I guess things run faster without the spyware, logging, and other general bullshit running in the background. Who could've guessed?
Just to be clear, this is testing the same handheld on both Steam and Windows and is in line with previous findings on a small set of AAA games.
Best guess, as someone who runs both Linux and Windows on both handhelds and desktop gaming PCs, the issue here is probably memory and driver optimizations around them. Windows is just heavier than SteamOS and, while the 32 GB in the Legion Go should be enough for at least some of these tested games, they are shared between CPU and GPU. I don't have a Go S, but I've seen significant performance improvements on Windows handhelds by manually assignign more VRAM in heavy games like these.
Shame, I've been waiting for more thorough testing (more games, desktop hardware references and a deeper look at memory management in Windows, but this is pretty superficial still.
EDIT: For what it's worth, and I DON'T have the time or the setup to do a full set of benchmarks, but running South of Midnight on both Linux and Windows, same settings, same PC, just dual booting I got almost 2x the fps on Windows. That's suspicious the other way, I'd expect the difference to be less dramatic, so there may be some resolution stuff going on here. Or perhaps the DLAA I'm running on both runs slower on the Nvidia Linux drivers? I'll give one more game a try with no DLSS before I call it an experiment.
EDIT 2: Damn, this is why benchmarking modern games sucks. I tried Marvel's Midnight Suns (just because it was there on both) and... well, the performance is the same on both, but Windows is clearly bugged and stutters for like a second every couple of seconds, consistently. So it's really nice on Linux but entirely unplayable on Windows (on this machine, at least).
If I'm learning anything from this is that despite modern advances PC gaming is still a tinkerer's game and that I really wish Linux/Windows drive sharing was less flaky because it's increasingly obvious that dual booting is a great tool for gaming, given how temperamental modern big games are.
Maybe wine/proton is just better at Windowsing than Windows is.
It is in some ways. I can tell you I tried to run Prototype 2 on a handheld today and it didn't run natively on Windows 11 because it's old but putting it into a Proton session and keeping it contained did wonders for it and the Deck ran it maxed out at 90fps (you forget it can do that if you insist on playing modern games on it, but man, does it look nice on the OLED).
So hey, it certainly Windows 8s better than Windows 11. There is that.
But it's not magic, so I'd still like to figure out what we're seeing in these examples.
Ever found a way around Lutris asking for a CD for games? I was using Lutris and one of the games I tried installing from a mounted ISO installed, yet I can't find any way to get Lutris to recognize the mounted drive as the CD. Tried adding it to Steam as a non-steam game as well and get the same result. Tried various versions of proton and wine, but I assume I need to direct it to the ISO somewhere... But couldn't find anyone who had an answer online.
I haven't tried, sorry. I use Heroic rather than Lutris for my non-Steam digital libraries and I haven't messed around with older physical releases too much, so I don't know what Lutris is expecting. Maybe someone else here can help?
Maybe I'll look into Heroic tomorrow, thanks for the info though, never used it before
Heroic is very straightforward, as long as what you want is access to your GoG, Epic, Amazon and Battle.Net libraries. Lutris is meant as a more general purpose launcher, so they're aiming at slightly different use cases that overlap.
Heroic won't solve your Lutris ISO problem, but if you want to play some non-Steam ways it works great, is easy to use and is very Steam-like.
The Legion Go only has 16GB of RAM natively.
The Legion Go 1 yeah, this was on the Legion Go S, which has 32, apparently.
I'd say if you're buying a handheld these days you should aim at 32 and look into having at least 8 available for the GPU.
Nope, the S is 16GB on the base models. It uses either the same Z1 Extreme chip as the non-S or the Z2 Go which is only 4c/8t, and is only 16GB with the latter. I think the former, which just released, has 512/16GB and 1TB/32GB variants.
As for memory sizes, it really depends on the chip. I think the Z1E would likely breathe a bit easier with 24GB but I think 32GB is kind of overkill for it. 16GB is likely plenty for the Z2 Go, and 24GB on the Z2 A in the ROG Xbox Ally is definitely overkill as that's just AMD finally releasing a SKU for the Steam Deck APU, which is two to three generations older than every other Z2 chip.
The Z2, Z2 Go and Z1E all have only 12 graphics cores and that's why I feel like 32GB is overkill for them, whereas the Z2 Extreme has 16 so it actually makes sense to dedicate more than 8GB of memory to it.
I think you've got to remember that "more memory better" doesn't always hold true on a device like a handheld as it does include a cost on battery life even at idle.
As of right now, both models of the Go S listed on Lenovo's website have 32 GB of RAM (screenshotted below, if the weird screenshot functionality here works). So no, you're wrong here. The version with 16 GB is the Go 1. If there is a 16 gig SKU of the Go S, which there may be, they currently don't have it listed.
Memory size requirements depend on what you're trying to run. Easier to run stuff will run on everything, but from hands-on experience I assure you a bunch of newer games struggle with the default allocation of 4 gigs of VRAM and can use the extra RAM. You can still give 8 gigs to the GPU with 16 but then you're a lot more likely to start struggling with system RAM. If these AMD APUs worked like an Apple chip and could dynamically allocate RAM that wouldn't be such a pain, but at the moment you need a reboot to change this even on current-gen hardware, so it's easier to have a larger pool and give the GPU a little too much.
