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Your Steam Machine won’t be quite as fast as your Windows PC

By Koh Wanzi - on 16 Nov 2015, 11:51am

Your Steam Machine won’t be quite as fast as your Windows PC

Steam Machines like this one from Alienware won't deliver the same performance you get on Windows. (Image Source: Steam Store)

Steam Machines claim to be able to replicate the PC gaming experience in your living room, but that may not be entirely true. When Ars Technica pitted SteamOS and Windows 10 against each other in real-world gaming benchmarks, Valve’s Linux operating system was noticeably slower.

While performance was fairly close in a synthetic benchmark like Geekbench 3 (although Windows 10 still had an edge), the difference was markedly larger in an actual game environment. That’s probably because Geekbench 3 is just a general CPU benchmark and doesn’t provide a sufficient assessment of GPU performance, which is where the real disparity lies.

Ars Technica tested both OSes with Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux, both of which are fairly demanding games. As it turned out, SteamOS performed anywhere from 21% to 58% slower than Windows 10, depending on the graphics settings. One of the starkest differences was in Shadow of Mordor at Ultra settings and 1080p resolution, where Windows 10 managed a playable average of 34.5fps but SteamOS stuttered by at a measly 14.6fps.

One might assume that the discrepancy was due to the fact that SteamOS was running Linux ports of the above games, and developers weren’t able to achieve the best performance from the OpenGL and Linux environment. However, Valve’s own Source engine games showed the same performance gap, with Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 evincing the same “massive frame rate dips”, according to Ars Technica.

Image Source: Ars Technica

If the company behind SteamOS can’t squeeze the best performance from game ports, that doesn’t bode well for future porting efforts. Still, games built from the outset with OpenGL and Linux might do better, and newer graphics hardware might help SteamOS somewhat (the Ars Technica system was running a Zotac GeForce GTX 660).

But for now, SteamOS will come with a significant performance hit compared to Windows, so it’d be good to temper your expectations of the platform. And when you consider that the SteamOS game library still lags behind its Windows counterpart, there seems little reason to pick it over Windows. So unless you really want to play PC games in your living room, it looks like it might be best to wait and see before getting a Steam Machine.

Source: Ars Technica

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