Wednesday, July 15th 2026
Windows 11 vs Linux Gaming Test Reveals There's More to It Than FPS
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, where viewers expressed their opinions after having switched to Linux. For starters, there were many comments that questioned the use of vanilla Fedora over something like Bazzite, CachyOS, or Nobara Linux, which employ more recent kernel versions and tweaks and optimizations to both the kernel and the OS in order to boost performance.
There were also comments noting that a less-than-10% performance boost isn't worth having to deal with Windows and Microsoft's decisions surrounding privacy, AI, and UI. There are also comments arguing that Linux performance would be comparatively better had the system been running less powerful hardware or slightly older hardware, like an RDNA 3 GPU, for instance, because Linux tends to run leaner, with less bloat eating up background resources. There are also valid arguments about forced updates, which have been known to break Windows features, cause instability, or, in rare cases, even potentially damage hardware.
Source:
Meta PCs on YouTube
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.
There were also comments noting that a less-than-10% performance boost isn't worth having to deal with Windows and Microsoft's decisions surrounding privacy, AI, and UI. There are also comments arguing that Linux performance would be comparatively better had the system been running less powerful hardware or slightly older hardware, like an RDNA 3 GPU, for instance, because Linux tends to run leaner, with less bloat eating up background resources. There are also valid arguments about forced updates, which have been known to break Windows features, cause instability, or, in rare cases, even potentially damage hardware.
66 Comments on Windows 11 vs Linux Gaming Test Reveals There's More to It Than FPS
Good part can be disabled - but average user doesn't know to do that, or worse - it just repeat some instructions from internet, and then wreck his system durign next Windows update. Truth to be told, following instructions from web blindly will get you into same wreck on Linux too...You watch Settings up while it is searching? Why? It is running in background, who cares.
As for relatively high CPU usage - it is not just issue with updates, and it is connected closely to Microsoft not caring (that is why I said Windows is dying), obscene amounts of telemetry (removing it halves CPU usage) and huge amount of backward-compatibility (so I can run Prince of Persia for DOS relatively easy, so, thanks for that and I would not want it otherwise).
However, if I need to do such setup to make Windows bearable - I can as well switch to Linux. Average user... well, he is screwed.Average users install all kinds of garbage over and over. Clicks on links, opens unchecked emails... And malware spreads. On any platform that is used by billions of users. Same will be with Linux.Like I said, wait when Linux have 50% market share and enjoy security migtation through kernel :) :) :)
No matter how good Linux has been over the past 30 years, it only became popular once someone started pushing for gaming support—that’s when it began to gain popularity.
Because, as we know, we can do whatever we want since we know how, but that doesn’t matter to a new user—they’ll use whatever someone teaches them.
This matches my experience.
Windows tends to run faster even with more processes in the background than Linux.
But Android is dominating other markets so Linux is still thriving
But don’t expect it to run as smoothly with every game as Linux does, especially when there are “more background processes.” ;)
As you can see here as an example, Linux loads the scenes in 3.284 seconds, while Windows takes 4.406 seconds. You can try it on your own system, and I'd be surprised if your load time is under 10 seconds.
And I can show you plenty of “numbers” too.
I don’t hate it—Windows still has a lot of features that make life easier for users than Linux does, especially when it comes to temperature sensors, where Linux lags significantly behind.
On windows 11, the vast majority of items on the OS load almost instantly, except for parts of the file explorer which they managed to mess up.
Some Linux distros have similar issues with unnecessary animations and transition effects to load aspects of the OS that would otherwise load effectively instantly.
Back to subject - Windows 11 have couple of key problems that Microsoft induced that paints a picture of slow OS:
1) Windows Explorer changes that lead to bad performance and issues. Windows 10 Explorer works perfectly and snappy. Unfortunately, this is not easy to solve or avoid.
2) Bad OneDrive integration: unfrotunately, I am user of OneDrive. It used to be great, but Microsoft vibe-coding lead to multiple issues with performance, that are felt both in Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office apps. Users blame apps, but actually it is OneDrive integraton that is causing issues. Once OneDrive is disabled, most issues are gone. I find ti puzzling that i.e. Yandex Disk app is so much more efficent and performant than OneDrive itself.
3) Webapps - Windows first-party apps like Photos and new Outlook are painfully slow because they are not proper apps - but web wrappers instead.
Once you remove issues 2 and 3, you are left only with Windows Explorer bugs - but you can restore Windows 10 Explorer and use it instead.
Voila - Win 11 becomes very performant OS again.
And then disable bigger part of telemetry (part, because not all can be disabled) and it becomes very good. With all tweaks, Win11 is faster, more reliable and secure than Windows 7 was. However, apps for Windows are sorely lacking these days. But that goes for all desktop apps in general - Linux have same issue, too.
This is more work than setting up some of "more-user-friendly" Linux distros. Terrible.