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Ars Technica recently put SteamOS through its paces and found that Valve's new operating system performs "significantly worse" than Windows when it comes to playing games. That seems like a pretty big issue since the thing you're going to be doing the most on SteamOS is playing games. While SteamOS is currently the new kid in town, it still doesn't mean it shouldn't be compared to the most widely used operating system in use by a vast majority of Steam users.
Ars found that the performance gap between Windows 10 and SteamOS were anywhere from 21% to 58%, depending on the game. Even Valve's own first-party titles struggled to match the performance in Windows 10.
Ars does note that upcoming games that support DirectX 12 and/or Vulkan from OpenGL could drastically alter how these charts look in the future. For now, however, the only way that performance gap will be fixed is if Valve makes some significant improvements to SteamOS, which they undoubtedly will in the weeks and months ahead.
Ars found that the performance gap between Windows 10 and SteamOS were anywhere from 21% to 58%, depending on the game. Even Valve's own first-party titles struggled to match the performance in Windows 10.
While these are two AAA games ported to Linux by respected publishers, it's possible the developers simply weren't able to extract the best performance from the less familiar OpenGL and Linux environment. We figured that Valve's own games wouldn't have this problem; if anyone could get the maximum performance out of its Linux ports, it should be the company behind SteamOS itself.
Unfortunately, Valve's own Source engine games showed the same performance hit when compared to their Windows versions. Portal, Team Fortress 2, and DOTA 2 all took massive frame rate dips on SteamOS compared to their Windows counterparts; only Left 4 Dead 2 showed comparable performance between the two operating systems (though there's no sign of those SteamOS frame rate improvements Valve cited years ago).
Since the Source engine games we tested were on the older side, the frame rate performance wasn't the difference between "playable" and "unplayable" in any case, even on maxed-out settings. For games like these, which don't push the upper limits of our hardware, most gamers wouldn't even notice the difference between the frame rates listed here. Still, it's not a good sign that Valve's own porting efforts generally couldn't get comparable, Windows-level performance out of a SteamOS version.
Unfortunately, Valve's own Source engine games showed the same performance hit when compared to their Windows versions. Portal, Team Fortress 2, and DOTA 2 all took massive frame rate dips on SteamOS compared to their Windows counterparts; only Left 4 Dead 2 showed comparable performance between the two operating systems (though there's no sign of those SteamOS frame rate improvements Valve cited years ago).
Since the Source engine games we tested were on the older side, the frame rate performance wasn't the difference between "playable" and "unplayable" in any case, even on maxed-out settings. For games like these, which don't push the upper limits of our hardware, most gamers wouldn't even notice the difference between the frame rates listed here. Still, it's not a good sign that Valve's own porting efforts generally couldn't get comparable, Windows-level performance out of a SteamOS version.
Ars does note that upcoming games that support DirectX 12 and/or Vulkan from OpenGL could drastically alter how these charts look in the future. For now, however, the only way that performance gap will be fixed is if Valve makes some significant improvements to SteamOS, which they undoubtedly will in the weeks and months ahead.