In a not-so-scientific benchmark conducted by YouTuber Cyber Dopamine, the Rog Xbox Ally managed to perform better without Windows, the operating system it ships with out of the box. Cyber installed Bazzite, a popular Linux distro for handhelds built specifically to offer that console-esque, seamless experience. Visually, Bazzite looks identical to SteamOS because it uses Steam’s Big Picture Mode as its main launcher. It also behaves similarly, but has its own custom menus and settings for customizing things like power profiles (which override Asus’ built-in ones).
When testing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Cyber noticed a shockingly significant jump in FPS, with Linux generating ~32% more FPS compared to Windows. This trend follows at lower wattages, albeit with less noticeable differences, and the delta actually plateaus in Hogwarts Legacy to the point that both Bazzite and the Xbox FSE offer the same FPS at 13W. That being said, those frame rates are much more consistent on Linux, according to Cyber, who shows that the FPS graph on Windows fluctuates regularly, while staying mostly flat on Bazzite.
I think we should be careful touting linux as more preformant in games than windows because when people switch they wi find that isnt always the case. There are two situations where linux beats windows. CPU intensive games and on systems where the CPU is really bad and sometimes really bad dx12 games.
In every other case the preformance comes down to the gpu drivers which are undeniably better and more tuned on windows.
But this is not bad. I think its still very convincing to be able to say you can get away from windows and switch to linux barely losing any preformance and even in some cases gain it.
And I/O intensive games. Windows’ scheduler is a old works for all devices while linux switches to a optimized one.