SteamOS vs. Windows on dedicated GPUs: It’s complicated, but Windows has an edge

Other results vary from game to game and GPU to GPU. border zone 3For example, all of our tested GPUs have significantly better performance on Windows than SteamOS, sometimes by 20 or 30 percent (with small lag here and there). As a 2019 game with no ray-tracing effects, it still runs serviceably on SteamOS across the board, but it was the game we tested that loved Windows the most.

in both forza horizon 5 And cyberpunk 2077, With ray-tracing effects enabled, you see a consistent benefit for Windows in a 16GB dedicated GPU, typically in the 15 to 20 percent range.

To Valve’s credit, there were also several games we tested where Windows and SteamOS performance were functionally tied. cyberpunk Without ray tracing, Return When the 7600’s 8GB RAM limit is not reached, and assassin’s creed valhalla were sometimes In fact Windows and SteamOS are tied, or they differ by a low-single-digit percentage that you can add up to the margin of error.

Now look at the results for the integrated GPUs, Radeon 780M and RX 8060S. These are vastly different GPUs from each other – the 8060S has more than three times the compute units of the 780M, and it’s making do with a high-speed pool of soldered-down LPDDR5X-8000 rather than two pokey DDR5-5600 SODIMMs.

But Limit On one hand, SteamOS actually performed much better on these GPUs relative to Windows. in both forza And cyberpunk With ray-tracing enabled, SteamOS slightly trails Windows on the 780M, and mostly closes the performance gap on the 8060S. For games where Windows and SteamOS are essentially tied on dedicated GPUs, SteamOS has a small but consistent lead over Windows in average frame rate.