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?

  • jakepi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    4·
    17 hours ago

    Wolf does use Sunshine for streaming.

    Wolf is a full stack vs Sunshine being a single app. Wolf packages up your OS, Steam, and Sunshine in an entire container for you to run.

    I did have a dedicated host and sunshine at one point. I find Wolf easier because containers and I can utilize my existing server hardware. Being able to fire up a docker and having it handle everything for me was easier than maintaining another PC.

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      Thanks for the break down. I researched both based on your post because my beefy gaming desktop is in our living room so my SO can play BG3 on it on a Windows partition (pre-native Linux), so my proxmox testing has taken a sideline.

      Based on what you’ve said and what I’ve researched, I should be able to stream anything my PC can handle to both my deck, and to the Anbernic Win600 I bought my SO.

      I really just need to max my ram out to 128gb and maybe throw in my R9 390 as a secondary GPU.

      • jakepi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        If you have a dedicated PC, no Proxmox required. You could just put Debian and Docker, throw Wolf on top. Having dual GPU in a Proxmox host could be great though. You could use one GPU for the host and passthrough the second GPU to a VM that is exclusively used for Wolf.

        I say this because I know that running docker nested inside of an LXC is generally frowned upon, though I have about half a dozen LXCs doing this. I also think my issue with Doom Dark Ages might be related to it not liking being on a docker container, on a LXC, on a Linux host. I have wondered if the very strict DRM in Doom isn’t bugging out?

        One beefy GPU should easily handle two handhelds since the resolution tends to be low. 128GB of RAM would be great but I get by with 64GB for my Proxmox host and it is pretty heavily utilized.

        Good luck with your project!