I believe it, Windows bloat these days is so bad. I keep telling my friends Tarkov runs better on Linux if they'd just let me play the goddamn multiplayer I'd be golden

Games run faster on SteamOS with proton than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

FTFY. I hate all these articles that downplay the heavy lifting proton (and all the tools that make it up) are doing. But "Proton makes games run better" doesn't get the same attention.

Take aways:

• Sample set is of 5 games
• Lenovo drivers are much slower than Asus
• There are 2 games where windows is neck to neck or better, 3 where SteamOS is far ahead

Some doubts:

• Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation. 99%ile would be helpful.
• I wonder if it makes sense to test DirectX10, 11 and 12 games separately to better understand where Proton has an edge.
• I wonder what all settings can be tweaked in Windows to find potential fixes (core isolation, cpu boost, power profiles).

Point is Microsoft and OEMs need to do better, however not every game or subscription services work on Linux, so in the interim time users should know what they can do to close the gap better.

Yes but Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit on my Linux laptop. Checkmate atheists.

I found the same thing on CachyOS (another Arch fork). The increase for me was staggering. Lies of P went from an unstable 144fps on windows 11 with an overclock (OC) on my GPU to 200fps in Cachy. Settings were all maxed out at 1440p. I noticed a similar jump from other games. Modded and vanilla NBA 2K25 went a stuttery mess at 172fps (frequent dips down to 72fps) to a steady 180fps with NO dips (that’s my monitor’s limit). I like to test things on The First Descendent, and it went from an unstable 79fps with maxed settings to 119fps. And while I don’t have numbers for it, The Witcher 3 Next Gen (vanilla and heavily modded) run a lot smoother. But after ten years, that game has been optimized out the ass.

I did notice, however, that the increase in performance diminished greatly as I turned down settings. On Windows 11, I would notice a way “higher” increase in frames. For Example, I could tweak settings in the First Descendent like Global illumination and increase frames in Windows 11 to 109fps, but still unstable. In Cachy, if I did these things, I didn’t really notice a meaningful impact.

RT also performs slightly worse on Linux. But I figure anyone using Linux might be the same type of person to not care about RT.

My hypothesis is that without the CPU resources being eaten up by things like Windows Defender, the CPU is able to process more data quicker, reducing GPU wait time. I don’t have data on that, I would need something as in depth as presentmon from Intel for testing. Arch has forks of that, but nothing nearly as in depth, and PresentMon has declined any Linux support in the foreseeable future.

I should mention, the OVERALL jump is ~40% going to CachyOS. And we know that the jump from Windows 10 to 11 saw a ~27% hit due to the new Windows Defender.

My system is 64GB of SK Hynix DDR5, 9070xt (on my Windows Partition it’s OC’d, but on CachyOS I leave it stock), and a 9800x3D that has been manually OC’d in the bios and a 240mm AIO. I leave the panels off my O11 D Mini. The motherboard is a Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite (2x8 pins for the CPU delivery).

For all the FPS data, I pulled it from Steam on Cachy which uses presented frames instead of actual frames. Basically, the frames the GPU is presenting to the monitor, not necessarily what your eyes are seeing.

On my Ally, I also noticed a difference swapping to SteamOS. Something to keep in mind with anyone planning to do that, you can allocate up to 6GB of RAM to the iGPU before Arch/SteamOS gets affected. I just don’t see anyone telling you you can do this.

Edit one day later- I played Enshrouded on CachyOS. I will report that my 9070xt underperforms at max settings. Unstable 80fps with dips down to 50fps, but the Frame Time Pacing makes it feel worse. It stutters like it’s running at 50. Turning down settings again only increased frames by 5fps, which is not marginal at these rates, but did not help with the stuttering issues. I think it’s rendering things similar to Minecraft. The comparison I have is my 7800xt, which at max settings a year ago was able to run in Windows 11 at 70fps, but equally unstable. Therefore, I’d hypothesize that if I ran present on I’d just see high GPU wait times.

It is more impressive when you realize that those games were meant for Windows and require a translation layer (Wine and DXVK).

We'll have to see if that's the same with the Xbox Ally.

I'll be laughing if its still outperformed

Wow, some of these are showing huge gains with Steam OS

Imagine if Valve decided to ship HL3 only on SteamOS :)

Windows runs better on Linux than on Windows…

Linux desktop compositors are still behind windows. Until my weird setup works just as well I can't switch without being annoyed. HDR 4k120hz and 1080p360hz both gysnc. Always seem to have issues with vrr in Linux and multi monitor. And HDR support is strange

Oh dear Microsoft, you had everything and you pissed it away again

That's still without NTSYNC patches, right?