According to testing from Ars Technica on the Lenovo Go S, the only portable on the market that’s designed to run Windows and SteamOS without bias toward one or the other, SteamOS runs games much better than Windows in the vast majority of cases.
Out of all their testing, there was only one title that didn’t see notable performance gains when running on SteamOS over Windows. Other than that, games tested had between an 8% and 36% performance uplift just for swapping the operating system.
The benefits of swapping between Steam and Windows may be minimal at best in the case of trying to use a hefty desktop PC with top-of-the-line components. But for handhelds? A few small changes can make a big difference.
SteamOS is considerably more efficient than Windows
The Lenovo Go S presents an opportunity to give both operating systems a clean drag race due to having official driver support for both SteamOS and Windows, something that wasn’t really possible until now amid the handheld PC arms race.
In their testing, SteamOS was a clear winner even with Valve’s operating system having to often translate commands built for Windows into something usable on their Linux-based OS.
Ars Technica’s testing found a massive performance uplift in four of the five games tested, with only Borderlands 3 having better performance with Windows loaded.
However, Returnal was the biggest winner for Valve, going from 26 FPS on Lenovo’s base Windows drivers to a staggering 47 FPS. That’s almost double the FPS with no hardware changes.
It’s worth mentioning that there are a number of caveats here, including that SteamOS isn’t compatible with every game and that Microsoft is already working on a competitor in the space with an OS custom built for their ROG Ally variant.
That said, Steam’s software really comes out swinging here. And, though there isn’t a simple way to just put SteamOS on a desktop PC just yet, there’s a future where Valve revisits their console/prebuilt PC efforts if there’s enough demand.
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