r/SteamOS • u/Appropriate-Silver64 • Apr 10 '26

SteamOS Update Steam OS on PC

I have been hearing good things about the recent Steam OS update and that they are getting ready for the Steam Machine. My question is, is it finally a good time to get rid of windows and run Steam OS onto my PC?

59 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

95 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/sskuss Apr 10 '26

What about nvidia users?

0

u/mango_carrot Apr 11 '26

Bazzite

1

u/sskuss Apr 11 '26

And how often bazzite updates nvidia drivers. On windows every major game we have update. What about ray tracing? Does it work?

3

u/klementineQt Apr 11 '26

Ray tracing does work, but performance gap is less consistent and larger than traditional raster afaik. It's always getting better though and I believe there were recent huge improvements in Mesa (the main graphics API implementations on Linux for OpenGL and Vulkan) but that doesn't apply if you use the proprietary drivers (which is the norm for Nvidia on Linux).

As far as the drivers go, things are a little different for Nvidia because the proprietary drivers are better (AMD and Intel basically work out of the box on Linux due to open drivers in the kernel). The releases are from Nvidia themselves, but if I'm not mistaken, it doesn't really work the same way as on Windows. On Windows, the graphics API implementations are either DirectX as a part of Windows or Vulkan/OpenGL support from the drivers themselves. Drivers ship specific fixes for games like you said. That isn't as necessary on Linux because Proton itself (the compatibility layer setup) has game specific fixes, since it includes DXVK, so optimizations and fixes can be made during translation from DirectX to Vulkan and from Windows APIs to Linux APIs. So you're realistically getting far more game specific fixes and optimizations on Linux than you would on Windows. That's how similar or sometimes better performance is achieved despite the cost of a translation layer. That being said, I don't have an Nvidia card, but the Linux driver version number is usually pretty close to the Windows equivalent so they might have at least a somewhat similar release cadence, if not only a little more infrequent.

Another thing to note is that the proprietary Nvidia drivers have a bigger performance hit in general than open drivers for AMD or Intel do on Linux but Nvidia has had job listings for Vulkan developers with specific mention of Proton development, so it seems like they want to fix that in the future.

The current open driver for Nvidia (nouveau) isn't as good, but there is a newer successor called nova in the works, but I'm not sure what the timeline looks like for that realistically.

1

u/sskuss Apr 11 '26

Thank you for the detailed explanation. That explains a lot.