Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
I’m really curious to see what kind of performance gains the Xbox-mode or whatever they’re calling it is going to provide. I don’t know if it’ll reach SteamOS levels, but it does legitimately look like they’re taking the bloat’s hit on gaming seriously with the Xbox-branded ROG Ally.
The reality is that mostly people aren’t going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it’s still a win.
The reality is that mostly people aren’t going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it’s still a win.
While I mostly agree with this, every time I see this mentioned it reminds me that MS-DOS was not very popular, until a Microsoft employee offered to port Doom to DOS, because he saw that if games ran on a platform people would use it and migrate naturally, that employee was called Gabe Newell. So I do have some hope that there’s some bigger migration, and in fact we’ve seen the numbers steadily rising, and these sort of things tend to be exponential, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it picks up speed.
Windows was wildly popular prior to Doom. Doom for Windows 95 was a showcase for DirectX, not Windows.
Doom was on more systems than Windows 95, yes, but that’s a little misleading. First off, it was released several years before Window’s 95. Secondly, people upgraded computers less often back then, and Windows 95 wasn’t packaged with most systems and wasn’t distributed online. You had to actively decide to go to a store and buy it.
Third, the vast majority of Doom copies were the shareware version of the first campaign. It was tiny and free. People would bring their floppy to a friend’s house, or they’d post it on a bbs for download.
The port to Windows 95 was a technical showcase of the advantages of using DirectX. It showed that Windows had integrated features that could be used to enhance games with minimal development cost, and that games could be run without having to exit Windows to DOS, which was a huge hassle required for most games at the time.