Dankpods used 12 computers with different hardware to test the performance of 5 games in 1080p and 4K, comparing the average fps results of the games' built in benchmarks to determine which OS ran the game better across the same hardware: Windows or Bazzite.
Some notes on methodolgy under this spoiler
Each game uses the same in game graphics settings in Windows and in Linux. The Linux distro used was Bazzite, using the version specific for the graphics card hardware fpr each individual machine. To be clear, this means that he installed the Bazzite version for (legacy) nVidia as appropriate.
Each bazzite install was fresh, no copying installs or swapping around a drive with it pre-installed. After install, it was updated using system update and rebooted, repeated until no updates remained.
Screenshots of some of Dankpods's comments to this effect:
There are many comments under the youtube video pointing out that in many of the Linux runs, it was not actually using the correct driver, comments about the experience using other distros, and comments about various potential fixes and workarounds.
This misses the point. Dankpods intentionally tested this way, and used Bazzite, to try and show what this would be like for the average gamer schmuck without a ton of technical skill interested in switching to Linux. Out of box experience matters in this situation, even though it's not quite fair to compare that between free opens source distros and an OS created by a megacorp. To the average end user, it won't matter. They just want it to work.
Prepare to be upset. With this particular testing methodology, Linux doesn't really win overall.
I'm interested to hear the community's thoughts on this.
I think it does show the typical experience. Its not a good test of linux systems, but it does show an accurate experience for a normal person trying out Linux on their existing hardware. These are exactly the problems unexperienced will run into. You see it all the time in help posts on linux communities. How we fix it, I’m not sure, but we shouldn’t deny that this is what its like for most people casually testing it out.
If that was the intent, then I think this was a very bad way to show that. A much better way would've been showing that it didn't work on system X and resolving it (e.g. with some external help). Instead he just showed a large number of invalid/irrelevant benchmarks. This now leaves people thinking that Linux has a massive performance deficit instead of an issue with the driver installation. I would like to see a follow-up to address the driver issues and explain what went wrong, s.t. we can actually learn something from this.
I would also hope that the typical experience is that it works out of the box, especially on a distro like Bazzite, but that's besides the point.
Yeah, I hope he does a part 2 where he gets some help to get it working, summarizes how, and re-runs the benchmarks.