Quick background. My primary gaming is done on a Promox host running Wolf in a LXC. I use this combined with Moonlight to stream my games to various screens around the house. For on the go and couch gaming I use a Lenovo Legion Go running SteamOS. I also own a MacBook Pro.
I decided to see how well each of them perform for gaming, because why not? I used Borderlands 3 as my benchmark since it was the only game I own that runs without issue on all three and has a built in tool.
All tests were done on High settings with Vsync disabled. The DX12 tests did have FSR2 enabled and set to Balanced. Prices are in USD. Now for the contenders...
WOLF
- Proxmox host is an i7 12700KF, 64GB DDR4 3600Mhz RAM, and a Radeon 7900 GRE running Proxmox 9.0.10
- The LXC Container for Wolf is running Ubuntu 25.04 and has 12 Cores with 16GB RAM with the 7900GRE Bind mounted to it.
- I can find a pretty comparable machine on Amazon for $1,900 and estimate I spent about $1,500 on it.
Lenovo Legion Go (1st Gen)
- The Legion Go has an AMD z1e with 16GB of DDR5 RAM. It is running SteamOS 3.7.15.
- All benchmarks were performed in Performance mode connected to a 100W USB C PD charger.
- Retail on this is $749. I picked up mine open box for $450.
MacBook Pro M3
- This model has the higher end M3 Pro with 12 CPU cores and 18 GPU Cores. 18GB of RAM and 1TB of Storage.
- All benchmarks were performed connected to a 100W USB C PD Charger and using CrossOver v25.1.1.
- Retail on this is $2399 but I picked it up for $1499.
Below are the raw numbers. Comments, questions, suggestions, WTF am I doing?
Apple is trying to get games running on macOS, most obviously with the Game Porting Toolkit to make it easier for developers to release Mac versions, but they still face an uphill climb mostly because of the reputation that Macs can’t run games. Of course, Apple would also prefer that these games be sold on the App Store instead of Steam or the Epic Games Store, and I think a lot of developers aren’t too interested in that.
It would be funny if gaming on Linux ends up getting more traction than macOS because of Valve’s efforts with Proton despite the much larger macOS market share.
I'd argue it already has honestly.
As far as Steam goes, Linux is already a full 1% ahead of MacOS in market share. Windows is still massively dominant.
I think it's a bit redundant to say Windows is still massively dominant. If that weren't the case, it would be all anyone was talking about on Lemmy.