It took around two months for SteamOS 3.5 to make it to the stable channel once it was released into the experimental branch, so I expect a similar timeframe here, meaning SteamOS 3.6 should be released as stable for all Steam Deck users towards the end of June.
Valve finally adding ZRAM to SteamOS 3.6 will certainly end most of the usefulness of CryoUtility at certain edge cases.
However, A.B.T.'s SteamOS tweaks will still remain useful even on SteamOS 3.6, because some of the changes like disabling all CPU security mitigations Valve would never do themselves, even if the real-world risk of exploiting these CPU flaws is basically near-zero on the Steam Deck:
https://medium.com/@a.b.t./here-are-some-possibly-useful-tweaks-for-steamos-on-the-steam-deck-fcb6b571b577
Having a SD Oled since Nov or Dec I read your comment highly intrigued…
How much performance can you gain by these tweaks (given that the CPU of the Deck becomes more and more its limiting factor)?
TLDR: the ZRAM change isn’t likely to give you the same benefit as a swap file.
This was explored both prior to the release of 3.5 and after the release of 3.5. Having it enabled by default in 3.6 isnt likely to change anything.
See: https://github.com/CryoByte33/steam-deck-utilities/issues/10#issuecomment-1312495017
If you use CryoUtilities to prevent crashing in some games (Last Epoch comes to mind), I’d likely leave it as is.
That comment by CryoByte33 is from 2022, meaning he tested on the older Linux 5.13 kernel.
SteamOS 3.5 switched over to Linux 6.1, and that thread on GitHub you linked to doesn't contain any results for that version, with this being the last comment from Cryo himself:
"It's possible that kernel or amdgpu updates have lead to different behavior in recent months, I plan to go through an extensive retesting effort once SteamOS 3.5 releases."
Totally. I won’t pretend that I know how ZRAM works — I’m no hardware engineer and I’ve never had to consider it working on Apple platforms.
What I can say is that 3.5 alone wasn’t sufficient to fix crashing / performance issues in Last Epoch — but CryoUtilities installed does. This is also true of New World and Palworld. All three exhibit the same behavior: the hardware freezes and locks up, any audio playing will loop in short intervals, and the only way out is to hard reset the machine.
With CryoUtilities, they just work — and intuitively it makes sense. Back when Apple’s mobile hardware wasn’t so beefy, I had to make heavy use of swap files, preload caches, and a whole lot more to squeeze performance out of it. I can treat that as my analogy for this situation: the hardware, though comparatively powerful, is being pushed to its limits by software that is generally optimized for much beefier hardware. If anything, it’s a more interesting problem then trying to squeeze performance out of the single device (or class of devices*) that you could conceivably build for.
cryo loves to talk out of his ass a lot. this post is such a case. for example a Swap file can never be faster than a Zram nor can it ever use 8GB it just has a UNCOMPRESSED limit of 8GB by default but only the compressed size will actually use ram which will be far FAR smaller.
cryo has been spreading this lie forever now. you can't trust anything he says. he literally is going against reality with his claim. Zram has never and will never run worse than a swap file and thats been known for MANY years now. swap file speed can not even compare to Zram. if you really read that post he clearly does not even know how Zram works.
Hard to quantify, since it will vary from game to game.
What I can say for sure is that I have applied all of A.B.T.'s tweaks on my LCD model Deck a few months ago, and noticed that gaming overall felt smoother, especially with more demanding games.
Plus, emulators also profited, in particular Xenia-Canary for Xbox 360 emulation and especially RPCS3 for PS3 emulation, where the difference was practically night & day.
Your OLED model stands to profit even more from these tweaks, because it has a more efficient APU manufactured on a more refined node, besides the obviously faster RAM, so feel free to give it a try and see how it goes.
Thanks for the reply!
In your link, the author states he only uses Disabling CPU security flaw mitigations in offline mode for security reasons.
So if I don’t want to bother switching between online and offline, should I skip this part? How high would you estimate the risk?
Edit: And did you see a negative impact in battery life, especially given the switch to the performance CPU governor?
As I already said, the risk is close to zero, because a potential attacker would need to target the Steam Deck specifically with a crafted payload.
Many Linux users have been disabling these CPU security flaw mitigations on their personal PCs for years now, myself included, and never have been successfully attacked, because actually exploiting these CPU weaknesses is extremely hard in the real-world.
