[STEAM] SteamOS vs. Windows on dedicated GPUs: It’s complicated, but Windows has an edge

[Steam 0]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about

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, a self-built desktop under my TV featuring an

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processor and a Radeon 780M integrated GPU. I wouldn’t recommend making your own version of this build, especially with RAM prices as they currently are, but there are all kinds of inexpensive mini PCs on

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with the same GPU, and they’ll all be pretty good at playing the kinds of games that already run well on the less-powerful Steam Deck.

But this kind of hardware is an imperfect proxy for the Steam Machine that Valve plans to launch sometime next year—that box will include a dedicated GPU with 8GB of dedicated video memory, presenting both benefits and

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compared to a system with an integrated GPU.

As a last pre-Steam Machine follow-up to our coverage so far, we’ve run tests on several games we test regularly in our GPU reviews to get a sense of how current versions of SteamOS stack up to Windows running on the same hardware. What we’ve found so far is basically the inverse of

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: Windows usually has an edge on SteamOS’s performance, and sometimes that gap is quite large. And SteamOS also exacerbates

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, hitting apparent RAM limits in more games and at lower resolutions compared to Windows.

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