Valve started working on its Steam Machines more than 3 years ago and they finally found their way to consumer hands earlier this week. As usual,
When Valve announced Steam Machines in 2012, it promised "substantial" performance increases in OpenGL games such as its own Left 4 Dead 2. Unfortunately, it looks like Valve couldn't make good on that promise.
Preliminary benchmarks performed by arstechnica show that the Steam OS game versions run consistently slower than their Windows counterparts by 20% to 60%. For example, the test machine was able to run Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor at ultra-settings at 34.5 fps on Windows but stuttered at 14.6 fps on Steam OS. Even Valve's own games saw similar performance degradation on Steam OS when compared to Windows with DOTA 2 running at 60.1 fps vs 70.1 fps and Portal running at 107.1 fps vs 146.2 fps.
Interestingly enough, Left 4 Dead 2 suffered the least when running on Steam OS, with that version running at 49.1 fps and the Windows version running at 50.1 fps.
We have to admit that we are not really surprised with those results. After all, it is no secret that NVidia, AMD and game developers treat Linux drivers as an afterthought and don't invest in any Linux-specific optimizations.
