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SteamOS Gaming Performance Lags Well Behind Windows (arstechnica.com)
New submitter NotDrWho writes: As reported by Ars Technica: "With this week's official launch of Valve's Linux-based Steam Machine line (for non-pre-orders), we decided to see if the new OS could stand up to the established Windows standard when running games on the same hardware. Unfortunately for open source gaming supporters, it looks like SteamOS gaming comes with a significant performance hit on a number of benchmarks." They tested with two graphically intensive titles from 2014, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux. They say, "we got anywhere from 21- to 58-percent fewer frames per second, depending on the graphical settings. On our hardware running Shadow of Mordor at Ultra settings and HD resolution, the OS change alone was the difference between a playable 34.5 fps average on Windows and a stuttering 14.6 fps mess on SteamOS." Even most of Valve's own games took big performance hits when running under SteamOS.
.. is the extra $199 you save by not having to buy a Windows license enough to make up for the frame rate difference if you divert that cash to your video card fund?
Most people don't make their choice of OS based on any sort of relevant information, including benchmarks. Windows fanboys will shout "I told you Windows was better!" FOSS evangelists will claim it's good enough, and worth it to 1) not have to pay for an OS and 2) not have to support a corrupt corporation. MAC fanboys will say "You two and your little fight are cute. I'm going to go pay a lot of money to purchase something that's exactly the same as the last one I purchased". Technology holy wars are no better than politics. Vet all data against your preexisting beliefs, and ignore everything that doesn't match them.
Probably drivers, I imagine, or is the OS architecture a limitation by itself?
These tests were done on their own custom built steam machine from 2 years ago. (Mentioned in article)
They have an older video card and older CPU than any of the steam machines for sale.
I'm guessing most optimization work has gone into the latest nVidia series rather than 1-2 previous ones.
On one machine, in two games.
I recognize that testing this sort of stuff on a wide variety of hardware and with many games is hard, and that they haven't had the time yet to put together a thorough analysis. But you should really qualify your results, like "preliminary testing has indicated that Steam OS performance may be worse than Windows 10 performance in some games on certain hardware configurations."
But that makes for a terrible headline :p
One of my primary suspects for the difference is the video card - how well optimized are the Linux drivers?
I guess that is too hard for Slashdot editors to write.
Nothing new here, but at least things seem to be changing, even if it's slow going. Who really expected the same or better performance at this point? Until Linux becomes mainstream (and by that, I mean holds at least 15% of the desktops), it will always be a "back burner" kind of thing for GPU manufacturers; not to mention the fractious bickering (usually over nitpicky crap) that pelts anybody who steps in to try and improve the situation.
This article's headline kind of exemplifies some of the problem - directing scorn and criticism on those who are trying to make things better.
The Shadow of Mordor port is garbage. Glean nothing more from its particular benchmark than that.
"Welcome, stranger! Come, sit by our hearth and tell us of this distant strange land you come from!"
He used some machine he had in the corner. How about using an actual Steam Machine?
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
It has little to do with the games. Waiting for some magical moment where everything happens and AAA games come out on stable, fast drivers is insanity.
What happens is you get a field-leader, like Steam. They start down the road of Linux. They get several HUNDREDS of games that weren't on Linux onto Linux by encouraging it. This now prompts stories like this where performance OF THE PROPRIETARY AND FREE GRAPHICS DRIVERS is brought to the fore.
The games aren't slow. The OS isn't slow. It's the graphics drivers. Now nVidia are shown up - pushing out flagship products from a major player but let down by the quality of Linux drivers. So they are now encouraged / bullied into making those drivers the equivalent of the Windows drivers. This makes those drivers more popular. More people are going to have cards that use them (even if just Steam Boxes). Now there's slightly more of an excuse for games developers to target Linux too. So now the quality of the drivers matters that little bit more. So nVidia/AMD improve the drivers a little more. Which encourages more benchmarks to show the leaps and bounds. So they get press from it. Which means more developers target SteamOS as part of their engines and platforms. And so on... ad infinitum.
We waited ten years for something to "Just Happen" in terms of graphic driver quality - both free and proprietary - to bring Linux drivers up to par with Windows. It didn't happen. So Valve are breaking the deadlock, removing the stalemate and saying "Your move, nVidia" - one of their partners, who is going to get bad press for having crap Linux drivers. nVidia will respond in time. And, incrementally, things will start to improve.
