It’s easy to groan when a new Windows Update arrives. TRUE, right now, Windows? What does this guy destroy? do you really need it? “Remember later. ” On the other hand, new versions of the Linux kernel always seem like small events in the open source community, promising exciting new features and performance improvements for so many devices running Linux. The kernel is the fundamental building block of Linux, and turns many distributions like Ubuntu and Arch (which Valve’s SteamOS is based on) into full-fledged operating systems.
We know Steam Deck is nothing without powerful options and everything in PC gaming.
Pierre Lou Griffe
SteamOS 3.5, Valve’s next big update, will upgrade the Linux kernel for the first time since its launch, so Steam Deck will soon be sharing in the excitement of that “new kernel day.” This means there are many benefits for Steam Deck owners, most of which you probably won’t even notice.
Updating the kernel “means getting closer to the latest and greatest, with many great additions, performance fixes, and feature fixes that improve every aspect of the system,” says Valve’s Pierre- Loup Griffais told PC Gamer. “When it comes to core features, running games, and performance, these kinds of fixes are mostly unobtrusive at this point, so you can’t expect any transformations there.”
However, that summary is tricky. Valve has one important performance fix for Steam Decks coming with SteamOS 3.5. Steam Deck’s processors support a common modern feature called SMT (simultaneous multithreading). You might be more familiar with Intel’s name Hyper-Threading. Simply put, SMT is the ability to run two threads on one CPU core. While this should be an overall performance improvement, obscure issues in the Linux kernel that shipped with the Steam Deck resulted in actual performance degradation in some cases. strike.
“Previously, there was a behavior hard-coded into the Linux kernel on AMD’s side. When a core went to sleep, it invalidated its caches. This meant that caches could no longer be valid by the time the core woke up. because of the nature of it,” says Griffais. “It turns out that if you have two threads on the same core and one thread is still working on something and the second SMT thread goes to sleep, it uses the same logic to destroy the cache. So , the running thread suddenly loses its L3 cache.As for the CPU, it’s really bad.It has to re-fetch everything from memory. “bubble” in computing. And your frame time will be shit. So that was what was happening. ”
AMD found and fixed the issue before Valve identified it. In fact, it was the SteamOS developers’ way of understanding what was going on. A kernel update will finally allow us to roll it out to our users.
This issue mostly raised its head in older games and affected modern emulators that weren’t built for multithreading. If you’ve ever experienced loud stutters or strangely low framerates in older games, SMT may be the culprit. Depending on what you play with your deck, you may not even notice the change.
However, some Steam Deck owners noticed the problem and started using plugins. power tools Disable SMT. Griffais said there were calls for Valve to integrate that feature into his SteamOS, but that wasn’t the route they wanted.
“Instead of adding a very counterintuitive setting that didn’t need to be disabled, we had to fix the bug that people had to deal with,” he said. “Overall it should perform better. So rather than adding options that can be counter-intuitive and hard for people to use, I wanted to look at the actual root cause of the problem. Especially , if you already have a mod, do so in the meantime.”
Griffais praised some of the plug-ins that the Steam Deck tinkerer has developed, but the way he describes Valve’s approach to the SMT problem is unlike other game consoles, which Deck has to achieve. I highlighted the tricky balance.
“We were always asking, ‘Is this a very complicated power-user product? ’,” he said. “We realize Steam Deck is nothing without options and all the power of PC gaming. It stands for PC gaming. But there is a lot of value in having that appliance-like experience I want everyone to have access to both, and I didn’t want to be in a situation where I had to turn off some settings to make it work. I just wanted to.”
Based on internal testing, Griffais believes that the SteamOS 3.5 update should eliminate the need to disable SMT, but to confirm the bug has been fully eliminated it will take You will need data.
SteamOS 3.5 will also include new graphics drivers, but Valve has quickly tracked some of the updates to 3.4.6, which was released on March 13th, resident evil 4 remakeOnce 3.5 arrives, it will be tested on the Steam Deck Preview Channel until it’s ready for a stable release.
