Legion Go SteamOS (not Bazzite) vs Windows 11 Performance Analysis

0:00 Hey everybody, it's Innovision with the announcement of the Nintendo Switch 2, rumors of an Xbox gaming handheld, and now Steam OS being able to be installed on devices outside of the Steam Deck line. What a time to be alive. We're in the midst of a handheld gaming renaissance. Now that I've spent a little bit more time with Steam OS on my Legion Go, I'm really starting to converge on some nice settings. and I think everyone here will be happy to see them. In today's episode, we're doing a study to analyze the performance characteristics of the real Steam OS versus Windows 11 on the Legion Go. We're going to share our test bed for analyzing performance, and by

0:46 the end of the video, we're going to compile the results to tell a very interesting story. Stick around. You don't want to miss any of it. Before we get started, a couple of public service announcements. As we focus on the performance characteristics of the real Steam OS on our Legion Go, I want everyone to keep in mind this software is in beta. Also, I want everyone to know as time permits. If there's interest within the community, I'm happy to do performance of the real Steam OS on ROG Ally and Ally X. Let me know. Something interesting I've learned, a prominent Windows user who goes by the handle Xeno Panther posted some analysis or data mining that was

1:32 done on a beta version of Windows 11. Now, coincidentally, this was on April 1st, but everyone swears that this is not a prank. And what they've learned is that by analyzing some of the strings in the Windows 11 beta, they found a onboarding of a user experience that resembles Steam's big picture mode. Now, this option can be configured as part of your desired user experience. And once you select it, the device, whatever Windows 11 device it might be, will boot into this mode. And we've already been hearing whispers on the internet about Microsoft testing a user experience where you can use your controller or joystick to navigate and control Windows. So, this would be perfect just in time for an Xbox branded handheld

2:19 gaming PC, which we've already heard of Project Kenan, which is a collaboration between ASUS and Microsoft. And even a few weeks back, we actually posted a video where we were kind of hypothesizing what this might be. And what I thought at the time was this would be a certification or a process that an OEM or a vendor would go through to be able to have the certification to run like a big picture mode. And it sounds like some of this might happen. We don't know. Keep in mind these are all rumors and we'll learn more as time goes on. As soon as we learn anything, you know, we're going to make some noise. Last but not least, originally I was planning to unbox and share a review for this awesome NECA TMNT movie

3:04 Leonardo and Shredder two pack. This ended up being quite an elaborate video just on the performance of things here. And as I thought about it more, this is such an awesome toy. I really want to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the TMNT movie. This is going to deserve its own video all by itself. And I have something very special planned for us to celebrate the unboxing here. and I have a very nice discussion planned for the community. So, don't worry, it's coming down the pipeline. So, as we look at performance under the real Steam OS in Windows 11, I still want everyone to keep in mind Steam OS is a beta software. We're going to be looking at three different TDP settings. We'll be taking a look at 15 watt, 20 watt, and 25 watt TDP with and without frame gen.

3:50 As time permits, if there's interest within the community, we can test other games. But I picked Diablo 4 for several reasons. First and foremost, it's a DirectX12 game. Unlike DirectX11, DirectX12 is more verbose and gives explicit control of the graphics pipeline and it actually more closely resembles the graphics pipeline that we see in Vulcan which is used in Steam OS because Steam OS is built on a technology called Proton DB and our DirectX shaders get recompiled into Vulcan shaders. Now, what we have on the screen here is a simplified block diagram for both DirectX12 and Vulcan graphics processing

4:35 pipelines. While they are different, they're actually quite similar, and this reduces the amount of overhead needed to map from DirectX12 graphics pipeline space to Vulcan's pipeline space. Another very important consideration for picking Diablo I 4 as the game for our test bed here is that Steam OS currently does not support frame generation technology. But if the game is a DirectX12 game and uses Nvidia's deep learning super sampling for frame generation, you can actually use a third-party plugin to inject FSR3 frame generation into that option of that game that you want to play. and we're going to show you how to do that later in the video. What's gnarly about this plugin

5:20 we're going to show you how to install, it's the same process no matter which Linux-based gaming dro you're using. So that means whether you're using Steam OS, Bazite, Cachio OS, any of them, it's the same process. All right, enough about that. It's time for the fun part. Let's fire it up. Just a quick look at our settings here in the AMD software. We've got integer scaling enabled. We've got AMD fluid motion frames enabled. So, this will disable the integer scaling will disable the Radeon super resolution. We're going to have two frame counters going on here. One on the top right corner is the one from Steam that's giving us our real frames per second. And the one on the left here comes from Legion space. And this gives us our FPS with the AMD fluid motion

6:06 frames enabled. And so since we're using integer scaling, just a quick note here, we're setting our resolution to 1280 by 800 and we're using 15watt TDP settings here across the board. And so let's let it rip. All right, so we're back in Steam OS. We're on Steam OS Hollow Steam Deck variant 3.8. And you'll notice that we're on the main development branch, which can be accessed through the developer settings. The other thing I want to call out here is we're running the most up-to-date version of the Steam OS software. You know, there's other channels out there that are staying on versions earlier than April 3rd. And I imagine the reason why is that the performance overlay

