I purchased an Acer 516 Chromebook GE [OSIRIS] from ebay (i5-1240P, Iris Xe Graphics 8GB, 125GB, 1440p 120Hz).
I am considering booting windows/fedora/ubuntu on it.
My question is:
Is this rarity of a gaming chromebook having Iris Xe graphics supported driver-wise on Linux/Windows?
The documentation says graphics accl. is supported; but is nevertheless vague in this case. Need coloquial evidence/confirmation.
If YES then is there a significant performance penalty in flashing Windows/Linux on this chromebook?
LMK if anyone has tried light gaming on this device because hardware-wise it is plenty capable of it.
P.S.: Yes I know that I can get steam installed officially but the officially supported games are abysmal and older titles that havent been updated for years.
P.P.S.: If noone has tried comparing performance, I might tank one for the team and do some of my own sleuth work and release it here. LMK if anyone is interested!!
Windows is the obvious choice if you want to run Steam games. You’d just download and install the Iris Xe graphics driver for Windows straight from Intel so I wouldn’t think there’d be any difference in performance.
There are other users with Osiris so I’m sure they’ll chime in at some point with more detail about personal experience.
In my opinion if you just want to play Steam games then ChromeOS is the best OS for this Chromebook because it has Steam officially supported and you know everything will work as expected.
Have you tried enabling support for other games in the ChromeOS Steam app? That basically gives you the same Steam games as a normal Linux distro would.
I tried playing DoTA 2 (Dota 2 on Steam) after installing Steam on Chrome OS stable (121.0.6167.212).
Without changing any of the default steam settings and reducing all ingame settings to the lowest possible value, even reducing the resolution to 360p (so everything except limiting max FPS and disabling shader caching), I am getting at most 30-40 FPS after the game is loaded.
I consider this horrendously bad considering the game is running on a 16 thread processor, and Dota generally being a CPU bound game.
However, DoTA 2 is not on the officially supported games list (like most games that are updated actively) and in no way is considered a well optimized game.
I was expecting a more of an accepatble 60~ fps (low settings) in DoTA 2 because I can achieve an average FPS of 120+ (low settings) on another laptop that is way worse on paper running Windows 10 (8gb RAM, i5-1135G7, Iris Xe).
Maybe someone who has already booted Windows/Linux on OSIRIS, could compare my numbers to his own considering DoTA 2 is a free to play game.
Or else I might just have to chrultrabook my OSIRIS and find the answer myself.
If you can get 120+ FPS on i5-1135G7 on Windows then you’ll probably get similar results on your Osiris on Windows. I guess Dota 2 has a lot of performance loss when translating to Linux.
