If Monday's announcement of SteamOS was greeted with a great deal of interest and speculation, Wednesday's announcement that Valve was getting into living room PCs with broad compatibility and a full range of supported hardware was a major letdown. The limited information available doesn't point to much of anything beyond "We're doing a cheap living room PC." So what are the options and potential for a Steam Box? To answer that, we need to consider three separate questions. Valve's just-unveiled controller, while interesting, is unlikely to be the peripheral that makes or breaks the device, particularly since it'll work on the Windows side of the equation as well.
Is Linux faster for gaming than Windows?
We're treating this question separately from the question of whether or not OpenGL is faster than DirectX. Gaming relies on a huge suite of supplementary technologies, from network I/O, storage performance, video drivers (separate from the graphics API), and how efficiently the operating system handles multithreading. The truth is, it's extremely difficult to find a solid answer to this question, partly due to the sheer variety of components in the Linux ecosystem.
To give one pertinent example: If you're running Windows, you're virtually certain to be using the NTFS file system. Microsoft hasn't offered an installation choice since Windows XP, and FAT32 has been pretty thoroughly deprecated at this point. But Linux supports a much wider range of file systems, each with its own strengths and weaknesses in certain environments. General storage performance between Windows and Linux, however, is pretty even. Is it possible that Gabe & Co have tweaked SteamOS to support a particular kind of operation with a file system picked to match the characteristics of gaming? Absolutely. But there's no clear, sustained advantage between I/O on your average Windows box and your average Linux system.
That theme is reflected in virtually every comparison between two systems. When you compare Linux and Windows, you aren't actually comparing Linux and Windows. You're comparing the relative strength of drivers and software support from Marvell, Intel, Broadcom, AMD, Nvidia, Asmedia, Samsung, and Realtek in two different operating environments. Most of the time, when components in one environment outperform the other, the deltas change following further software updates. This makes it nearly impossible to drill down and definitively say, "Yes, Linux is always faster than Windows when running X."
The bigger issue here is that while Valve might squeeze better performance out of a Linux-based OS running on specific hardware, embracing broad compatibility makes this more difficult. SteamOS may run Linux, but it still has to adhere to the same hardware standards as Windows. The SATA, PCIe, DDR3, and USB subsystems don't change just because the operating system does. That makes it harder to squeeze out broad gains, but using a custom Linux distro and specific software for something like video capture might still result in higher performance.
Verdict: Is Linux faster than Windows for gaming? Maybe, but not by much.
Next page: Is OpenGL faster than DirectX?
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