Is It Time To Move To Bazzite Or SteamOS Yet?
There are many gamers who use Microsoft Windows out of convenience; not because they want to. Recently Linux has become more feasible, with thousands of Steam games officially supporting that OS. The switch to Linus may not be attractive to someone who would much rather prefer a plug and play experience without needed to know how to mount drives properly or CHMOD like a pro. To that end Bazzite was created, a Linux distro specifically designed for gamers which comes with drivers and game launchers ready to go. Just make sure to pick the one that matches your GPU as there is one version of Bazzite configured for NVIDIA and one for everyone else.
GamersNexus benchmarked a number of games on Bazzite and compared the performance Windows provides and in general it seems that Microsoft still has the advantage overall. Not only will you see more impressive performance on Windows, as hard as it may be to believe you also won’t see as many odd bugs and crashes. One big caveat from the testing you should note immediately, Bazzite and 8GB GPUs do not get along very well. You will start running out of memory and seeing performance degradation you simply won’t get with Windows.
Ars Technica went a different way, trying one of the semi-secret versions of SteamOS which is being developed for the upcoming Steam machines and isn’t quite ready for Prime Time. They tested the performance of four AMD cards, spanning the RX 6800, RX 7600, RX 7600 XT and the RX 9070. In addition they also tried two onboard GPUs, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with a Radeon RX 8060S GP in the Framework Desktop, and a wee Aoostar Maco mini PC with a Radeon 780M GPU on a Ryzen 7 H255. In general the performance results are close, but except for a few edge cases Microsoft’s bag of bugs they call an OS does have the advantage.