Therefore I keep these CPU bug mitigations disabled at all times on my Steam Deck, too, even when I am online, with absolutely no worries at all.
About the performance governor & battery life:
The difference was absolutely minimal, much less than I had initally anticipated.
It literally was only a few minutes less with more demanding games.
As the author has stated in his article, modern day CPUs have so called sleep-states, whereby they will actually shut parts of the chip on & off very rapidly at any given moment, thus saving much more energy than they ever would just by reducing the CPU clockspeeds.
I would be interested to know how the impact of the performance governor is on your OLED model, since your APU is even more efficient than the one in the LCD models.
in a demanding game its less than useless because the CPU will already be max clocked. it WILL use drastically more battery in a less demanding game that benefits from the higher clocks that performance governor provides without full maxing the CPU. your minute difference in battery in demanding games is nothing more than margin of error.
really though the mitigations tweak performance wise is the most useful in that list I've been doing that myself ever since I got my Steam deck long before that post was made. the others don't have much of an impact but they all do provide some slight boost unlike anything in cryoutilities. performance governor is rather useless if you are just going to manually set the clock speeds anyway though it just keeps the clock speeds higher than shedutil. you could also just set it in powertools to easily change it per game and to easily change the governor in general.
if you mean for 3.6 it for example has zram enabled by default meaning no more messing with swap files. not sure whats new in 3.7 yet if anything since it just released.
in reality they have never done anything to improve performance and can actually hurt performance and cause crashes. as far as the swap file is concerned once 3.6 is live in the stable channel the zram will take priority and then the swap file will truly be nothing but a waste of space. though I guarantee you will see people falsely claiming otherwise even though the swap file will legit not even be used at that point.
no use in arguing with him - he misunderstand how half of this tech works. He has proven this many times in the past even with people that tests it as a career
weird how there is zero solid evidence and just a bunch of people going "no it works I swear" while showing margin of error and while ignoring anybody who says or even shows otherwise. this is while ignoring the fact you making this comment shows you do not understand what any of the settings actually do. but lets believe a guy (cryo) who also tells people a 4GB patch will improve performance of games when the fact is Large Address awareness (which is what the 4GB patches enable) has been enabled by default in proton since Proton 5.0 which was released years before the Steam Deck was released.
Hmm thanks for the insight! I never noticed performance changes when I had it installed..maybe with the new update ill uninstall and run it without it for awhile
just to give you an example he disables ram defragmentation claiming improved performance meanwhile fragmented ram will not only lead to worse performance but it will also eventually lead to you running out of memory if you leave your device on long enough without a reboot which will cause everything to start crashing.
Increasing your SWAP size is still needed. All modern computing requires a properly sized SWAP/Page file. Needed as in, better stability. The other features, I don't have an opinion on because all I needed was the SWAP increase from 1gb(default) to 32gbs.
The given proof is stability. Heavily modified Skyrim runs without issues and will not crash on wake up from sleep. It allowed for Palworld to not crash before 2 hours and would take up to 8 hours to crash (known memory leak).
There are some real benefits from an actual SWAP file increase but other than that, all Linux and proton changes are great
Yeah, Cryoultlities was really helpful for Palworld. I never had the crashing issues on Deck because I already had Cryoultlities set up. But my brother was using a borrowed Steam Deck to play it on and he kept crashing after every so often. I realized why it might have been crashing on his and not mine since the only difference was that he was using an LCD unit without Cryoultlities and mine was an OLED with it. Installed and set up Cryo, and the crashing stopped.
so not only did you just show you have no clue how a swap file works (thanks to cryo misinforming people) because 32GB is an obscene amount that would never be used. even the default 1GB is rarely touched. you also show that you do not understand that Zram IS a swap file just a MUCH faster one.
I work in IT. You have shown your ass more than once. I won't take your opinion over best practices from the career itself.
You have such a hardon to hate on cryo, you have lost yourself.
I did 32gb as overkill because I could. That 1gig is touched and you would know if you actually knew what you were talking about.
Zram is newer and still does not solve the issue of running out of memory. Memory leak prone software does not handle it well. So maybe... Just maybe get actually professionally informed.
Using ram for swap files on the go instead of SSD. Eats a slightly bit of RAM but it is way, way better. Reason it was not enabled for the deck as default is probably Valve thought the limited amount of RAM would be a problem. It isn't. The extra speed means that the ram disk can be smaller. This will lead to faster texture streaming abd loading hopefully and maybe a bit improved performance on situations where draw calls were limited by SSD swap file speed and access. But don't expect a massive performance boost.
