SteamOS struggles in gaming benchmark tests

Many gamers have been looking forward to getting a Steam Machine for their living room for months, but benchmark tests may put those plans on ice temporarily.

SteamOS is more sluggish than Windows 10, it seems. This unfortunate news comes courtesy of Ars Technica benchmarking. The site pitted Windows 10 Pro against SteamOS on a system powered by an Intel Pentium G3220 (dual-core) running at 3GHz backed up by 8GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 660 graphics card (with 2GB of video RAM).

Geekbench 3 indicated that there wasn’t much to separate the two in single-core or multi-core tests, though Windows 10 came out slightly ahead.

But it was in more practical tests that SteamOS lost ground. Ars Technica tested the systems by loading up games like Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light Redux

Running Shadow of Mordor at 1792 x 1120 resolution on high details, the test rig managed just over 50 fps on Windows 10, compared to 39 fps with SteamOS. The latter struggled further when details were ramped up to Ultra; SteamOS managed just 14fps, while Windows 10 fell to 34fps.

Some optimisation work is required for SteamOS to be able to go toe-to-toe with Windows 10.