Is SteamOS Any Faster Than Ubuntu 15.10 Linux?

[duby229]

Is it possible to do a benchmark where the game is pretty much the only thing running as some sort of baseline?

You'd still need X and a tiny WM. Steam does have it's own window manager that is probably a lot simpler. It may be faster, but the biggest performance penalty seems to be coming from compositors, so just turning off the compositor will usually be good enough.

[LaughingMan]

Is it possible to start seeing testing of Frame Time, and results for minimum frame rates as honestly these 2 metrics are far more important then average frame rates.
Also just like to say keep up the good work.

[Nobu]

You'd still need X and a tiny WM. Steam does have it's own window manager that is probably a lot simpler. It may be faster, but the biggest performance penalty seems to be coming from compositors, so just turning off the compositor will usually be good enough.

Steam runs pretty well on Wayland (gnome-shell), though I'm not sure if it's native or XWayland--guess I need to check that. For games that use SDL, they could be run completely without X. For everything else...well, XWayland isn't that bad.

[Michael]

Is it possible to start seeing testing of Frame Time, and results for minimum frame rates as honestly these 2 metrics are far more important then average frame rates.
Also just like to say keep up the good work.

As has been mentioned many times in the forums and elsewhere, it all depends upon what the game engine exposes and generally I expose everything possible. With all of these Steam tests, there isn't any frame-time or other information accessible as far as I am aware. I think the Company of Heroes 2 test exposes it, but there's other issues at hand. If the test exposes frame times or min/max, it's shown in the test. Using external solutions like libframetime have proven not to be completely universal, etc.

[Tiger_Coder]

Michael can it be possible to add PTS in steam repo? There are enough people here who can vote it through Greenlight. There may be open PTS with xterm. So you can test SteamOS without going through Gnome Desktop Mode. And if we can bundle php and other necessary libs, it will be totally hassle free install for any end user. Many game related softwares(mostly windows I know) deliver there software also through Steam so I think this will be a good step for PTS.

[Michael]

Michael can it be possible to add PTS in steam repo? There are enough people here who can vote it through Greenlight. There may be open PTS with xterm. So you can test SteamOS without going through Gnome Desktop Mode. And if we can bundle php and other necessary libs, it will be totally hassle free install for any end user. Many game related softwares(mostly windows I know) deliver there software also through Steam so I think this will be a good step for PTS.

Anyone is free to help in doing so, but I have no time nor resources to really to devote to that.

[duby229]

Steam runs pretty well on Wayland (gnome-shell), though I'm not sure if it's native or XWayland--guess I need to check that. For games that use SDL, they could be run completely without X. For everything else...well, XWayland isn't that bad.

Oh yeah. I don't live in a wayland world yet, so I guess I just didn't think about that.

[dungeon]

Seems like bit less CPU overhead on SteamOS... i don't expect any tramendious difference.

Well neither under X vs W , otherwise i guess it is a bug.

[GreatEmerald]

I'd be very alarmed if SteamOS was faster than Ubuntu with newer drivers. It would mean Ubuntu or NVIDIA screwed something up big time. After all, SteamOS is more about latency than throughput.

[bregma]

Steam runs pretty well on Wayland (gnome-shell), though I'm not sure if it's native or XWayland--guess I need to check that. For games that use SDL, they could be run completely without X. For everything else...well, XWayland isn't that bad.

The Steam client has X11 riddled through it like cancer. Games are a different story.