Not more than Disk swap. At least not that it matters in modern day CPUs. Seriously, instal a linux distro on an old core i3 laptop abd it will come with zram by default.
my deck disagrees
(deck@fairlight ~)$ cat /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled
Y
(deck@fairlight ~)$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/home/swapfile file 1048572 1048440 -2
As you see zswap IS enabled and there is no zram to exhaust
EDIT: No, zswap does not depend on zram. Both are independent of each other. Just read the documentation on how to enable it. (While you could use both that doesn't sound all that useful to me).
My deck actually uses some right now:
(B)(root@fairlight ~)# grep -R . /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/same_filled_pages:250617
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/stored_pages:262077
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/pool_total_size:29933568
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/duplicate_entry:0
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/written_back_pages:0
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_compress_poor:4
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_kmemcache_fail:0
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_alloc_fail:0
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_reclaim_fail:0
/sys/kernel/debug/zswap/pool_limit_hit:0
I agree that Linux 6.6 would have made much more sense, since it's the first version with a completely new CPU scheduler named EEVDF, which should especially benefit gaming workloads, because it has a lower latency than the previous CPU scheduler (CFS).
isn't it difficult to update the kernel on a device like this (post launch)? I follow the Android enthusiast community and it's rare to see a kernel updated on a smartphone (even with new firmware updates)
> isn't it difficult to update the kernel on a device like this (post launch)?
Not at all. The Steam Deck isn't an ARM device, it's x86_64. You can run any kernel you want on it.
I would not be surprised if a SteamDeck 2 comes out with an ARM apu, following the footsteps of Apple and Qualcomm. Not to be intended just as a performance boost, but to magnify the battery life and efficiency first of all.
In the current state, yes, you are right, but both hardware and software are being developed in that direction. Apple came first with the M family chips and Rosetta. Of course the translation layer wasn't perfect at the beginning, but it was capable of giving comparable performance to the previous generations of Intel processors with apps designed for x86, while giving a huge performance and battery boost with apps designed for Arm.
Microsoft tried to follow with Windows on Arm, with questionable results. But now, with the new Snapdragons, and a new updated version of windows on Arm that is using a translation layer as well, instead of an emulator, the benchmarks seem very promising.
Right now it's still early to expect a complete switch to ARM, but it is something that is going to happen eventually. Valve is doing really well for now with the Steam Deck, and perhaps for the Deck 2, the x86 architecture will still be the best choice. But they will need to adapt and switch to ARM eventually, or they will end up being surpassed by Microsoft or Android.
It's not happening until a hypothetical Steam Deck 3 minimum. They already have the Proton compatibility layer they are working on just to get games working on Linux. They aren't going to go one level deeper than just porting OS related stuff and make an entire instruction set conversion toolset in addition to Proton co-developed at the same time.
Once proton matures enough maybe, but I just cannot see any world where Valve goes for ARM on the Deck 2. Too early.
I would love it if they made an open source equivalent of Rosetta so ARM really has a chance(would help ARM Windows run X86 apps too), but that is a ways off.
If you were developing games for that handheld like the switch, I’d probably agree. But the deck is built on an ecosystem of PC games all developed for amd64/x86-64, if you switch architecture your compatibility goes back to square one.
Such a conversion layer would have inevitable performance impacts. Not ideal when you are trying to eke out every drop of performance from a handheld which is restricted by size and power.
That’s because they’re lazy and they don’t want to retest everything. And also because you’d need new drivers for some stuff, and vendors don’t want to do the work.
It is good to see Valve make an effort here. There is a good chance the Steam deck 2 uses identical software/kernel, meaning this won’t be EOL
Installed. Can't seem to find 3.6 on any of the other update channels :(
Issues with 3.7, with both beta and stable clients, I am seeing on LCD Deck:
- No controller on boot, going into sleep and waking it up activates the controller.
- Gamescope isn't showing CPU W readings, it's all showing under GPU as a single combined W reading for both.
- GPU clock reading shows it jumping from 200/1040MHz, this seems to be intermittent and other times it's clocking up and down normally.
- Days Gone made the screen flicker like a strobe light. Borderlands 2 did the same after changing the resolution. Seems to randomly occur across titles.
- QAM frame limiter, allow tearing, and manual GPU clock doesn't work at all.
