New AMD Linux Patch Boosts Low-End Gaming Performance on Steam Deck
Freeman writes:
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.
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