling game devs not to change anything, continue developping only for windows, so then *porters* could sell their expertise and/or DX to OGL layer framework. The end of the tunnel for us is far far far... :/
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The subject of the mail being quoted does not matter, the fact that journalists of major news outlets are discussing together about serious news subjects on a private mailing list is seriously wrong.Also I would add that the guy who wrote this is not clean at all, he have been part of a scandal involving gaming journalists of big gaming sites colluding together on how to shape the opinion by choosing what to cover and how to cover it in a private mailing list : http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/
That's reading an awful lot into a journalist asking colleagues to show some compassion towards a developer who has recently been harassed by an Internet mob out to get her.
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jedidiah_lnx 13 Nov 2015
Seriously WTF? Why do they benchmark with a GTX 660 and a dual core processor at a resolutions of 2560x1600 and 1792x1120? Doesn't that look like they tested all combinations and choose the one that was worst for
How do you even end up with a resolution like that anyways?
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Some thoughts:
Valve didn't had any advertising strategie. Every new platform has at least one killer feature / one killer game whatever which is holding the candle even if stuff false flat on the edges. What realy unique does steam os / steam machines offer out of the box at the moment?
Ok if there is nothing unique it must be good at what it is doing. So it must be good in terms of gaming. Nowhere in the last few years i have seen any comparsion in terms of gaming pc's without a performance comparsion. So it was for sure that performance will be compared. Here we need to be honest ... in a way we could be happy they have choosen the pentium g and not an amd cpu. The performance difference from windows to linux on amd cpu's are even much worse. We can also be happy that ars technica didn't blame linux / steam os for the performance difference but rather opengl / unoptimised ports and so on. They could had made it much simplier by saying it's a product i bought and it sucks in what it should do.
So as hard as it sound's thats basically what steam os (steam machines) current state is. It's less performant than windows and it doesn't give any advantage for the "normal" user over windows and to stress it even more there is not one AAA Game from this year available on steam os nor does any other with AAA publisher support linux.
(Bethesda -> nope | Ubisoft -> nope (no uplay) | EA -> nope (no origin) ....).
To make this one not dead on arival valve realy need to put something out which is unique or make a huge effort as soon as vulcan is available so the most attractive games on steam os get a vulcan renderer and get on comparable performance level with windows, else i don't see a reason why a non linux dedicated user should pay the same price for a less performant steam os box than a windows box.
Another small hint how unsatisfying the current situation ist (most popular games on twitch):
CS:GO -> Positional Audio doesn't work as expected out of the box , mouse input is hard to configure | requires good linux knowledge | to get full performance you need to tweak the starting commandline | some still have issues (microstutters) with multithreading enabled | performance below windows
DOTA2 -> performance below windows
LOL -> not on steamos
Fallout 4 -> not on steamos
Heartstone -> not on steamos
Call of Duty (Black OPS III) -> not on steamos
ARMA III -> on steamos in beta , still not current version
Kingdom -> not on steamos
Starcraft II -> not on steamos
Minecraft -> not accesable throu steam big picture mode and lacks in current version the "easy" installer of windows
World of Warcraft -> not on steamos
Fifa 16 -> not on steamos
Destiny -> not on steamos
This list goes on. Let me ask a real question here , which market is the target for steam machines right of now?
Last edited by Glog78 on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:18 pm UTC
Valve didn't had any advertising strategie. Every new platform has at least one killer feature / one killer game whatever which is holding the candle even if stuff false flat on the edges. What realy unique does steam os / steam machines offer out of the box at the moment?
Ok if there is nothing unique it must be good at what it is doing. So it must be good in terms of gaming. Nowhere in the last few years i have seen any comparsion in terms of gaming pc's without a performance comparsion. So it was for sure that performance will be compared. Here we need to be honest ... in a way we could be happy they have choosen the pentium g and not an amd cpu. The performance difference from windows to linux on amd cpu's are even much worse. We can also be happy that ars technica didn't blame linux / steam os for the performance difference but rather opengl / unoptimised ports and so on. They could had made it much simplier by saying it's a product i bought and it sucks in what it should do.
So as hard as it sound's thats basically what steam os (steam machines) current state is. It's less performant than windows and it doesn't give any advantage for the "normal" user over windows and to stress it even more there is not one AAA Game from this year available on steam os nor does any other with AAA publisher support linux.
(Bethesda -> nope | Ubisoft -> nope (no uplay) | EA -> nope (no origin) ....).
To make this one not dead on arival valve realy need to put something out which is unique or make a huge effort as soon as vulcan is available so the most attractive games on steam os get a vulcan renderer and get on comparable performance level with windows, else i don't see a reason why a non linux dedicated user should pay the same price for a less performant steam os box than a windows box.
Another small hint how unsatisfying the current situation ist (most popular games on twitch):
CS:GO -> Positional Audio doesn't work as expected out of the box , mouse input is hard to configure | requires good linux knowledge | to get full performance you need to tweak the starting commandline | some still have issues (microstutters) with multithreading enabled | performance below windows
DOTA2 -> performance below windows
LOL -> not on steamos
Fallout 4 -> not on steamos
Heartstone -> not on steamos
Call of Duty (Black OPS III) -> not on steamos
ARMA III -> on steamos in beta , still not current version
Kingdom -> not on steamos
Starcraft II -> not on steamos
Minecraft -> not accesable throu steam big picture mode and lacks in current version the "easy" installer of windows
World of Warcraft -> not on steamos
Fifa 16 -> not on steamos
Destiny -> not on steamos
This list goes on. Let me ask a real question here , which market is the target for steam machines right of now?
Last edited by Glog78 on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:18 pm UTC
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I appreciate this particular discussion is important and almost relevant enough to rehash once again, but could we please try to keep this extremely polarizing topic out of GOL? I know absolutely everybody and their pet dog has a well thought out and completely justified opinion on the GG debate, but let's keep this site a safe haven from all the hate if at all possible. Please.Also I would add that the guy who wrote this is not clean at all, he have been part of a scandal involving gaming journalists of big gaming sites colluding together on how to shape the opinion by choosing what to cover and how to cover it in a private mailing list : http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/
That's reading an awful lot into a journalist asking colleagues to show some compassion towards a developer who has recently been harassed by an Internet mob out to get her.
(Not completely sure this bomb was ever going to explode, but thought I'd try to defuse it anyway.)
Last edited by tuubi on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:32 pm UTC
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Also I would add that the guy who wrote this is not clean at all
I would also add that
1) Breitbart is an ultra-right-wing smear paper
2) Milo is, likewise, a very unsavoury character
3) The article you quoted is oozing with crocodile excrement
EDIT: It seems that the GoL commenting form is breaking emojis
Last edited by DrMcCoy on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:23 pm UTC
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This list goes on. Let me ask a real question here , which market is the target for steam machines right of now?Console gamers?
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This list goes on. Let me ask a real question here , which market is the target for steam machines right of now?Console gamers?
Why do you think console gamers should use a steam machine over their console ? Current Gen consoles are cheaper have a better lineup in terms of AAA tittle's deliver on all games a satisfying performance without adjusting any setting. They even might have the advantage of not needing to download GB's before they can play a game. Just insert a DVD and go for it...
Or let me say it different ... if i have a Batman Arkham Knight on PS4 without any tuning ... the PS4 cost 350$ + 60$ for the game its 410$ ... thats still 90$ less than the alienware steammachine. Not to mention that even alienware doesn't believe 100% in steam os -> http://www.alienware.com/Landings/steammachine/ < or why is there the alienware alpha advertised too ?
Last edited by Glog78 on 13 Nov 2015 at 8:35 pm UTC
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