Valve Corp’s long awaited Steam Machines are finally starting to make their way into the hands of consumers, but recent benchmark tests suggest that the Linux-based SteamOS might not be able to offer the full living room PC gaming experience it had once promised.
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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 chose to benchmark devices running both.
Windows 10 beat out SteamOS on Shadow of Mordor at the low end, 95.5 fps to 61 fps, and on Ultra, 34.5 fps to 14.6 fps.
Rather than smack SteamOS with cutting-edge releases, Ars went with two older, but still very demanding games in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux. But how well do games perform on their SteamOS? The games tested were all originally developed for Windows and consoles like Xbox and PlayStation, and they were only ported to Linux later. Both are relatively graphically intensive 3D games with built-in benchmarking tools and a variety of quality sliders to play with (including six handy presets in Shadow of Mordor’s case). As Ars Technica point out, it’s possible that the developers of these titles simply weren’t as familiar with Linux and OpenGL environments and thus weren’t able to extract equivalent performance levels.
Figuring that Valve’s own games wouldn’t run into the same issue, their own Source engine games were tested on SteamOS and Windows…
Unfortunately, Valve’s own Source engine games showed the same performance hit when compared to their Windows versions. Even when testing out Valve’s first-party titles – Dota 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 – Windows 10 won.
Looks like there needs to be a few general optimizations done on SteamOS to get it on par with Windows 10, but for now…
Still, SteamOS just couldn’t touch Windows 10 in benchmarks. Newer graphics hardware might be better suited to take advantage of high-end OpenGL features, though that new hardware is at least as likely to get more power out of Windows’ prevalent DirectX standards as well.
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This might be why Origin chose not to use SteamOS on their Steam Machine. Until then, though, it’s hard to recommend a SteamOS box to anyone who wants to get the best graphical performance out of their PC hardware.
