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.

In being curious about the performance of the Arch Linux powered SteamOS 3.5 update, I ran some initial benchmarks over the weekend looking at the impact of SteamOS 3.5 preview as of 15 September compared to SteamOS 3.4 stable.

With the SteamOS 3.5 upgrade it means going from Linux 5.15 to Linux 6.1. Keep in mind that Valve also back-ports various changes to their SteamOS kernel and isn't just a straight-forward Linux upstream kernel. Another significant upgrade is the user-space Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver components with now moving from a Mesa 22.2-based graphics stack to one based on Mesa 23.1.3, of which Valve's Linux graphics gurus are also likely back-porting more patches onto that stable Mesa 23.1 base. SteamOS 3.5 also moves from KDE Plasma 5.26 to 5.27 on the desktop along with having various other package upgrades for its Arch Linux base.

A variety of games were benchmarked on SteamOS 3.4 stable vs. 3.5 preview plus some additional Linux CPU workloads in just getting an overall idea for the performance of this forthcoming SteamOS upgrade for the Steam Deck.