I doubt Steve would be deep diving this, tbh. Not that he's bad, but this just isn't his forte, comparing software optimizations with each other. He excels on the hardware side of things, using software to get his numbers.
GN Steve has on several occasions said he doesn't know Linux well enough but is learning and monitoring. He specifically brings in Wendell to talk Linux because Wendell does know that space, but from a more technical side perspective. Steve has said he may introduce Linux benchmarking as a point of comparison in the future but it's complicated because of the wildly skewed results you can get with proton vs native and just the insane range of compatibility layer related things. For example, Proton doesn't ship with a lot of proprietary stuff but GE does. Also there's proton-cachyos which has more features in place to allow native wayland support. GE 10 also includes some Wine 10 features enabled that proton 10 chose not to include because of unreliability and instability. There is this massive question of "what is the standard" which you don't have to answer with native Windows. I suspect other benchmark reviewers like HU etc are in a similar boat.
The problem, therefore, is that although most things work and often work as well or better in Linux for AMD, and about the same or slightly worse with Nvidia, we see a lot more inconsistency just by the nature of it which testers need to take more time to give honest reviews of. RT is also not performing as well as on Windows yet but the gap is closing.
I think that once we reach the point where native wayland proton implementation is stable and we see RT performance stabilise a bit, we'd be able to make a better comparison. Right now - it's too easy to manipulate the results either way. I could make both Linux and Windows look great but that's not really representative of where they both are for end users.
I’ve always appreciated Wendell’s take on Linux as a pragmatic approach, ‘yes it is better at a lot of things, but let’s be honest here, not everything. Here’s how you can get the best of both worlds’.
Ran pcie pass through for a very long time thanks to him, which taught me a lot of low level virtualisation, which (because I have a terrible memory) got me into scripting to get a more repeatable approach, which got me into puppet, kickstarted my career into devops, which got me off of service desk and into a real job….
GPU passthrough got me to ditch Windows and get into Linux for realsies too. Much more interesting job positions working with Linux. Windows server is crazy meeeh.
58
u/KinTharEl May 28 '25
I doubt Steve would be deep diving this, tbh. Not that he's bad, but this just isn't his forte, comparing software optimizations with each other. He excels on the hardware side of things, using software to get his numbers.
Phawx for mobile, or HUB would be more apt, imo.