Lenovo Legion Go S: Windows 11 vs. SteamOS Performance, and General Availability

https://boilingsteam.com/lenovo-legion-go-s-windows-vs-steam-os-performance/

by ekianjo • 1 year ago

116 103 1 year ago

Absolutely murderous results.

And the open source situation promises only better and better. Work in Mesa 25.2 is improving the next gen geometry, enabling much better culling for example. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Better-NGG-Mesa-25.2

And a recent organizational shift; the Radeon software folks are leaving behind their proprietary stack & will be working purely on the open source stack. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-Software-Drop-Prop-GL-V...

It'd be neat to have a comparison like this that has some stats or resources consumption graphs. How many of these wins are CPU, GPU, or other would be interesting to get a pulse on.

Info on the Legion Go S: specs on the Ryzen Z2 Go APU here are overall very similar to the Steam Deck's custom apu; 4 Zen3+ cores, 12CU RDNA2 iGPU (a 680m). A (Windows based) test shows a perhaps double digit % lead for the Z2 Go. I'm a huge fan of there being a second USB port, enabling simultaneously charging and display. Notably has a 32GB ram model. Base: $650 (on sale for $500 recently). https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-Z2-Go-Processor-Benc... https://www.pcmag.com/comparisons/lenovo-legion-go-s-vs-valv...

Night_Thastus2• 1 year ago

Given Microsoft's recent 'This is an Xbox' and 'Windows 11 will be the platform for gaming' messaging, and the demolishing of the Xbox division, this may be good timing.

Results like this may light a fire under MS to finally fix some deep problems in Windows' performance. At least, one can hope.

mlnj3• 1 year ago

At this point, I've given up having hope for Windows to be actually a good experience for anything at all.

Development has been a pain over the last decade. MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.

Normal everyday experience is just a pain with unintuitive settings pages, slow Files Explorer, and a horrendous start panel experience.

Gaming seems to be the last thread my Windows machine is around for anymore. Although I have not tried moving to Linux for this, the gaming community seems to be happy enough for more and more games every week.

BunsanSpace• 1 year ago

MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on

Except when Apple deprecates APIs but the replacement doesn't have close to the same functionality (looking at you screen capture kit).

Or when the documentation just doesn't explain anything and you have to reverse engineer the API to figure out what it does.

or how there's a bunch of hidden APIs only certain vendors are told about so you can't even compete on an even playing field.

And don't get me started on the C, C++, ObjectiveC and now Swift monstrosities. Having fun with your legacy project when the new APIs require swift, so you have to use the objectiveC bridge and the weird bugs that comes with it.

baq3• 1 year ago

MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.

I don’t know what kind of projects are you working on, but it couldn’t be further from truth for me. WSL2 is so much better than docker on macOS it isn’t even funny. (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)

vips7L2• 1 year ago

I genuinely enjoy programming on windows. Perhaps because I don’t try to force windows to be linux, but PowerShell is genuinely good.

The only issues I face are when other developers do non-cross platform things. Like use bash for build scripts.

lupusreal2• 1 year ago

I hope Microsoft stays complacent and ultimately loses the gamer market. With gamers out and most other casual consumers going mobile, Microsoft will be ever more relegated to office environments, making them even less cool and hopefully starting a snowball effect that really hurts them.

whalesalad• 1 year ago

Gonna be tough when they own literally all the gaming studios now

msgodel2• 1 year ago

Most office environments seem to be using OSX for their client OS these days. It's just much more behaved OOTB. The only thing people really need Windows for now is the domain controllers and goofy legacy embedded stuff.

neuroelectron4• 1 year ago

They need to actually hire good devs again but then again they are a major part of why software as a career is dying in America.

zamalek2• 1 year ago

The problem is the bullet point features that Microsoft is adding to Windows (AI, ads, Xbox bar, etc.). The fastest line of code possible is the line of code that doesn't exist (look, this technically isn't true when considering data structures, but it's a good baseline).

Microsoft would have to exercise discipline with Windows features, which is never going to happen: the very people pushing the garbage are using Macs and don't have to suffer it.