6:52 doesn't seem to work in later versions. I actually found a workaround that I can still get the performance overlay. We're actually using the most up-to-date version of this software. We're using the simple Deki TDP and we've got the 15 watts TDP setting. There we have it. Instead of it showing FPS here, it's showing VK D3D. That stands for Vulcan Direct 3D surface. Adjust our settings here. So, we're using 1200 by 800. All right. So, this is actually really cool here. I'll show you a little bit about this in a little bit. Um, but we've got different options here. Obviously, this is a AMD graphics card. It doesn't have Nvidia deep learning super sampling, you know, but let's stick with the um FSR2

7:39 quality mode. So, I'm going to show you this really cool plugin. So, if you go into the Decki loader here and you go to search the plugins that are available, if you go all the way down, there's one called Decki Frame Den. All right. So, you'll want to install this one. And so what this gives you the option to do is it will actually if if a game supports DirectX12 and it's a game that supports, you know, Nvidia's DLSS, it will take the DLSS option and install a plugin that lets you use FSR3. And so once it's installed, you would come to your plugins here and go to Deki Frame Gen. And then you'd pick a game. Diablo I would be the game to pick. You would

8:26 then select it and it would say, "Hey, do you want to patch it?" I already patched it so I'm not going to do it again. You go into your games settings and then instead of using FSR2, we're going to pick Nvidia deep learning super sampling super resolution. I'm going to use the ultra quality preset and I'm going to enable frame generation right here. [Music] Dark nights when the shadows start creeping. Streets whisper ain't no safe sleeping. Eyes watch from the corners they scheming. Got to move quick start feeding. Heart pounds every step I'm misleading. Make calls from the alley can't be seen. Hide in the black. Can't

9:12 let them intervene. Grip tight every moans echo of past deeds. Ain't no time for the weak. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music]

10:14 Hey, hey, hey. [Music] While it's nice to see the performance of the two operating systems side by side, we really need to take a step back and quantify our data so we can take a look from a bird's eye view to really understand what's going On this chart here shows the average frames per second at 15, 20, and 25 watt TDP settings without frame generation enabled. The blue bar is Windows 11 and the red bar

11:00 is Steam OS. This chart tells a very interesting story. At lower TDPs, Windows 11 and Steam OS have comparable performance. But as we start to increase the TDP, Steam OS tends to have higher frame rates than Windows. But I think just looking at average frames per second over some sustained time interval, like so many other people do, is a very lopsided story. To really tease out the differences here, we should look at the variability of the frame rates at these different TDP settings. Here we've prepared a chart that shows the variability across the different TDP settings for the two OSS. I don't know what's going on at the 20 watt setting. The best explanation I have here is that

11:46 Steam OS is, you know, still in beta and I'm sure this is going to change as time goes on and the software gets more polished. But in general, at the 15 and 25 watt TDP, there's really not much of a difference. There's nothing to write home about here. I'd be curious how this changes though as the software gets more polished and hits its final release. I might actually rerun this test just to look at it. Now, let's take a look at our frame rates with frame generation enabled. Now, here we can clearly see at the 20 and 25 watt mark, Windows 11 outperforms Steam OS at the lower wattage here, Steam OS performs quite nicely. In fact, I didn't add it to this chart here, but my typical setup, I use 16 watt TDP with frame generation enabled. I get similar frame rates to

12:32 what we see in the 20watt TDP setting. But we can see that Windows is clearly outperforming Steam OS at the higher power rates. Now, while that seems like an awesome result, if we take a step back and look at the variability of our frame rates here, it tells a whole different story. And this story is consistent with my own experience playing Diablo I on Windows when I enable frame generation. And so we see at the 15 watt setting, the variability is extremely high, the highest that it is in all the cases. But in all cases here, the frame rates are way more stable in Steam OS. In fact, while I'm traversing my environment in Windows, I could be at like 130 or 140 frames per second, depending on my TDP setting. all of a sudden it will tank down into 80

13:19 frames per second and I just see the game stutter. And this is a case where if we had a variable refresh rate screen on the Legion Go, it'd be really nice because it would smooth that out. But there's almost no polishing that turd to be honest with you. At any rate, that's why I think it's very important to not just look at frames per second. You should really look at the variability, how much it's changing with respect to the average here. And so my experience with not only Steam OS but Basite as well, my frame rates tend to be more stable. They might not get to be as high, but I don't have that much jitter and fluctuation there. I'm not saying that, oh, Steam OS and Bazi are better than Windows 11 here. That's not the case here. Each thing has its place. You

14:04 know, if you want to play with anti-che, you want to play, you know, Xbox Game Pass, if you want access to pretty much every Windows PC game. Yeah, Windows is awesome for that. I do think that there's another story here. I think if the Legion Go had 32 gigs of RAM, we'd see a lot less variability. And there's a couple reasons why your frame rate might tank while you're playing. One of the reasons might be, you know, as the console heats up, the clock rate goes down to keep it from overheating, and you'll see a drop there. I don't think that that's the case here on the Legion Go. What I think we're seeing is that we're starved for memory. And you see this especially when enemies pop up on the screen, for example. So that's why I'm correlating this to memory or when you get into a new environment, the game

14:49 will stutter because just Windows policy for how it deals with swapping out memory might be suboptimal compared to Linux. You know, there could be a whole study just on that, but I think you can dodge that bullet entirely if you just had more memory. In this video, we took a look at the performance characteristics compared between Windows 11 and Steam OS, the real Steam OS on our Lenovo Legion Go. This video was a labor of love. Make sure you show that love back by hitting the like button on the video. Subscribe. You don't want to miss all the amazing gaming tips, collectibles, and mods we've got coming down the pipeline. [Music]