SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains For The Steam Deck

[schmidtbag]

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.

Considering how much performance has improved, and, that there are regressions, I think that makes it pretty clear the OS is what got updated and not the hardware/firmware.

[geearf]

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

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.

How many system partitions can you have? Is it just limited by drive space? That'd be great for gaming on the go, no need to fix anything when something gets weird or perf drop.

[X_m7]

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

Running `cat /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled` on my Deck returns `0x0007`, like on my main system running kernel 6.5, so it seems like it is indeed enabled.

[guglovich]

Considering how much performance has improved, and, that there are regressions, I think that makes it pretty clear the OS is what got updated and not the hardware/firmware.

But the OS also includes driver updates and stuff, I guess the FPS doesn't increase only because of the firmware. So I wonder if the overall performance of the game among distributions also increased a lot, for example because of amdgpu + Mesa update, and maybe DXVK-native update, if Valve games are based on it.

[Nille]

How many system partitions can you have? Is it just limited by drive space? That'd be great for gaming on the go, no need to fix anything when something gets weird or perf drop.

There are 2. System A and System B. If you are on B and install a System Update it write the changes to A and set it as the next Boot Partition.

[geearf]

There are 2. System A and System B. If you are on B and install a System Update it write the changes to A and set it as the next Boot Partition.

I see, thank you!

[schmidtbag]

But the OS also includes driver updates and stuff, I guess the FPS doesn't increase only because of the firmware. So I wonder if the overall performance of the game among distributions also increased a lot, for example because of amdgpu + Mesa update, and maybe DXVK-native update, if Valve games are based on it.

Well that's kind of saying what I was saying: yes, I think it's likely the kernel and drivers have a lot to do with the improvements. You mentioned Windows performance though, so, what Valve did is highly unlikely to affect that. Other distros are likely to improve but perhaps not as much if Valve did any fine-tuning for their own distro.