Good on Valve I say. Good for Linux. Probably not so good for nVidia et al but they've been dragging their feet anyway. And, ultimately, good for the consumer. But if we only used the one thing that worked and is top-speed and competitive and expensive, ATI/AMD wouldn't exist, Windows and nVidia would be on every console, and the situation would be even worse because of the lack of competition. Now that someone's seriously pushing gaming on Linux, and shows these shortfalls to the people SELLING PARTS OF THIS HARDWARE, there might well be a push to get more optimised drivers running on Linux for that hardware.
If spend the cost of a Windows licence on better hardware how does the performance compare?
As soon as I saw the headline I was curious which games they had tested with. As soon as I saw Shadow of Mordor I cringed. It is well known that its Linux performance is extremely subpar. The fact of the matter is that Linux ports and drivers have seen nowhere near the time and effort put into performance tuning as their Windows counterparts. Until Vulkan gears up and SteamOS gains more inertia, I don't expect any different.
For the record, though, Shadow of Mordor is the only Linux game I have not been able to play on max settings with my GTX 970; and despite having to crank it down a bit, it still works flawlessly. As a Linux gamer I am more than content with how fast things are progressing. Why rate and comment on the runners' performance when they haven't even finished warming up?
On an absolute scale, probably not as well-optimized as the Windows one. But Nvidia's Linux drivers have consistently been better-performing than AMD's versions. Intel's Linux drivers have had problems, too, and their dependence on Mesa has meant that a lot of recent OpenGL features haven't been exposed. Plus Intel's hardware is significantly slower than AMD or Nvidia's offerings.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Make Half Life 3 only available on SteamOS. Problem solved.
Riveting tale chap.
Not true - in fact, Nvidia's Linux driver is quite good. The issue is that 'important' games get special attention from the graphics companies, who special-case things in their drivers - replacing whole shaders, etc. That doesn't happen in Linux. It winds up being necessary because OpenGL has grown so complex that it's incredibly hard to write fast code for it.
Vuikan is liable to change that considerably - a much lower-level API, that engines can interface with more directly and consistently. The drivers won't have be huge tangles of special-case code, and will be much simpler to implement on multiple operating systems because they are called upon to do far less.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Like I said, I'd love to be wrong, and I'd LOVE my gaming PC to be running SteamOS instead of Windows. But I want to play Mass Effect and Fallout and Skyrim and Tomb Raider and Battlefronts and Uncharted and Assassin's Creed.
That's MY definition of a Casual Gamer - I get a relatively low number of games, but I play the hell out of them. I switched to PC because consoles became a really unfriendly environment for people like me, and Steam is just way the heck off. To play the games I want on PC right now I need both Steam and Origin. And if EA /ever/ lets their stuff go on Steam, well. It ain't going to be any time soon. SteamOS might be an OK platform eventually, but it's far from it now, and won't get to "OK" for a bit, either.
And, again, I would love for it to succeed, but they've been at this for years.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
You mean the firehose?
The Nvidia drivers are fine. We don't have the performance issues with them over here on FreeBSD that people on Linux do. Graphics have honestly been very consistently better and smoother on FreeBSD than Linux for the most part.
It'd be a little more convincing if nVidia wasn't the only game in town Valve has. They don't care if they sell you a graphics card for a Windows or SteamOS box. AMD is too economically crippled to make a strategic investment and Intel still isn't what I'd put in a game console. In short, Steam boxes could flop and it'd be a much bigger deal for Valve than nVidia. So I guess we'll see, it might light a fire under their feet but I wouldn't bet on it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I believe many if not most games on Steam For Linux are actually windows versions literally wrapped in what amounts to their propriety/in-house branch of the wine environment.
In this case it seems both unrealistic and unfair to make performance comparisons between running what a windows-native app on Windows, and then on Linux where it requires an extra significant overhead of API translation because the app itself was never designed or built to run on Linux-native APIs.
Who the heck orders an OS box shipped these days instead of instant download?
People behind metered Internet access, for one. See a story a couple months ago about surprise overages caused by Microsoft preing an instant Windows download.
Never paid for windows since xp. You were saying?
