Benchmark testing reveals Windows 10 outperforms SteamOS

But right now, it’s sure not going to help Valve put machines in living room.

Linux games abound on Steam, but playing them on SteamOS – Valve’s flavour of the open source operating system – remains the inferior option when performance is a concern.

According to a report by Ars Technica, several benchmarks have found that SteamOS performs significantly worse than Windows 10, especially when it comes to game performance. Obviously this was just one test on a fairly low-end system- I would be interested to see how something higher end performs on SteamOS VS Windows. You would have expected the developers of both the game and OS to have the expertise to support equivalent performances, if it were possible.

“Generalized CPU benchmarks are only somewhat useful in judging actual, GPU-powered gaming performance, though”, says Ars Technica.

So with Microsoft having recently released Windows 10, along with more promises to return its focus on PC gaming, the folks over at Ars Technica made a decision to benchmark devices running both. The games tested were all originally developed for Windows and consoles like Xbox and PlayStation, and they were only ported to Linux later.

We finally settled on a couple of mid-to-late-2014 releases that had SteamOS ports suitable for our tests: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux. SteamOS lost handily on every setting in between.

We have to admit that we are not really surprised with those results.

Figuring that Valve’s own games wouldn’t run into the same issue, their own Source engine games were tested on SteamOS and Windows… “Portal, Team Fortress 2, and DOTA 2 all took massive frame rate dips on SteamOS compared to their Windows counterparts; only Left 4 Dead 2 showed comparable performance between the two operating systems”. For games like these, which don’t push the upper limits of our hardware, most gamers wouldn’t even notice the difference between the frame rates listed here.

Windows 10 edged out SteamOS overall in GPU usage in each category, including integer and float point.

Testing six games on a single hardware set up is far from comprehensive, of course.

Still, SteamOS just couldn’t touch Windows 10 in benchmarks.