It could also be a strategy to then lobby and make everyone else give up their stores, levelling the playing field.

Microsoft seems to be preemptively doing that already.

Preach. Studios that make games with anti cheats and what not should reconsider how they handle Linux as they’ll only get even more players, who’ll probably be even more loyal due to their Linux compatibility. I know cheating is a big issue in online games, but adding invasive kernel level code to detect that is just adding system level vulnerabilities just to prevent cheaters from cheating seems like an overkill. It’s not like cheating mouse and keyboards don’t exist and cheaters have evaporated entirely due to anti cheat.

Because I’m more curious about why things are the way they are just like the author, and would like to understand this with more data points, only making the comparison more helpful. I’m not saying author “should” consider impact of shader compilation, but I’m saying had they done, we’d understand the difference better.

They added asus vs Lenovo drivers data points, which alone tells us that driver optimization is responsible to a great extent. All I’m saying here is more data is more helpful.

Maybe even after taking care of that, the difference is huge, which will tell us its not enough to have precompilation of shaders. Maybe it does reduce the gap, telling us that potentially dx11 games might tend to do similarly.

Saying “RTX 5060 is better than 9060 XT” with 5 games tested is one level of comparison, but if they are grouped into RT and non RT games, games with 8gb and 16gb VRAM requirements, games with and without nVidia partnership, isn’t that just more detailed and an even better comparison point?

Biased to what? Point of comparison is to figure out why things are the way they are and use that information to get the best of both worlds? It’s not very helpful if the conclusion stops at “x is better than y”.

Going deeper into “why” Proton is doing better in 3/5 games but not in 2/5 will only help users of both operating systems to make better informed decisions and get everyone closer to root cause other than “bloated windows” or “just use linux”, potentially even leading to improvements to both sides.

While the bloat exists, even debloated windows wouldn’t match proton because that’s not the only reason. Despite bloat there are two games in this test the actually do similar or better than SteamOS. This means there’s a confounding reason for the difference, not the bloat.

It’s not a slight, as I said it’s a doubt, not criticism. I’m not saying “did the author EVEN …”

I think Microsoft is too big to make sensible and timely changes. The company needs to be broken up. Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, Bing, all need to be separate companies with their individual sustainable business plans, or else let free market decide their fate. Same for Apple and Google.

Take aways:

• Sample set is of 5 games
• Lenovo drivers are much slower than Asus
• There are 2 games where windows is neck to neck or better, 3 where SteamOS is far ahead

Some doubts:

• Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation. 99%ile would be helpful.
• I wonder if it makes sense to test DirectX10, 11 and 12 games separately to better understand where Proton has an edge.
• I wonder what all settings can be tweaked in Windows to find potential fixes (core isolation, cpu boost, power profiles).

Point is Microsoft and OEMs need to do better, however not every game or subscription services work on Linux, so in the interim time users should know what they can do to close the gap better.

Microsoft has been weird with this game. They hyped it up as launch title, game for 10 years, when it was far from ready. They released it a year later, with decent multiplayer and single player, but slowed down right after season 1. They woke up and got Forge working and then slept again. Even the recent showcase had the usual ESO and FO76 updates but nothing about Halo Infinte. Now they are teasing something new for next year, without even asking users to consider playing Halo Infinte in the interim time.

Even Forza Motorsport plan seems to be similar. Hyped game as ‘platform’, meh launch, even meh support, no mention in their showcase.

What if we make a new language that extends it and makes it fun to write? What if we call it c+=1?

I think the issue here is DirectX, so unless there’s meaningful changes to how DX works internally, DXVK at this point can always be a step ahead with all the changes it can make without tech debt to worry about. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Series X despite being stronger than PS5 on paper, struggles to match performance in non zero count of games.

deleted by creator

He? You mean she, Carrey Patel?

Bethesda, makers of Fallout 76, may be interested because to use that mod you’ve to own both Oblivion and Skyrim, making Skyblivion a great scheme to sell you two more games.