The amount of CUs and the VRAM aren't necessarily related. Even with larger RAM allocations and weaker GPUs you can find yourself in the wrong setup, which is annoying. And it's not just amount of RAM, these shared architectures can struggle with bandwidth as well, so speed can matter (although it's more giving you more or smoother FPS and the less the fall-off-a-cliff unplayable mess you get if the game is entirely out of RAM budget). That's also why I suspect being lighter on memory and perhaps having a better default setup may be a part of why SteamOS performance is disproportionally better on heavier scenarios compared to what you see on desktop PCs. I can't be sure, though.
This comes from me messing around with a literal handful of PC handhelds on Windows, SteamOS and Bazzite. I'm not guessing, I'm telling you what happened during hands-on testing.
Drivers and "other stuff" have more impact than the OS itself. I would expect if you installed Windows 11 from a USB stick onto this device that it probably puts performance into "balanced" mode for example, fires up antivirus/malware protection, runs a bunch of esoteric services, throws in a WHQL (stable but crappy) GPU driver etc.
I think the article would have been fairer and more useful to install Windows, and optimize the life out of it and then compare performance and other factors (e.g. battery, heat, fan noise etc.)
That depends. In this case, where the Lenovo drivers are clearly outdated and kinda broken, definitely they're the bottleneck for at least some games. That much they've shown, by installing newer drivers and showing a massive performance upgrade.
Although I'd caveat that by saying that their flashier results with big updates across OSs and driver variants are running at outright unplayable settings. They are benchmarking on settings resulting on framerates in the teens. When they say they saw 12% performance increases on the newer drivers they mean going from 14 to 16 fps in some cases.
Benchmarking properly is hard, I guess is my point.
But what you gain in performance you lose in data mining. Imagine not being graped for personal information after you paid extra to get it.
What a shock
Shitty OS is shitty.
I can definitely believe this on low power machines.
I got a N150 Mini PC the other week, and it comes with Win 11. It thrashed around at 100% CPU doing updates and virus checks and fuck knows what other background tasks Windows considers more essential than whatever I tell it to do. Case was red hot.
So I popped the latest Ubuntu on it. Is it perfect? No. I had to mess around with Firefox "snap" for ages and type arcane commands to make it find the N150's tiny GPU. And it still can't play videos using the hardware. But other than that, it just works, just the bare essentials, and then gets out the way. Sits at about 2% CPU use when idle.
MS seriously need to cut bloat.
This reminds me of when I got Spore on Optical disc for my (brand new at the time) Intel iMac. The disc was ISO9660 with both Joliet and HFS extensions, so if you put it in Windows, it would show up natively and if you put it in a Mac, it would also be native.
After a few games in MacOSX I was disappointed with the performance so I started to dig and realised it was the Windows Binary with some sort of WINE-like translation layer. I assumed it would run better natively in Windows.
I installed Bootcamp and a stripped-down version of Windows Vista and then installed the native Windows version. It installed a Root kit that broke most of Vistas security and the game ran even worse and crashed constantly.
I don’t think that Microsoft deserves all the blame for games running like shit natively. The users who pirate games and the studios who don’t trust Windows users to not pirate games deserve the blame as well.
Microsoft (and Post-Jobs Apple) definitely do deserve a lot of blame for allowing their platforms to get so bloated with so many features that users don’t want. Copilot should have been laughed out of the boardroom and Apple Intelligence is an underperforming, overly obnoxious know-nothing know-it-all.
Apple Intelligence is completely disabled on my Mac.
Me too, and Copilot is disabled on my work computer (and then magically reenabling itself)
Please tell me how to disable Data Detectors on MacOS, sometimes a number is just a numerical string and is not a Phone number; actually it it quite unusual for it to ever be a phone number. Even if it is a phone number, I would love to be able to just copy and paste it without it trying to connect to my phone and prank call some poor sucker.
Never had an issue with that... I didn't even know that was a thing on Macos. Maybe because I have enabled paste app? Or maybe never said ok to some Macos app in accessibility permissions?
Running a windows game using Proton-GE 10.4 and a Wayland desktop is even faster still.
I think a far more likely reason for any slow down is Lenovo's Windows drivers suck, or Windows defaults to a power saving mode that improves battery life but impacts performance, or Windows has antivirus or some other impactful service running that they didn't turn off. Since the article neglects to say if they tweaked Windows I have to assume they didn't.
It was already shown that SteamOS is way better in terms of battery performance than Windows. So if Windows uses power saving mode by default, these results are even more damning:
There might be some tweaks to mitigate some of the short comings of Windows, but that doesn't changed that the script has flipped. Before it was Linux that required tweaking and Windows would have a decent out of the box experience. Now SteamOS works great out of the Box while Windows needs tweaks. And at that point there is no reason for sticking with Windows unless your software specifically demands it.
So does the application menu
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