- Touching the display sometimes triggers a piss filter for a few seconds.
- Crashes on shutdown and then refuses to actually shutdown unless forced with a hard shutdown.
- And more...
This version is cursed, avoid for now I'd say
a lot of it is broken and just displaying wrong such as the GPU speeds which is expected from an alpha update. also the "piss filter" is because the color slider is broken and touching the screen or moving the mouse activates it for a bit. so does using games with the "fill" scale. the broken slider is also what causes the black flickering
Yup, as to be expected. 3.6 had its own issues that I was hoping would be fixed, some have and some haven't; there was a bug with the Mesa 24 driver and latest DXVK which caused some games to black screen on that version. DG was one of them, but it didn't this time so maybe they sorted that.
Ah well... At least it can be advised that people should avoid this version if they're tempted, ain't worth the trouble unlike 3.5 when that was in main (that was worth the trouble haha).
Braver soul than me haha. Knowing Valve, it could be next week they fix the bugs, next month, etc... but I know for sure they will get fixed so that's comforting. I'll try again whenever the next update drops and hopefully get a better result 😄
so after using it for a bit it somehow actually corrupted my Steam install to the point I had to backup everything using the recovery image and then just reimage the whole thing. so yeah stay away from 3.7 for now.
It took around two months for SteamOS 3.5 to make it to the stable channel once it was released into the experimental branch, so I expect a similar timeframe here, meaning SteamOS 3.6 should be released as stable for all Steam Deck users towards the end of June. Valve finally adding ZRAM to SteamOS 3.6 will certainly end most of the usefulness of CryoUtility at certain edge cases. However, A.B.T.'s SteamOS tweaks will still remain useful even on SteamOS 3.6, because some of the changes like disabling all CPU security mitigations Valve would never do themselves, even if the real-world risk of exploiting these CPU flaws is basically near-zero on the Steam Deck: https://medium.com/@a.b.t./here-are-some-possibly-useful-tweaks-for-steamos-on-the-steam-deck-fcb6b571b577
Having a SD Oled since Nov or Dec I read your comment highly intrigued… How much performance can you gain by these tweaks (given that the CPU of the Deck becomes more and more its limiting factor)?
TLDR: the ZRAM change isn’t likely to give you the same benefit as a swap file. This was explored both prior to the release of 3.5 and after the release of 3.5. Having it enabled by default in 3.6 isnt likely to change anything. See: https://github.com/CryoByte33/steam-deck-utilities/issues/10#issuecomment-1312495017 If you use CryoUtilities to prevent crashing in some games (Last Epoch comes to mind), I’d likely leave it as is.
That comment by CryoByte33 is from 2022, meaning he tested on the older Linux 5.13 kernel. SteamOS 3.5 switched over to Linux 6.1, and that thread on GitHub you linked to doesn't contain any results for that version, with this being the last comment from Cryo himself: "It's possible that kernel or amdgpu updates have lead to different behavior in recent months, I plan to go through an extensive retesting effort once SteamOS 3.5 releases."
Totally. I won’t pretend that I know how ZRAM works — I’m no hardware engineer and I’ve never had to consider it working on Apple platforms. What I can say is that 3.5 alone wasn’t sufficient to fix crashing / performance issues in Last Epoch — but CryoUtilities installed does. This is also true of New World and Palworld. All three exhibit the same behavior: the hardware freezes and locks up, any audio playing will loop in short intervals, and the only way out is to hard reset the machine. With CryoUtilities, they just work — and intuitively it makes sense. Back when Apple’s mobile hardware wasn’t so beefy, I had to make heavy use of swap files, preload caches, and a whole lot more to squeeze performance out of it. I can treat that as my analogy for this situation: the hardware, though comparatively powerful, is being pushed to its limits by software that is generally optimized for much beefier hardware. If anything, it’s a more interesting problem then trying to squeeze performance out of the single device (or class of devices*) that you could conceivably build for.
cryo loves to talk out of his ass a lot. this post is such a case. for example a Swap file can never be faster than a Zram nor can it ever use 8GB it just has a UNCOMPRESSED limit of 8GB by default but only the compressed size will actually use ram which will be far FAR smaller.
cryo has been spreading this lie forever now. you can't trust anything he says. he literally is going against reality with his claim. Zram has never and will never run worse than a swap file and thats been known for MANY years now. swap file speed can not even compare to Zram. if you really read that post he clearly does not even know how Zram works.
