It’s no secret that the ACPI CPUFreq driver code has at times been less than ideal on recent AMD processors with delivering less than expected performance/behavior with being slow to ramp up to a higher performance state or otherwise coming up short of disabling the power management functionality outright. AMD hasn’t traditionally worked on the Linux CPU frequency scaling code as much as Intel does to their P-State scaling driver and other areas of power management at large.
[…]
AMD and Valve have been working to improve the performance/power efficiency for modern AMD platforms running on Steam Play (Proton / Wine) and have spearheaded “[The ACPI CPUFreq driver] was not very performance/power efficiency for modern AMD platforms…a new CPU performance scaling design for AMD platform which has better performance per watt scaling on such as 3D game like Horizon Zero Dawn with VKD3D-Proton on Steam.”
Valve has single-handedly made Linux a viable choice for people who play games, and with the Steam Deck on its way, their efforts are only going to ramp up. They’re doing this for their own bottom line, of course, but this is one of those cases where a corporate interest lines up perfectly with a consumer interest.
“Valve has single-handedly”… I would gently point out the giant work done by Wine contributors over the decades.
Yes, Valve did the last push, and they were at the right time with the right stuff. But many people had contributed to this success.
So Steam Machines weren’t a complete flop? Guess I never got that memo…
Yes, it was a flop. But then so was Windows 1.0 and the Apple Lisa. That doesn’t mean you should give up. Sure, making their own hardware was (and probably still is, i see you there, Steam Deck) a dead end, but that doesn’t mean the concept of gaming on Linux is a bad idea. In fact, Linux probably has more games supporting it than MacOS does
From what we’ve seen of it so far, I think the Steam Deck will be anything but a dead end. The GPD series of handheld PCs has shown there is a market, and while GPD’s build quality and support are both greatly lacking (especially recently with the Win 3), Valve has the advantage of standing on their shoulders to make a much better product. I put in a pre-order the minute they went live, not because I need another toy, but because I want to see just how great a device like that can be with AMD and Valve working hand-in-hand on it. The fact that it runs Linux (even if it’s the meh Arch distro) is just icing.
> even if it’s the meh Arch distro
This is actually probably part of why they’re going to do better with the Steam Deck than the older Steam Machine stuff. SteamOS was based on Debian, which is _notorious_ for taking forever to update a lot of stuff. The net result of that was a need for both a greater deal of complexity on Valve’s side of things and more difficulty among manufacturers in getting their brand new hardware to work 100% correctly with it. Arch has neither of those issues, which will free up a lot of engineering resources at Valve to actually work on more important things.
Yeah I was mostly joking with the “meh” part (an allusion to the “I use Arch BTW” meme), it’s a much better direction than Debian. I’m also thrilled it will use KDE Plasma as the non-Steam interface.
Debian stable is fine… now that backports is an official repository and has much better support. Problem with SteamOS going from Debian Stable to Arch is like you’ve gone from being a slow and methodical release method to things changing daily. While SteamOS 3.0 isn’t out yet, I’m hoping they don’t just full on use Arch as a base (which I normally hate distributions that don’t use the upstream repositories yet claim they are $distro based) but in this case, I can’t imagine it going well when the random thing breaks in Arch Linux affects everyone running a Steam Deck.
Also, I’ve yet to try Plasma on a 7″ screen. Maybe I should test it out on my GPD Win2 and see how that plays out (though last time I tried Linux on it, it was annoying with the screen rotation, as it’s literally just running a phone’s screen and thinks it should be in that mode by default.)
I didn’t suggest they Valve give up on Linux. I just think comments like the one I quoted are bloated at best. Valve absolutely did not do anything “single-handedly”, and even if you play along with that just for kicks, saying they “made Linux a viable choice for people who play games” without also saying Linux has a teeny tiny 1% of the pc gaming market. Something only true due to a technicality is not reason for me to get a hard one over. For this to become interesting, Valve has to 1) follow through, something they’re not great at, and 2) more than a handful of people have to care enough to invest their hard-earned money into it.
