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Until Valve addresses this huge resource usage of Big Picture mode I can't see any practical use for the thing. which is a shame as I quite liked the interface even though it still needed many features added. If Steamos runs as badly as big picture, using the same interface and from my limited experience playing with it, (it does) perhaps valve should drop it, if they are not willing to make some major changes to the system.
I'm wondering what other peoples experiences have been with it, and also if there is an alternative to big picture.
Can't say I've seen any difference at all tbh
edit:
What's your specs?
View PC info
You seem to have some concepts mixed up.
SteamOS is the Linux distribution from Valve, which is setup to autostart the steam client in big picture mode. It is the same steam client that is installed on other distributions.
It is tricky to get steamos to run steam in window mode but it is possible.
You can also switch to a gnome desktop in steamos and kill the steam client still running in the background. Then start steam from there and you get an option to exit big picture mode.
I have run the benchmark from Deus Ex on my steam machine now both in big picture and from steam window mode 3 times each and got basically the same numbers, with a slight increase from window mode. Which I think was caused that I also killed the compositor off, and sound, there was a lot of tearing running it from window mode.
Deus Ex is known to have very varying FPS depending on where in the game you are on what just happens.
Did you see the differences while playing, or from the inbuilt benchmark?
Maybe it is something else on your system running interfering with big picture mode, or it was just because you did different things in the game.
For reference the numbers I got, the ingame settings where the same
BPM try1 try2 try3
Average FPS 29.2 29.2 29.2
Minimum FPS 22.1 22.3 22.1
Maximum FPS 36.9 36.1 38.1
From desktop with steam in window mode:
Average FPS 29.8 29.8 29.7
Minimum FPS 22.2 22.6 22.3
Maximum FPS 38.6 38.6 38.5
Intel i7 4790
8GB ram
GeForce GTX 770 2gb
I must admit I've just tried running from big picture mode after latest client update and it seems a lot better. perhaps i had a problem with my install and didn't realize.
Thanks for the replies guys.