Steam Deckusers may receive another batch of performance improvements with SteamOS 3.5, according to a Valve coder. Featuring a custom set of AMD-provided hardware, Valve’s handheld gaming PC has steadily been getting better and better as time goes on, and this is bound to continue for the foreseeable future, it would seem.
As many AMD users may already know, the hardware manufacturer’s CPUs leverage SMT (simultaneous multithreading) to improve their performance and efficiency, but the feature doesn’t perform all that great across the board, with some games doing way better with it turned off. Valve’sSteam Deckmay take this into account in the near future, according to authoritative sources.
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Now that theSteam Deck has over 7,000 compatible games, it’s been made obvious that a not insignificant number of them aren’t performing as well as they probably could. One of the potential problems in this regard was SMT itself, but Valve software developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has now confirmed that the company is looking at ways to alleviate the problem. According to Griffais, SteamOS 3.5 will be able to turn SMT on or off, depending on whether the given game performs better with it enabled or disabled, which may lead to significant performance increases in select cases.
Given that Valve is banking heavily on its Linux-based gaming system, it’s not too strange to see that the company is very hands-on with such improvements. Earlier this year,Valve fixed Ubisoft games not workingon the Steam Deck, which means that the team working on the device’s software is both keeping its ear to the ground and capable of pulling off some impressive feats without input from publishers and developers.
Of course, Valve does have its sights set rather high. On top of all the big improvements the company’s made to gaming on Linux, it’s also looking to bring the operating system up to par with Windows in other respects. For example,Valve is developing HDR for Linuxright now, and considering how unreliable the feature is on Windows, it’s entirely feasible that SteamOS may end up beating it in this respect.
Not everything is milk and honey, however. Those who’ve been using the Steam Deck for a while may remember that Valve made a serious blunder late in 2022. Specifically, anuntested Steam Deck update changed SD card pathsout of the blue, breaking applications and emulator setups for a wide variety of users. Though the change was reverted the next day, the plan is still to reimplement it later on in order to maintain format parity with other, more widespread Linux distributions.
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