April is a very special month at the flibitOffice. Just 5 short years ago, I started working on my very first port, unaware of what was to come. Today, I'm just short of 50 Linux games shipped, including many best-sellers with numerous awards spread throughout the catalog. It's amazing what one person can do in such a short time!

But part of working independently is using the freedom to try new creative things, and to break new ground in areas that may have been stagnating and rotting away with seemingly no desire or chance to recover.

Which is why I'm announcing my entry into the world of entertainment journalism!

I have the great fortune of being able to work entirely independently, and I have now had this privilege for more than half a decade. It should be no surprise that, for my debut content, I am going where no other has gone before: Publishing lots of bar graphs littered with shamelessly transparent editorial commentary masquerading as in-depth technical analysis.

While we will be getting very technical throughout this article, I made my best effort to make the contents of these benchmarks relevant to the average consumer, so the test machine was built with the following:

Intel Core i7-6950X 10-Core CPU, overclocked to 4.5GHz

192GB RAM, DDR4 4266MHz

6x 1TB SSD, RAID 0

GTX 1080 Ti, 3x SLI Configuration

Windows 10 Pro, SteamOS 2.0

While I am writing this wholly and entirely independently, I should disclose that the Windows 10 Pro license, hardware, Starbucks gift card, and additional sponsorship was provided by a representative of the Microsoft Corporation.

With that, let's dive into our first title:

As you can see, both versions of the game are reasonably competitive with one another, which is to be expected given that the game was optimized for the Ouya and thus has a slight bias toward platforms such as SteamOS. But what about other, similar games?

This is where things start to get interesting; as you can see, Rogue Legacy on Windows comes out as a very clear winner over SteamOS. I suspect that this is mostly CPU-bottlenecked, because during the SteamOS benchmark I was actually watching the latest episode of the Nerd Crew with the Steam Overlay, but this does not excuse the hiccup. It's disappointing that SteamOS developers, and indies in particular, have not adopted guaranteed CPU-enhancing APIs like Vulkan as quickly as we would have wanted, in the same way that DirectX 12 unlocked 1080p 60fps on the Xbox One, available now for only $349.99 at your local Caldor.

Axiom Verge is where things got super interesting. At a glance it looks a lot like the TowerFall graph for some reason, and at first I couldn't quite put my finger on why. It's not an Ouya title, it was developed on Windows, and it's really really popular. Something was amiss... then I remembered something important:

The Windows version being comparable makes sense since VSync is turned on, but for SteamOS to barely be competing with hardware that is effectively last-gen is very unbecoming of a platform whose entire existence and sole purpose is centered exclusively around performance and performance alone. Valve may be a large company, but their arrogance and self-proclaimed infallibility shines quite brightly in scenarios such as this one.

Conclusion

From day 1 it seems like article after article has come out with overwhelming negativity towards the Steam Machines (or as I call them, the "GabeCube"), with no sort of positivity in any aspect, no matter how miniscule, or even any sort of concession to the challenge of developing an entirely new platform from scratch in sight. But that in no way means we have set out to destroy it. In particular, by adding the word "hopefully" to the end of this article, I have met my industry-standard requirement of emphasizing 100% nonpartisan research and doing whatever I can to lay down a safety net in the event that this, for some bizarre reason, comes off as a flagrantly rigged system.

Check back next week as we run benchmarks of Thimbleweed Park and System Shock 2, as well as attempt to figure out why Valve have made no effort to bring Bloodborne and Scalebound to their shiny new operating system.

NOTE: This article was inexplicably sponsored by Microsoft Hololens. Hololens: Definitely as smooth, detailed, and functional as its advertising materials suggest.