Someone else already explained (after watching the video) why this test is flawed.
"This is purely from a broken test. Watch the video and you’ll see that its not testing with the same power limits.
17w tests are actually 16w vs 20w+ and 35w test is 25w vs 35w
This leads to drastically higher clock speeds on both cpu and gpu as seen in the video and thus higher fps (and power draw, so lower battery life)
Thanks for linking my post, it’s a shame Tom’s hasn’t updated their post as it’s discussed in the comments there too.
I tried to make sure it got quoted but my app doesn’t do well with copying the user so I did it this way so people would know it certainly wasn’t me who saw the flaw.
If it helps UFD tech on YouTube also reported off the Tom’s Guide article, spouting the same flawed data as the headline.
Heh, my money was on it being shaders like most times this comes up. Steam+Proton gets a downloaded shader precache. Windows does it live.
Just let me boil the holy water
Not really surprising. Windows hasn’t had significant investment from Microsoft in a while, unless it’s cramming bullshit AI and telemetry “features” in.
I seriously can’t remember the last time a windows update added an actually useful feature for me. Its like they are actively avoiding making it any better at all.
- Explorer tabs.
- Significant improvements to power management.
- Terminal/ssh
- Quick restore and autopilot
- Notepad tabs
- Windows hello, passkey support
Not OS, and it’s older now, but powershell is pretty great and vscode is nice.
They might add features, but none of them are a joy to work with or use. They are usually slow and buggy and annoying.
Powershell is disgusting (my opinion).
Explorer tabs are SO ANNOYING. Coming from using dolphin at home, then windows explorer at work MAKES ME CRY. I might actually use dolphin on windows, but the builds dont seem to be properly supported (i dont think?) or at least in alpha/beta or something and I don’t wanna have a buggy file explorer thats not made specifically for an os. But come on dolphin can do it right and fast, why can’t a billion dollar company?!?!?!!?!
Powershell has some nasty little quirks, and the command naming is user-hostile, but god damn is it great to pass objects around instead of parsing and reparsing text.
Explorer tabs
Pretty sure that happened over a decade ago.
Terminal/ssh
Same
Quick restore
Same
autopilot
What even is that? A precursor to Copilot? If so, DEFINITELY doesn’t qualify.
Notepad tabs
If you’re not using Notepad++, you’re wrong and should be ashamed of yourself
Windows hello
Absolutely abominable and mandatory. A winning combination 😮💨
passkey support.
Which all of the competitors except maybe Apple’s walled gardens already had?
Face it: windows has seen at most a handful of positive changes since XP and at least a dozen as many negative ones just since 7.
Explorer tabs are 2022h2 so not that recent.
Terminal was 2020 so yeah that’s old.
Quick machine restore was only July.
Autopilot is enterprise provisioning any device from an out of box state. Only mobile devices have this.
Windows hello isn’t mandatory. it’s passwordless security, just like mobile devices.
I don’t believe Linux supports passkey in the os.
I don’t believe Linux supports passkey in the os.
Not sure if this is the same thing, but KDE (on a linux system) presents me with options to login with smartkey/fingerprint, so it might, I’m guessing? I dunno if thay’s what passkeys are referring to, but if yes, then I think it does.
Not the same.
If it’a not (ie biometric, etc), what’s the difference or what is it on Windows?
Microsoft long ago migrated Windows away from home and recreational computer users to business machines that have non-business uses. Any optimization was ignored in favor of soaking up more value from users.
Told ya so tm
From Xbox to LinuXbox
This is such a click-bait title, my God…
According to the article the only significant FPS gains are in the Performance mode. In Silent mode Bazzite has two FPS more in KCD2, and… one less in Hogwarts.
In Turbo mode, the difference is 5 FPS.
And even in Performance it’s not like you’re running at 13 FPS by default - it’s 47 in KCD2 and 50 in HL.
They even provide a nice summary themselves - on average, Bazzite gains 6.6 FPS.
What do you get in return?
Not stability:
I have 512gb model and am running on low with FSR2 on balanced. The game keeps crashing during every play sessions
And you lose A TONNE of optional game stores, including the entirety of GamePass games.
I would get it if the difference was “20 FPS on Windows” and 50 on Bazzite", but come on…
The article said the frame rates are more stable under bazzite with windows fluctuating a lot more even at low power settings.
I read through that thread you linked and I didn’t see bazzite mentioned anywhere.
Who the hell is still paying for game pass? Lol
The article said the frame rates are more stable under bazzite with windows fluctuating a lot more even at low power settings
I think that, as long as the framerate doesn’t dip below 30, a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS. It’s something you’ll see in benchmarks, but not in real life. For example: a friend of mine was playing Elden Ring and and Halo on the ROG Ally X and didn’t notice any issues with stability or framerate. And he’s pretty anal about this kind of stuff.
I read through that thread you linked and I didn’t see bazzite mentioned anywhere.
True, it was about Steam Deck performance. But I had similar experiences on Garuda Linux on my PC with Hogwarts. Every now and again it would just crash and burn. Got better after a Proton patch or two, but that’s the problem with Linux gaming - you never really know what you’ll get. With Windows, you don’t have that issue at all.
Who the hell is still paying for game pass?