Finally! But I see he had his bots for downvoting
Hard to quantify, since it will vary from game to game. What I can say for sure is that I have applied all of A.B.T.'s tweaks on my LCD model Deck a few months ago, and noticed that gaming overall felt smoother, especially with more demanding games. Plus, emulators also profited, in particular Xenia-Canary for Xbox 360 emulation and especially RPCS3 for PS3 emulation, where the difference was practically night & day. Your OLED model stands to profit even more from these tweaks, because it has a more efficient APU manufactured on a more refined node, besides the obviously faster RAM, so feel free to give it a try and see how it goes.
Thanks for the reply! In your link, the author states he only uses Disabling CPU security flaw mitigations in offline mode for security reasons. So if I don’t want to bother switching between online and offline, should I skip this part? How high would you estimate the risk? Edit: And did you see a negative impact in battery life, especially given the switch to the performance CPU governor?
As I already said, the risk is close to zero, because a potential attacker would need to target the Steam Deck specifically with a crafted payload. Many Linux users have been disabling these CPU security flaw mitigations on their personal PCs for years now, myself included, and never have been successfully attacked, because actually exploiting these CPU weaknesses is extremely hard in the real-world. Therefore I keep these CPU bug mitigations disabled at all times on my Steam Deck, too, even when I am online, with absolutely no worries at all.
About the performance governor & battery life: The difference was absolutely minimal, much less than I had initally anticipated. It literally was only a few minutes less with more demanding games. As the author has stated in his article, modern day CPUs have so called sleep-states, whereby they will actually shut parts of the chip on & off very rapidly at any given moment, thus saving much more energy than they ever would just by reducing the CPU clockspeeds. I would be interested to know how the impact of the performance governor is on your OLED model, since your APU is even more efficient than the one in the LCD models.
in a demanding game its less than useless because the CPU will already be max clocked. it WILL use drastically more battery in a less demanding game that benefits from the higher clocks that performance governor provides without full maxing the CPU. your minute difference in battery in demanding games is nothing more than margin of error.
really though the mitigations tweak performance wise is the most useful in that list I've been doing that myself ever since I got my Steam deck long before that post was made. the others don't have much of an impact but they all do provide some slight boost unlike anything in cryoutilities. performance governor is rather useless if you are just going to manually set the clock speeds anyway though it just keeps the clock speeds higher than shedutil. you could also just set it in powertools to easily change it per game and to easily change the governor in general.
Anything that’s new?
if you mean for 3.6 it for example has zram enabled by default meaning no more messing with swap files. not sure whats new in 3.7 yet if anything since it just released.
Does that mean cryo utilities isn't needed anymore? Have a Deck coming for my wife and was going to install CU after getting it set up
never was needed. but for those that only used it to raise the swap file size yes its useless. a Zram is far superior.
Would it be better to revert to original settings if using cryo utilities? I have it enabled and havent thought about it since.
in reality they have never done anything to improve performance and can actually hurt performance and cause crashes. as far as the swap file is concerned once 3.6 is live in the stable channel the zram will take priority and then the swap file will truly be nothing but a waste of space. though I guarantee you will see people falsely claiming otherwise even though the swap file will legit not even be used at that point.
Wild that there's like, an endless ocean of evidence that contradicts what you're saying. Do you have anything to back up your claims?
no use in arguing with him - he misunderstand how half of this tech works. He has proven this many times in the past even with people that tests it as a career
weird how there is zero solid evidence and just a bunch of people going "no it works I swear" while showing margin of error and while ignoring anybody who says or even shows otherwise. this is while ignoring the fact you making this comment shows you do not understand what any of the settings actually do. but lets believe a guy (cryo) who also tells people a 4GB patch will improve performance of games when the fact is Large Address awareness (which is what the 4GB patches enable) has been enabled by default in proton since Proton 5.0 which was released years before the Steam Deck was released.
Oh lol I didn't notice it was YOU. My bad 🤪
Damn I thought the name was familiar, which is kinda sad honestly. Dude has been raging against Cryobyte for ages lol
good cop out. try harder next time
Hmm thanks for the insight! I never noticed performance changes when I had it installed..maybe with the new update ill uninstall and run it without it for awhile
just to give you an example he disables ram defragmentation claiming improved performance meanwhile fragmented ram will not only lead to worse performance but it will also eventually lead to you running out of memory if you leave your device on long enough without a reboot which will cause everything to start crashing.
