Unsurprising. Drivers are better than they used to be, but some of them (Nvidia) have a long way to go in terms of optimization.

More importantly, however, is the complete lack of info the article provides about their testing methodology.

• They said they tested on SteamOS—ok, but it’s not officially available on non-handheld devices. How did they install it? Did they actually use HoloISO?

• How did they run the games? Directly through an embedded gamescope session like the Steam Deck, or through KDE Plasma, which has a compositor that can’t be disabled on Wayland. Or, did they take the double hit and run gamescope as a window within Plasma?

• Speaking of Wayland, did they use Wayland or X? They have different performance characteristics, and it’s not negligible.

• How many runs did they do? One-and-done, then record what the game said the average FPS was?

• Did they pre-run the scenes to ensure the assets were cached from the disk and the shader caches were available?

And the way they present the results are also bad:

• The graph the FPS achieved by each platform, but they have absolutely no detail about the 1% or 0.1% lows—and at a sufficiently-high average FPS, these are what make the games feel slow and stuttery.

• What about frametime graphs and frame pacing information? If Linux can achieve more consistent pacing at 85% of the average FPS, it would still be a better experience than having the same frame being presented repeatedly because the game missed the vblank window.

• They didn’t try multiple resolutions to identify where the bottlenecks are occuring in each game. If a game is CPU bottlenecked by their hardware choices, it’s not a good comparison of GPU performance. Likewise, if it’s GPU bottlenecked, it’s not a good comparison for CPU performance.