Windows 11 vs Linux Gaming Test Reveals There’s More to It Than FPS
Windows 11 vs Linux Gaming Test Reveals There’s More to It Than FPS
Publish Date: 2026-07-15 15:45:00
Source Domain: www.techpowerup.com
It seems as though the launch of Valve’s Steam Deck has resulted in an almost non-stop slew of comparisons between Linux and Windows as a gaming operating system. In one recent test, Meta PCs sought out to test the two operating systems head-to-head to get some hard numbers and potentially settle the debate, however, the results brought up an interesting debate about what makes one operating system better than another.
Benchmarks were conducted on an all-AMD system running an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, an XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 GB, and 16 GB of RAM, with the AMD Linux drivers effectively making this a best-case scenario for Linux. The benchmarks were run on the latest version of Windows 11 and Fedora Linux 44, games were tested at the same resolution, and results were an average across three runs. All games tested were also the Windows versions running via Valve’s Proton compatibility layer.
The results were a bit of a mixed bag. In synthetic benchmarks, Windows was slower. In Geekbench 6, Linux beat out Windows 11 by around 3-4%, depending on whether it was single-core or multicore testing, and this was repeated in Blender tests, where Linux was anywhere from 4% to 10% faster, depending on the scene. When it came to gaming, however, Linux trailed Windows slightly, earning a 9 FPS (6%) lead in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, and a 7% lead at 4K with High settings. In Arc Raiders, Windows beats out Linux by 9% in average FPS, but it has significantly higher 1% lows, which means perceived smoothness will be higher. Marvel Rivals also saw a modest 5% improvement on Windows.The reviewer ended up crowning Windows as the best gaming operating system for now, noting that the moderate performance boons over Linux and more consistent support from developers for features like anti-cheat makes Microsoft’s operating system the superior choice for most people. However, and perhaps more interestingly than the conclusion of the performance benchmarks is the comments section,…
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