Handhelds have their place in gaming, no question. However, I’m not convinced there’s any huge untapped gaming market (or market in general) for handheld pcs. The vast vast majority of desktop pc gamers are adults while the opposite is true for handhelds. I don’t know many adults who long for their desktop pc games to be available on massively smaller displays and portable. Maybe that’s a thing in Asia, and there _are_ a ton of people there, but here in the northern and southern American markets beyond a *con, seeing an adult playing a handheld is like seeing a unicorn. I concede the market isn’t zero, but I very much am skeptical of how much of a market there really is. If this goes nowhere my surprise level will be 0%. If the opposite happens the opposite will be true. I don’t think I’m wrong for wanting proof over text/hype.
Well, I mostly see these x86 handhelds like a hybrid between a laptop and a switch. The best of both worlds. Now take photos with it and get phone calls and I bet you don’t need anything more. A dock, a wireless keyboard and you’re done.
Sounds like an x86-based tablet with a controller stuck to the side instead of via bluetooth.
@friedchicken
Personally, having tried using a Bluetooth controller with a tablet, I’ll take a fixed controller any day. Unless you’re sitting at a table or desk with the tablet propped in a stand at just the right angle, it’s uncomfortable and unwieldy. And if you’re doing that, you may as well be playing on a laptop or desktop PC. I’m with Kochise, a good dock-able x86 handheld with good gaming controls and a desktop class SoC is a dream machine. More portable than a laptop, more powerful than a tablet, more fun than either.
Ha, get a SIP line and forward cell calls? Done? Not sure about the camera part. Sure someone will make a little webcam for it if it doesn’t already have one.
It still blows my mind… I still remember compiling my own libraries to get one of the most advanced Linux game at the time, Tux Racer, to run on my computer.
But now, I can open Steam, purchase Doom Eternal, click run, and everything just works. Even controller rumble support.
I barely check for compatibility any more. The only game I bought that had zero Linux support was Space Channel 5 Part 2, so I just did a quick refund, no problem. XD
I returned to Linux after many years on Windows. Gone were the days when you had to tinker with Wine settings for hours to get anything to run. Pretty much every game I tested on Steam just worked. Some even better than on Windows. Valve has done a great job for gaming on Linux. I don’t have much time for games nowdays but it’s good to have the option available.
Valve is a little like Tesla here, they have productised based on the work of others but have the name and following to turn the industry on it’s head… Using Linux is now more than viable for gamers, just as Tesla forced other car manufacturers to wake up and release compelling EV’s.
I really hope the home-goal of Windows 11 requiring TPU 2.0 will give Linux a push … especially in the current climate of e-waste = bad and lack of silicon availability – now is NOT the time to be pushing people to upgrade.
Game developers should also think about making games performant without some features for older hardware instead of just sucking.
What’s sad is the power of current (and older) hardware is far enough to run most things, yet Windows and even Linux ditch support on pretty arbitrary points. Ie, my 2011 laptop (Dell Vostro 3555 AMD A8-3500M) is abandoned while still in perfectly working condition and able to crunch as many bytes/s as before, but no, not secure anymore, people cannot “support endlessly” old hardware.
Pretty much the same excuse for OEM to abandon their Android based smartphones after a couple of years. Should I really put $400-$800 in a new one every couple of years ? Ok, the upgrade of quality and functionality could be fine, but I don’t think it worth that much compared to the previous model. e-waste is a far larger problem caused by capitalism and greed, workers are not the one that really benefit from it (regarding their wages especially when outsourced to Asia).
Anyway, even if Valve used many things already existing, at least they did it efficiently enough to be successful. I bet it could be the Android of handhelds at that point. I wouldn’t compare them to Tesla though.
i’m not sure what part of Linux you think abandons older hardware? Linux kernel still supports the 486 — finding a distro that supports it may be trickier but you could easily run a lightware DE such as LXDE for a perfectly usable desktop on older hardware.
My comparison to Tesla (I thought I was clear) was around being the champion and driver for a particular technology and making it popular, I guess that’s where the similarities end.