Night_Thastus2• 1 year ago

I'm not convinced those new features are adding any substantial overhead. From my understanding, most of the problems are at the low level - things like threading, kernel space operations, file writing, etc.

Very stripped-down versions of Windows perform pretty much identically from what I last saw.

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

Very interesting that the Cyberpunk 2077 results showed 28% performance improvements as well as a 25% increase in battery life.

Often better performance is due to more efficient use of hardware, which comes at an energy cost. Other times it allows the hardware to work more efficiently, like avoiding spinning on locks.

usrusr• 1 year ago

When seeing numbers like that I always wonder about the probability of the engines truly running the same feature set: not because I doubt that an alternative implementation can be faster (I don't) and certainly not because I'd want to accuse anyone of trickery, but because those software stacks are just so very, very complex and adaptive and minor (but, perhaps, costly in fps) adaptions of the engine parametrization to the runtime environment can be very difficult to spot by looking at the output. I'd imagine the relationship between the code and what's actually happening must be almost as wild and unpredictable as what we see in epigenetics.

Cyph0n3• 1 year ago

How would the engines be running differently? It’s quite literally the same Windows build of the game running on Wine/Proton.

The simpler explanation is that Windows is poorly optimized, and runs a ton of inefficient crap in the background that’s taking cycles away from the CPU and maybe even GPU.

paol• 1 year ago

That would be plausible if the effect was only seen in one game, or a small handful. Instead it's happening across the board, with almost all games tested showing at least some gain, and many showing gains comparable to CP2077.

At that point it has to be a platform/stack difference.

kevingadd• 1 year ago

The CP2077 framerate is 59, so it's probably effectively running at 60FPS, or is CPU-limited instead of GPU-limited. If the graphics side of things has spare headroom it's going to draw less power.

On the flip side, the CPU may be doing less work due to things like more efficient drivers / less OS nonsense tying up CPU, which would also reduce power draw.

cassianoleal• 1 year ago

better performance is due to more efficient use of hardware, which comes at an energy cost

It's a matter of balance.

More efficiency means less power for the same computations. If you increase the computations more than your gain in performance, you use more power. If your efficiency gains are not fully utilised by increased computations, you use less power.

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

What I was getting at was that if you have a CPU bottleneck, reducing or removing that bottleneck can make your GPU work harder, which results in more frames per second but also more energy because GPU isn't idle as much.

This would be in contrast to say wasting a lot of cycles in a spin lock due to thread contention, where reducing or removing the contention might gain you both performance and lower energy cost due to less waste.

trelane• 1 year ago

So, guys, I don’t want to kill your enthusiasm, but this sounds very much like We are just pretending to release a SteamOS version but in fact we advertise the Windows model everywhere instead. Since I am familiar with large companies, I guess the story was like that.

As a Linux user since the last millennium, this dance is so incredibly familiar.

In his own column, Gassée has written several times about Microsoft's Windows OEM License and the ways in which it limits the freedoms of PC OEMs. In July 2001, I spoke with Gassée to find out why no dual-boot computers with BeOS or Linux installed alongside Windows can be purchased today

https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

It's impossible to know precisely how much, but if you do the math and assume that it's $30 per computer from those various sources, that would yield $200 million or more than 25% of Dell's profitability. It could be more or less than this number, but any way that you look at it, Dell is dependent on Microsoft for a massive chunk of their profits.

http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=131

So, uh, good luck. Sure is an amazing coincidence how many PC vendors suddenly have a competitor to the Steam Deck, that happen to run Windows, and especially push their Windows versions.

pjmlp5• 1 year ago

I keep telling remember OS/2 and netbooks, but apparently the dream of Desktop Linux built on top of Win32 and DirectX is too good to give up, and accept the issues building castles on foreign kingdoms.

notepad0x906• 1 year ago

I don't get the comparison here. Imagine comparing a Toyota corolla out of the dealer's lot with a highly customized Honda civic optimized for street racing. Guess which will be faster? lol

Windows is a general purpose operating system. Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right? apples and oranges.

Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category? A good comparison would have been consoles like playstation or xbox (Microsoft's gaming optimized OS/platform akin to SteamOS). Then if they used similarly specced PC, it would be reasonable benchmark.

ekianjo2• 1 year ago

obvious terrible choice for the category?

the same hardware for gaming is being advertised and sold with Windows 11. That's why.

reef_sh• 1 year ago

Steam OS is very much just a general purpose OS. It easily allows you to switch to desktop mode and just use it as a regular linux PC. It just boots into steam by default.

notepad0x906• 1 year ago

So I can deploy steam at any random company? or if I'm a graphic designer can I use it to replace my macos? is it a good distro if I'm working on embedded sofware development? Should I use it as a web server? it can after all run nginx or apache on it. If I have a VPS with 1GB ram, is this a good OS for it? or a laptop from 2011? all I'm saying is it can do lots of things, but it isn't built to support all those things. it's built for gaming. if it really is a general purpose OS, the litmus test (in my opinion) is that someone starts shipping it with general purpose computing hardware and people actually start using that.

coolgoose• 1 year ago

SteamOS has 'desktop mode' which is full fledged Linux + Kde environment. You can use that accounting software most likely via wine ;)

notepad0x906• 1 year ago

I get that, I have VMs for various linux distros as well, all purpose-built. i wouldn't use Kali RockyLinux for office use cases for example. there is a lot to a distro than merely downstreaming ubuntu. it can run libreoffice but can it support (not run,support!) other workloads? I can run netbsd on anything, i can theoretically port any software to it or run a VM in it, that doesn't mean it can support what I'm doing with it well.

0cf8612b2e1e2• 1 year ago

How well does this work? I have been trying to justify this toy to myself. Could it act as a crummy laptop replacement so long as I can dock it with a real monitor and keyboard?

lawn2• 1 year ago

Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right?

I bet it can.

Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category?

They're selling the "obviously terrible" choice, even prioritizing and asking a premium for it.

Furthermore Windows has been the obvious choice for gaming for decades, that SteamOS seems to outclass Windows is indeed noteworthy.

notepad0x906• 1 year ago

Windows has been the choice for gaming, not because windows is great but because game devs supported it primarily. It was no property of windows itself but its market dominance that caused that.

For decades, most gamers preferred consoles, which have a purpose built OS like SteamOS. Windows still supports features that have been around for 3 decades despite their drawbacks and performance issues.

staticman23• 1 year ago

I've had a lot of weird issues with my early model Steam Deck from 2022.

I'd be interested in knowing how these later devices do in basic usability issues like will the device freeze for 30 minutes if booted when your internet is down but your network is up and it can't confirm your Steam credentials on startup.

Will switching inputs on an HDTV result in the dock needing to be disconnected and reconnected before you get a video signal? Etc.

bsimpson2• 1 year ago

Considering a major selling point of handhelds is portability, it's bizarre that Steam insists on trying to log in when you power it on. Even if there are no known wifi hotspots nearby, it will still spend a minute looking for one.

garciansmith• 1 year ago

I have an early model Steam Deck, my network is up but my home internet connection has been down for hours (because Comcast). Just tested this and it boots up immediately like normal, no issues, so I can't reproduce that freezing issue.

staticman23• 1 year ago

I can't guarantee it hasn't been patched- it's not like I frequently boot the Deck when the Internet is down but my network is running- but this reddit thread describes the problem though it seems the existence of a network but no Internet may not have been the trigger, any lack of Internet may have killed it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ynxson/possible_...

As I recall I also hadn't used my Deck for a while.

Daishiman2• 1 year ago

Really amazing how Win32 is now another API that's been essentially virtualized out of Windows with performance improvements on top.

baq3• 1 year ago

It’s the stable ABI that Linux doesn’t want to have so it got shoved down its throat in userspace, with surprisingly good results and a typical 20 years in the making overnight success.

zanecodes4• 1 year ago

I'm convinced that the lack of a stable ABI and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer (requiring drivers to be in the kernel source tree) is what's preventing The Year of the Linux Desktop from ever arriving. I understand the principles behind both decisions, but at some point I think pragmatism should win out. I guess I'm just a bit surprised that no distro has taken up the mantle of providing these things; it seems to me it should be possible to build a stable ABI and HAL on top of the existing Linux kernel.

pjmlp5• 1 year ago

It is an API frozen in Windows XP days, most new additions are based on COM since Vista.

