Benchmark: SteamOS underperforms Windows 10 in games

Benchmarks performed with various games show that a PC with SteamOS from Valve performs less well on average than the same PC with Windows 10. This is a difference of 21 to 58 percent in frame rate.

The benchmarks were performed by Ars Technica, who provided a system with an Intel Pentium G3220 processor and a Zotac Geforce GTX660 as the basis with a dual boot configuration with SteamOS and Windows 10. Minor differences were noted in the processor benchmarks with Geekbench, albeit in the advantage of Windows 10, but in the gaming benchmarks, the performance differences became significantly greater.

For example, in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux, large differences were measured in performance, on both low and high graphics settings. The performance differences ranged from 21 percent to 58 percent, but all against SteamOS. To see if games made with Valve’s own Source engine performed better, Portal, Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 were tested. Only the latter was able to keep track of the frame rate measured on Windows 10.

Although SteamOS cannot achieve a higher frame rate than Windows 10 in any of the benchmarked games, that does not mean that the operating system from Valve will perform worse in all cases. Ars Technica points out that games built for OpenGL and Linux, and thus more or less for SteamOS, may perform better than in Windows 10. Currently, many games still need to be ported in order to work with SteamOS, partly because the operating system is not can handle DirectX directly. In the future, Valve wants to release games that work with Vulkan, an open-standard cross-platform API that provides low-level access to graphics hardware and is known as the “new generation OpenGL.”

Incidentally, the results from Ars Technica match a benchmark previously run with a beta version of SteamOS; GameSpot reported big differences in framerate between Valve’s OS and Windows 8.1 last year.