SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains For The Steam Deck

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains For The Steam Deck

Released late on Friday was the much anticipated SteamOS 3.5 preview for the Steam Deck with ongoing work around HDR and enhancing color management, VRR for external USB-C displays, various platform issues resolved, auto-mounting external storage, and more. With SteamOS 3.5 it also means some lower-level OS upgrades too like moving to the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel. For those wondering about the performance impact of going from SteamOS 3.4 stable to the SteamOS 3.5 preview release, here are some early benchmarks on the Steam Deck.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/steamos-35-benchmarks

[Danny3]

Cool!
Hopefully on the next upgrade they will put Linux 6.5 and Mesa 23.2 and the lastest point release of KDE Plasma.

[bple2137]

Cool!
Hopefully on the next upgrade they will put Linux 6.5 and Mesa 23.2 and the lastest point release of KDE Plasma.

Seeing the pace of updates now, next release will probably be Plasma 6.x, and likely not 6.0.
I think it makes sense to keep the LTS kernel and backport what's needed, unless it's rebasing to newer LTS (which 6.5 is not).

[guglovich]

I'm wondering if it's optimized Steam Deck itself or the OS in general for gaming. If CS:GO is that much faster, it would mean an even bigger gap to Windows.

[X_m7]

I wonder what they changed exactly that helped CPU bound games but hindered multi-threaded CPU workloads, I definitely noticed the latter aspect when I ran 3DMark Fire Strike as well as Cinebench R23 out of curiosity and noticed that the physics score for the former and the multi-core score for the latter dropped by about 5%.

On the flip side the single core score for Cinebench R23 actually increased by like 20%, so I guess that improved single threaded performance is what gave those CPU bound games a boost. I didn't notice any difference in games personally, but then again I tend to play on low settings plus a 30-40fps cap and lowered TDP limits so it'd probably take a larger change for me to notice anything different there.

[citral]

Looks pretty good for emulation and cpu heavy games like Valheim

[yump]

Kernel 6.1 means it could have MGLRU, right? I wonder if it's enabled?

[geearf]

Is it easy to rollback an update on the Deck if performance is not adequate?

[slagiewka]

Is it easy to rollback an update on the Deck if performance is not adequate?

When it hits stable - no. When it's in preview - yes. Just change the update channel back to stable and the system will rollback.

[Nille]

When it hits stable - no. When it's in preview - yes.

He can Boot the other system partition. Hold the ... Button and press power while still holding ... Then you can select the system partition you can to boot. that way you can also access grubs boot options of each system partition. for example to reset a password.