I think this screenshot is pretty telling.
The battery life test is even more damning. SteamOS in some cases had more than 2x better battery life.
Yeah you’re right, I had mostly been looking at the difference between the steam deck and legion Go S on that chart and barely even noticed the difference between windows on the legion Go S there.
wtf happened at dead cells? I mean I almost don’t believe the results
It just indicates that Dead Cells itself isn’t very demanding, so the power draw in that game converges against idle draw where the issues are most apparent
Windows uses a lot of power just existing, so you can’t get any of the windows handhelds down to a low power consumption. I remember when the Rig Ally first came out, the verge tested it using 5-8w of power on the steam deck, and using 16-22w of power on the Ally. Some of that is the hardware (the Deck has a really power efficient chip for low power games), but a lot of it is windows.
This explains why Windows laptops just randomly start spinning their fans. Random energy consumption -> heat production increased -> fan spins
It takes a lot of power to send half your life to the other side of the world, to MS datawarehouse.
Interesting, I wonder if the games with a bigger improvement is more CPU bound than GPU bound
My understanding is it’s mostly just the advantage of not having windows running hogging resources, so it should be a bigger gain for CPU bound games.
**Edit ** There can be performance gains from using vulkan over DirectX too, so there probably are GPU gains as well. It will depend on the game though
