B ack in LXF280 we reported on how Valve was preparing to launch its Steam Deck handheld console, which runs Linux in the guise of its Arch-based SteamOS 3.0 distro, and it appears that work is bringing benefits to other Linux gamers as well. As Tom’s Hardware reports (https://bit.ly/lxf282valveamd), Valve has been working with AMD to create a new CPU driver that will improve the performance and power efficiency of Zen-based AMD processors on the Linux platform – which includes the Steam Deck.
As AMD developer Ray Huang explained at the recent X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021), Valve discovered issues with the current ACPI CPUFreq driver, which was impacting performance with games running on Proton. Proton is a fork of Wine that was co-created by Valve to enable Windows-only games to run on Linux. Valve is understandably keen to make sure that everything runs as smoothly as possible, which meant creating a new driver to replace the ACPI driver that had originally been created by Intel for its firstgeneration Core processors.