As the Steam Deck slowly marches toward its fifth birthday next February, owners are likely eager for a way to extend its life rather than investing in expensive high-end competition. A new patch for AMD's Linux drivers could substantially reduce low-end frame hitches when the Steam Deck or other AMD-based gaming hardware is running in Energy Performance Preference (EPP) mode.
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Vernet's patch instead monitors cores to look for situations where a busy thread would benefit from an improved clock rate. The patch then temporarily sets just that core to the "performance" setting until the workload slows enough to downshift back into energy-saving EPP mode.The nitty-gritty implementation at a kernel level gets pretty complicated—read through Vernet's write-up for all the details. But the worst-case performance improvements seem clear in early testing. Vernet's testing on Civilization VI benchmarks saw a 31.8 percent improvement in the "1% low" fps measurement, and 4.1 percent faster p99 frame generation times (i.e., the point where 99 percent of frames are generated at least that quickly).
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We'll likely have to wait for Vernet's submitted patch to be integrated into the full AMD Linux kernel to see how the new feature fares on other common gaming benchmarks. Regardless, it's nice to see that low-level Linux coding updates are still wringing some performance improvements from Valve's quickly aging handheld hardware.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday July 31, @02:44PM (1 child)
Great news, for anyone who already owned a Steam Deck. While this would also benefit anyone who would be interested in buying a Steam Deck now. The significant price hike on 5+ year old hardware is quite the pill to swallow. Even, if Valve is still supporting it. I've been interested in the Steam Deck for some time. However, I just don't commute / travel enough for it to be worth it. With the recent price hike, it's an even worse idea for me. The now only sell a base model and a premium model and increased the cost of each approximately 50%. That's absurd, but falls in line with the whole RAM+Storage cost insanity.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Friday July 31, @03:00PM
The Steam Machine is a much better deal, if you don't require the device specific functionality of a handheld gaming device. Beyond which, you can still build yourself a better steam machine for barely cheaper than a Steam Machine. https://newegg.io/2afd129 [newegg.io] $1001.31 (8GB GPU). For not a lot more than that you can a significantly better GPU: https://newegg.io/2afd129 [newegg.io] $1151.33 (16GB GPU). As long as you go all AMD, it should "just work" with SteamOS as your OS. Though, you're certainly free to go with your flavor of Linux or Windows. Though, if you go with windows you'd be paying the price of the 16GB GPU build for the 8G build+Windows.
Then upgrade the RAM+Storage in a year or two when the RAM + Storage pricing becomes less stupid and/or just keep an eye out on the used market for RAM+Storage deals.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"