Adilaris 
When Valve announced it would create its own Steam OS, based off the Linux architecture, it was touted it would have superior performance when compared to running on a Windows OS. This would be due to the lower overhead provided by Steam’s version so the system could focus on just the game rather than dividing resources to other background tasks.
According to Ars Technica’s benchmarking, Steam OS performs significantly worse, anywhere from 20 to almost 60 percent difference, depending on the game and graphical settings; using the same hardware.
Now before we brush off Steam OS as a failure, we have to mention that it’s a long-standing fact that drivers and graphical API’s on Linux are just simply not as mature or robust as those on Windows. This is part of why Windows has been the dominant go-to OS of choice for over 20 years running now, among a list of other factors. Steam OS is still very much in its infancy, and will continue to grow for some time – but more importantly, we have yet to see the implementation of Vulkan. This is a new API from the creators of OpenGL is being designed to have low overhead similar to the likes of AMD’s Mantle and Microsoft’s DX12; with the bonus of being OS agnostic.
The optimistic view is that Valve will have their OS run their games through Vulkan and therefore at least be able to equal, if not surpass Windows in the Benchmarks. Time will tell, but it’s an interesting hurdle to jump.