This will work out as long as Microsoft is willing to tolerate it, like netbooks.

inversetelecine• 1 year ago

I guess the OEMs (Lenovo in this case) still don't want support calls about why their game (anti-cheat enabled, fortnite, etc) won't run on their new Legion Go S.

lvass• 1 year ago

Although you may very well be correct, Epic and Lenovo aren't owned by the same entities in paper, and putting it this way is uncalled for.

tines• 1 year ago

This year I switched over to Linux and Mac completely away from my high end Lenovo Windows gaming laptop, using the latter only when absolutely necessary, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m not putting up with ads in my goddamn start menu, opt-out or no.

acd• 1 year ago

When gamers get better FPS on Linux they will switch os.

zamalek2• 1 year ago

Unfortunately draconian anticheat is still rife and prohibits many gamers from switching. Those of us who no longer care about competitive games are fortunate to be able to choose the superior platform.

dralley• 1 year ago

It's already possible with a lot of titles.

POM374• 1 year ago

I personally own the older but almost identical version of the Legion Go and while i really think Steam OS is the defacto better operating system for Handleld gaming i still don't switch because what the article missed is the big buzzword Named Frame Generation. Yes windows has worse performance if you count Frame Gen out. Steam OS saddly had no Framegen on launch and now a relatively Old version of it. I think for handheld gaming this really is the killer feature. You get double or even triple the frames in those More demanding 3d titles, added smoothness for the 2d indi games, and the normally occurring downsides like graphic artefacts are a lot less of a problem because of the smaller screen size. Even on windows Lenovo is slow to update their official Drivers but you can either go directly to AMD or get the asus Handheld drivers instead, if you are willing to jump through the hoops that its. This feature which currently has a lot of bad press(rightly so) really is perfect for Handheld gaming and Valve should be staying on top with the updates more.

jauntywundrkind2• 1 year ago

FSR 3.1 has been supported for over a year. https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1dq8ztk/fsr_31_f...

GE-Proton is easy to add and added FSR4 support in the recent 10.9 release, https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/07/ge-proton-10-9-release...

There are mods for if you have a game that alas uses an icky, proprietary framegen, to use FSR instead. https://www.resetera.com/threads/framegen-mod-available-for-...

Steam's performance hub shows what frame gen is running and how many frames it's generating. Now on the rest of Linux clients too (mangohud is also very popular). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/steam-gets-a-new-steam...

This feature which currently has a lot of bad press(rightly so) really is perfect for Handheld gaming and Valve should be staying on top with the updates more.

There's no company in the history of Linux that has done 1/20th as much to "stay on top with the updates" to Linux.

Definitely deeply considering flipping the bozo bit here! Lot of dad tramboning over things that work, well.

POM374• 1 year ago

That's Interesting to hear, but what i meant was AMDs AMFM 2.1 which is their currently best driver level Frame gen technology , FSR is mainly for Upscaling but also has older Framgen modell but has both performance and quality wise worse Framegen performance.

The mods mostly only change the upscaler aka FSR4 that runs after the generated frame is produced which is of course also important but wasn't my point.

ekianjo2• 1 year ago

framegen cause very noticeable input lag and is really not a good option for action games for example.

POM374• 1 year ago

The newer variants of both AMD and Nvidia have really cut down on the input lag. For example Hollow Night, Monster Hunter and No Rest for the Wicked all had acceptable levels of input lag (10- 25ms added latency) while having a much smoother experience, and even action games can run Great with it, but of course that's also more of a Personal comfortability issue. I would argue the trade-off is worth it, AFMF 2.1 also has way less artifacts in those faster paced games compared to FSR.

Particularly the Z1 chip has many 3D games where you're just shy of 60fps or 30fps mark, that's where Framegen really shines.

Lenovo Legion Go S: Windows 11 vs. SteamOS Performance, and General Availability

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