Valve Corp’s long awaited Steam Machines are finally starting to make their way into the hands of consumers, but recent benchmark tests suggest that the Linux-based SteamOS might not be able to offer the full living room PC gaming experience it had once promised.

According to a report by Ars Technica, several benchmarks have found that SteamOS performs significantly worse than Windows 10, especially when it comes to game performance.

Using a PC with a dual boot installation of both SteamOS and Windows 10, Ars Technica used the Geekbench 3 benchmark tool to test a number of performance factors between the two operating systems, and Windows 10 came out ahead in every category, especially in floating point operations.

An even more telling test evaluated the framerate performance of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro: Last Light, both of which are relatively graphics-intensive games. Ars Technica looked at the framerate of each game at multiple graphics settings, ranging from lowest to ultra, and once again Windows 10 came out on top in every test.

In some cases, framerate performance was more than double on Windows 10 compared to SteamOS, with Shadow of Mordor running at a respectable 34.5 frames per second (FPS) on ultra settings on Windows 10 while it struggled at an abysmal 14.5 FPS on SteamOS. For comparison, 30 FPS is often considered the minimum acceptable framerate for a game, with 60 FPS being preferred by most tech savvy PC gamers.

SteamOS was able to perform well on max settings for several of Valve Corp’s own games, including Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2, but while the gap between SteamOS and Windows was much smaller for these games, Windows still came out ahead in every test.

Who is to blame: SteamOS or the games themselves?

While SteamOS failed to match Windows 10’s performance in any of the tests, this may not necessarily be the fault of the OS itself. The games tested were all originally developed for Windows and consoles like Xbox and PlayStation, and they were only ported to Linux later.

As a result, the poor performance for some of the games may be caused more by problems with the Linux ports themselves than by issues with SteamOS specifically. Of course, this is still bad news for Steam Machines either way, as the effect on potential buyers is the same either way.

In the end, a lack of optimized games would have the same effect on buyers as an inefficient operating system, and Valve will need to prove that Steam Machines can handle the latest games at least as well as modern consoles if it wants them to have any chance of succeeding.

Image credit: Valve Corp