this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Just to be clear, this is testing the same handheld on both Steam and Windows and is in line with previous findings on a small set of AAA games.
Best guess, as someone who runs both Linux and Windows on both handhelds and desktop gaming PCs, the issue here is probably memory and driver optimizations around them. Windows is just heavier than SteamOS and, while the 32 GB in the Legion Go should be enough for at least some of these tested games, they are shared between CPU and GPU. I don't have a Go S, but I've seen significant performance improvements on Windows handhelds by manually assignign more VRAM in heavy games like these.
Shame, I've been waiting for more thorough testing (more games, desktop hardware references and a deeper look at memory management in Windows, but this is pretty superficial still.
EDIT: For what it's worth, and I DON'T have the time or the setup to do a full set of benchmarks, but running South of Midnight on both Linux and Windows, same settings, same PC, just dual booting I got almost 2x the fps on Windows. That's suspicious the other way, I'd expect the difference to be less dramatic, so there may be some resolution stuff going on here. Or perhaps the DLAA I'm running on both runs slower on the Nvidia Linux drivers? I'll give one more game a try with no DLSS before I call it an experiment.
EDIT 2: Damn, this is why benchmarking modern games sucks. I tried Marvel's Midnight Suns (just because it was there on both) and... well, the performance is the same on both, but Windows is clearly bugged and stutters for like a second every couple of seconds, consistently. So it's really nice on Linux but entirely unplayable on Windows (on this machine, at least).
If I'm learning anything from this is that despite modern advances PC gaming is still a tinkerer's game and that I really wish Linux/Windows drive sharing was less flaky because it's increasingly obvious that dual booting is a great tool for gaming, given how temperamental modern big games are.
Maybe wine/proton is just better at Windowsing than Windows is.
It is in some ways. I can tell you I tried to run Prototype 2 on a handheld today and it didn't run natively on Windows 11 because it's old but putting it into a Proton session and keeping it contained did wonders for it and the Deck ran it maxed out at 90fps (you forget it can do that if you insist on playing modern games on it, but man, does it look nice on the OLED).
So hey, it certainly Windows 8s better than Windows 11. There is that.
But it's not magic, so I'd still like to figure out what we're seeing in these examples.
1: SteamOS don't run unnecessary services in the background. (especially stuff like print services and other random shit)
1b: Even regular Linux, which does run a bunch of extra services, still generally has less overhead because it's still being optimized for lighter weight systems, and it idles more efficiently too. Meanwhile Windows doesn't have a good way to tell your printer driver and its corresponding services to shut up when you're gaming.
2: Antivirus programs
3: Drivers, graphics system. This is both a plus and minus, but for performance mostly plus. More efficient driver model, less overhead again. Sometimes the performance comes from lacking features which doesn't get executed fully, though. Sometimes it comes from translating to Vulkan, because DirectX has some more overhead (and in these specific cases you can get the same performance boost on Windows by switching to Vulkan).
Antivirus programs? When was the last time you tried Windows, the mid-00s?
Anyway, it's not random print services causing CPU overhead, that's old timey stuff. In this case it's being RAM heavy in a RAM-limited scenario and, from their testing, Lenovo being really terrible at keeping their AMD Windows drivers updated. As part of the test they manually switched to an ASUS version of newer AMD drivers and saw significant boosts in some games.
Modern graphics drivers are a mess of per-game features and optimizations. Different manufacturers keeping things at different levels of currency is a nontrivial issue and why some of this benchmarking is hard and throwing five random games at the problem doesn't fully answer the question.
All modern versions of Windows will have Microsoft's Defender antivirus/malware protection turned on by default. That means you incur a penalty every time a file is accessed from disk, or a process is launched, or a library loaded, or sockets are used or certain APIs are called.
It's better than most 3rd party AV software but it's still a performance overhead that could be turned off.
I mean... you can turn it off. I wouldn't, but you can.
I just haven't heard it referred to as "antivirus programs" in ages, it sounds so 20th century to me. Say what you will about MS's monopolistic tendencies, but at least they killed the parasitic "antivirus" industry with that one.
I think Windows Defender is a fantastic line of defence and it's definitely better than installing garbage from Trend, McAfee etc. That said, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Dell etc still preinstall crapware on their new machines from Norton or their ilk threatening that my machine is "at risk" if I don't pay them money.
I wouldn't turn it off unless I knew that I was only installing games from Steam. But if I did I think performance would improve. A game from Steam could still contain malware so you have to exercise some common sense. Even on SteamOS a game could be malicious but since its containerized the scope for damage is limited but not necessarily impossible to break out.
I mean, this is wrong. The CUPS daemon literally is a print service and does exist in Linux. It's just socket based so tends not to use resources until asked.
The CUPS daemon does not get killed during games. It wouldn't be needed anyways