Nearly a decade ago, Ars testing found that Valve's "Steam Machines"-era version of SteamOS performed significantly worse than Windows when SteamOS' Linux game ports were tested on the same hardware as their Windows counterparts. Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11. The performance advantage is yet another way that Valve's upstart OS is differentiating itself from the "default" Windows installation used by most PC gamers for decades now.
While users have been able to install Windows on the Steam Deck since its 2022 launch, Valve doesn't offer official "Windows on Deck" support for this alternative hardware use case. Lenovo's Legion Go S, on the other hand, is the first gaming portable explicitly designed to work with either Windows 11 (in hardware first released in January) or SteamOS (in hardware first released in May, alongside a new version of SteamOS designed for non-Valve AMD hardware).
To test the performance impact of this operating system choice, we started with the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S (provided by Lenovo) and tested five high-end 3D games released in the last five years using built-in benchmarking tools and two different graphics/resolution tiers. We then installed Windows 11 on the handheld, downloaded updated drivers from Lenovo's support site, and re-ran the benchmarks on the same games downloaded through Steam for Windows.
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