You either use another OS or you're a software pirate, so your post is completely irrelevant.
You appear to have forgotten a third option: someone else is paying for Anonymous Coward #50924157's copy of Windows. This is likely the publisher of trialware bundled with a name brand PC. I can tell that publishers of trialware for Windows fully subsidize Windows because GNU/Linux PCs from companies such as System76 tend to cost more than Windows PCs with equivalent specifications. The maker of PCs that ship with GNU/Linux cannot collect revenue from trialware publishers because trialware publishers are on the whole unwilling to port their products to GNU/Linux.
You get the lower power and lack of versatility of consoles
I was under the impression that SteamOS supported community-created mods, unlike consoles, and had an Exit to GNOME option unlike consoles since the release of PlayStation 3 system software 3.21.
If the SoM port wasn't literally the worst example you might have a leg to stand on here, but there are a number of ports that were significantly better done. In this particular case, I'm not bitching about a company that went "out of its way," I'm bitching about a catastrophic fuckup. For another example of a completely fucked up Linux release, see Dying Light. Most the rest haven't actually been nearly so poorly done.
Incidentally though, in the case of Dying Light, they did actually after-the-fact work hard to improve performance based on user feedback, and had notable, if not complete success. They're both textbook examples of how NOT to port a game to Linux though, unless you own Microsoft stock.
Its also worth noting, the company you say "went out of their way" to port their game to Linux did nothing of the sort. They hired a third party (Feral Interactive) who has also ported several games other than SoM which were not catastrophically fucked-up at launch, and in fact include some of the better AAA ports available for Linux as well, suggesting that the original developers (not Feral) may be more to blame here for the sorry state of the Shadow of Mordor port than anyone is acknowledging here.
Those niches exist but you chose a poor example. Android = Linux... it is the dominate platform in that market.
I apologize for moving the goalposts, but thank you for proving RMS's point about the importance of the term GNU/Linux, which I had carelessly neglected to use. Android uses the kernel Linux, but it is not compatible with applications designed for Steam Runtime or any other applications designed for GNU/Linux. One could port a GNU/Linux application to Android, but then Android's all maximized all the time window management policy starts to get in the way. What good is it when a calculator fills the 10 to 12 inch screen of a tablet, covering up whatever else you were working on?
I have two tablets, one a detachable ASUS that was the best performing detachable available running any platform when I bought it sitting in my living room right now The same model could be purchased with Microsoft's option but that offers poor app support and slower performance on the same hardware.
I'm referring to Windows laptops such as the ASUS EeeBook X205TA and its detachable cousin the Transformer Book T100TA. These ship with Windows 8.1 or 10, not Android. What you have is probably the ASUS Transformer TF101 or TF103C, the Android-based cousin of the T100TA. Just a guess, but I'm pretty sure it suffers from "full screen calculator syndrome", unlike the Windows laptops. Do games designed for SteamOS run at all on it?
The fact you assumed you could [defenestrate any random Windows PC] and can point out specific examples where it didn't work is only highlighting a feature of linux. It is highly portable and works across such a wide range of hardware
Just because a device runs the kernel Linux doesn't help if the device runs only a crippled userland that can't show multiple apps at once. It's the user interface equivalent of not being able to walk and chew gum.
Ugh, you grammar nazis. I really couldn't care fewer.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Not to mention how the game developer might charge $19.99 for their game on both Windows and Linux, and the Lintards will bitch about why that game is not free (as in beer, not just as in speech)
...but I got the sense that Ars Technica pretty much sucks Microsoft cock all day long.
This is based mainly on their attitude toward the privacy issues related to Windows 10, but I noticed other corroborating data points.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
If you read the article they also compared 5 valve made games with similar results. I have no idea if those games were optimised for Steam OS.
There are now a larger number of eyes on the problem. I expect there will be a significant performance improvement over the next few months as the causes for the delays are isolated.
The games aren't slow. The OS isn't slow. It's the graphics drivers.
No, it is a combination of all of those things as has been explained many times before. Like here for instance.
Linux gaming is in it's infancy, but in a short time things have already improved a lot.
I remember a time when windows was starting to get games, and performance was just horrible. Together with my friends we just laughed about the idea of windows as a viable gaming platform, it couldn't even touch DOS. Look at where we are now.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.