Tweaking SteamOS For Better Steam Deck Performance

A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck. Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.

The set of changes include setting the Steam Deck's Van Gogh APU to the performance governor, adjusting the MGLRU settings, adjusting the memlock values, setting the I/O scheduler to Kyber, silencing the watchdog timer, and avoiding extra operations on file access times. See this blog post for all the details and instructions.

Following my recent SteamOS 3.4 vs. SteamOS 3.5 Preview benchmarks, I repeated the SteamOS 3.5 Preview run while applying these optimizations as recommended. No other changes were made to the Steam Deck besides making the noted changes and then repeating the benchmarks.