Well, the Steam Deck is meant as a dedicated gaming PC, and explicitly supports replacing the OS, so Windows performance is eminently relevant.

Also, every single reference to Windows is in the context of testing whether the performance issues they're seeing are OS or hardware related, which is exactly the sort of analysis work I'd like to see more of.

It’s explicitly a Linux gaming PC. Do you see people benchmarking BeOS on their Surface?

No, I don't see people benchmarking BeOS on a Surface. Then again, I've never heard anybody say "well, if this whole Windows thing doesn't work out, I'll install Be on my Surface".

At any rate, this article isn't about the Steam Deck's performance, it's about Van Gogh specifically, and how it relates to other pieces of Zen 2 hardware. Testing with both Linux and Windows is useful. There's a comment elsewhere in this discussion by a Valve engineer saying that one of the issues the author saw is due to an ACPI handling issue in Linux. That's the sort of thing you catch by testing with multiple OSes.

(author here) full disclosure, I work at Microsoft. On Azure though, not on Windows.

But using Windows, as another commentator pointed out, was done because my latency test gave very weird results from SteamOS and needed more investigation. I also used Windows to test the iGPU because Nemes's Vulkan test ran into problems under SteamOS.

Thanks, I just don’t know how relevant the results are under Windows though. It looks like you think the L3 “disappeared” but that just doesn’t make sense.

Probably does makes sense as a comparison to the Linux part of the review, and for investigating differences.

It's not like the Linux review part was completely skipped, which would make the review a bit silly.

They are not relevant, the author made a totally irrational choice by benchmarking under Windows, not realizing the Deck is marketed as a Linux machine first and foremost, and they should be ashamed of themself.

From the first day the Steam Deck was released, ALL FORUMS, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND OTHER ONLINE OUTLETS, BLOGS, AND THE TECH PRESS has been repeating the doubtless paid Microsoft astroturf that "it'll be a great Windows gaming platform" and lo and behold, we get yet another article in this vein.

It's like Linux on the Switch - you don't see the gaming press benchmarking the Switch using Linux. But then again the Linux Foundation doesn't pay thousands of "people" in the gaming press to astroturf its product. Microsoft does.