Come on, now. You can’t be this childish.
games never crash on windows? lmfao
You can complain about click bait all day, that’s fine, but you came in here misinterpreting the article and then posted a non-relevant link to support your argument, followed by another back-pedaling comment to say “frame rates don’t matter as long as it’s over 30fps” LMAO.
I think you’re arguing just to argue, seems a little more childish than anything I said honestly.
You definetly do notice the fluctuating fps if it’s more than 10 fps at these frame rates. It feels like it’s speeding up then slowing down over and over. That’s why you should just lock your fps to something the device can maintain.
They raised the GamePass price didn’t they? It’s been lackluster lately
They did, yeah. Stupid move, especially just before the Ally release, but shareholders must be appeased.
But, other than the price, it’s been pretty great while I used it. Lots of day one releases, lots of less known titles I would never have tried if not for GP.
You will notice “average” 30 FPS plenty when it fluctuates. If it STAYS above 30FPS the whole time then sure but if 30 is the average that shit is struggling and you’ll be getting like 20-40 FPS
This is such a click-bait comment, my god…
Your source for stability issues in Hogwarts Legacy is a single user in the Steam community with other users in the same thread not having issues at all. Seeing that Hogwarts Legacy is one of the most played games on Deck (ranked 11th at time of writing ), I think many more people would report issues if crashes were common.
Furthermore, your TONNE of optional game stores is one. I can‘t really think of a game store, besides Microsoft’s, that doesn‘t work on Steam Deck.
These early performance comparisons definitely have limited value for comparing Windows/Linux performance on the device. But I’m sorry to say that your arguments have even less.
Microsoft is the only one I can think of that doesn’t work on Linux though? What’s the tonne of stores you miss out on?
losing gamepass is a plus, then you don’t have to deal with windows store
What a silly thing to say… You’re not dealing with Windows Store either way.
it has a xbox service that installs from the windows store, it is hella finnicky, ive had to do a full pc restore in the past to get it to work, no other option online helped
Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.
Yeah, I was able to play through most of AC: Odyssey on my deck, thanks to Lutris. I also use Heroic just because I’ve never wanted to install Epic’s launcher.
My source is just an example of gaming experience on Linux.
I run Garuda (Arch-based) which is a distro “for gamers”. The experience is great, I love it. Everything works fine… most of the time.
But, until Proton got a couple of updates, I was just unable to run Mafia. Until Proton got a couple of updates, Hogwart’s would crash randomly. Right now Cyberpunk runs fine… until it crashes during loading sometimes.
That’s the gaming experience of Linux.
All that for a +6.6 FPS average, and no GamePass.
You lose access to Windows store
Windows Store is irrelevant, you lose the XBox (App)-installed GamePass games, which means that you lose access to a tonne of XBox games.
New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It’s the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren’t just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested. I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn’t mean that it’s still happening.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly
*gets updates literally on the same day every month with 14 days time before a forced update*
*complains about getting interrupted by constant updates*
Sigh… I’m not even going to comment on this. Can’t fix fundamentalism.
but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested
Because, overall, Windows 11 is badly optimised and MS already fired all the competent developers, so, yeah, it’s going to happen. But what Windows gives you, is the guarantee that if you have the hardware to handle a game, it will run. Any issues will be on the side of the game, not the OS.
I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews
That’s also part of the “Linux gaming experience” - with all the distros flying around, almost nobody will have the same exact experience. Sure, if everyone installs Bazzite on the Ally, it should be a relatively uniform experience, but - again - I fail to see the point in going through all this, losing the (apparently) excellent touch UI and a unified gaming library, just to get… 6 FPS extra. In one power mode.
the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games. Reviews like the Phawks points out that microsoft kinda handed it off to the handheld makers to optimize for battery life. So in the instances such as getting 8hours of battery life running dead cells because the system doesnt really need to push that much to run the game, the Windows handheld is stuck on a higher performance clock and has a significantly shorter battery life time.
This would be extremely visible if more lighter games are tested, which typically aren’t for reviews like this because its not really fun to show a bunch of games all hitting 60 if you cap framerate.
the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games
Power consumption is handled by the power mode on the device. You get three modes - Silent (13W), Performance (17W), and Turbo (35W). You can switch between them at will, it’s not controlled by the game.
but a game may not necessarily need 13W, thats the point. youre using up more power than what is necessary because the CPU governor doesn’t know if its necessary or not to actually use all 13W.
The steam deck is controlled the same way(has wattage targets), but it understands when its being underused, to use even less resources to maximize battery life.
If you have a car that has gears, where gear 1 is 25, gear 2 is 50 (old cars), it doesn’t mean there aren’t usecases where you want to go 5/10. its unnecessary to always have to hit said target.
it’s weird, and refreshing, to find someone who actually reads the article and don’t base his comments only on the header, and also provides some additional info.
my opinion isn’t based strictly on the header. because to argue that the default is silent mode, when its very reasonable to assume that the middle tier performance mode is the default usecase, because it has a 80W/h battery when compared to typical other handhelds. Steam deck for example uses a 40W/h battery. 17W, which is seeing the chunk of the performance gain, is a very reasonable target for a 80W/h battery. Because it would roughly be equivalent to a steam deck at 10W on its 40W/h battery.
Oop, you didn’t bash my “not really anti-Microsoft stance”, prepare for downvotes, friend! :)
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