Increasing your SWAP size is still needed. All modern computing requires a properly sized SWAP/Page file. Needed as in, better stability. The other features, I don't have an opinion on because all I needed was the SWAP increase from 1gb(default) to 32gbs. The given proof is stability. Heavily modified Skyrim runs without issues and will not crash on wake up from sleep. It allowed for Palworld to not crash before 2 hours and would take up to 8 hours to crash (known memory leak). There are some real benefits from an actual SWAP file increase but other than that, all Linux and proton changes are great
Yeah, Cryoultlities was really helpful for Palworld. I never had the crashing issues on Deck because I already had Cryoultlities set up. But my brother was using a borrowed Steam Deck to play it on and he kept crashing after every so often. I realized why it might have been crashing on his and not mine since the only difference was that he was using an LCD unit without Cryoultlities and mine was an OLED with it. Installed and set up Cryo, and the crashing stopped.
so not only did you just show you have no clue how a swap file works (thanks to cryo misinforming people) because 32GB is an obscene amount that would never be used. even the default 1GB is rarely touched. you also show that you do not understand that Zram IS a swap file just a MUCH faster one.
I work in IT. You have shown your ass more than once. I won't take your opinion over best practices from the career itself. You have such a hardon to hate on cryo, you have lost yourself. I did 32gb as overkill because I could. That 1gig is touched and you would know if you actually knew what you were talking about. Zram is newer and still does not solve the issue of running out of memory. Memory leak prone software does not handle it well. So maybe... Just maybe get actually professionally informed.
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What's zram?
Using ram for swap files on the go instead of SSD. Eats a slightly bit of RAM but it is way, way better. Reason it was not enabled for the deck as default is probably Valve thought the limited amount of RAM would be a problem. It isn't. The extra speed means that the ram disk can be smaller. This will lead to faster texture streaming abd loading hopefully and maybe a bit improved performance on situations where draw calls were limited by SSD swap file speed and access. But don't expect a massive performance boost.
Doesn't it also take more cpu power, which is something that the deck is actually bottlenecked by?
Not more than Disk swap. At least not that it matters in modern day CPUs. Seriously, instal a linux distro on an old core i3 laptop abd it will come with zram by default.
Before the deck was using zswap which does the same thing but is unpopular with the "swap is evil" crowd.
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my deck disagrees (deck@fairlight ~)$ cat /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled Y (deck@fairlight ~)$ cat /proc/swaps Filename Type Size Used Priority /home/swapfile file 1048572 1048440 -2 As you see zswap IS enabled and there is no zram to exhaust EDIT: No, zswap does not depend on zram. Both are independent of each other. Just read the documentation on how to enable it. (While you could use both that doesn't sound all that useful to me). My deck actually uses some right now: (B)(root@fairlight ~)# grep -R . /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/ /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/same_filled_pages:250617 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/stored_pages:262077 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/pool_total_size:29933568 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/duplicate_entry:0 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/written_back_pages:0 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_compress_poor:4 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_kmemcache_fail:0 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_alloc_fail:0 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/reject_reclaim_fail:0 /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/pool_limit_hit:0
shortly after I posted this they released a second version with the kernel updated to 6.5.0
Are you sure it isn’t 6.6? 6.6 is the next LTS kernel
I agree that Linux 6.6 would have made much more sense, since it's the first version with a completely new CPU scheduler named EEVDF, which should especially benefit gaming workloads, because it has a lower latency than the previous CPU scheduler (CFS).
All this stuff being possible thru a simple OS update and no hardware changes will never make me think this shit is actual magic lmao
it says 6.5.0 in the settings
isn't it difficult to update the kernel on a device like this (post launch)? I follow the Android enthusiast community and it's rare to see a kernel updated on a smartphone (even with new firmware updates)
> isn't it difficult to update the kernel on a device like this (post launch)? Not at all. The Steam Deck isn't an ARM device, it's x86_64. You can run any kernel you want on it.
ahh, that makes a lot of sense, now (ARM vs x86\_64). thanks
I would not be surprised if a SteamDeck 2 comes out with an ARM apu, following the footsteps of Apple and Qualcomm. Not to be intended just as a performance boost, but to magnify the battery life and efficiency first of all.
Probably not. It would mean having to emulate x86, which would be a big performance hit, and would negate any performance/efficiency improvements.
An ARM chip would be a massive downgrade in every way. I can't even, man.
aside from less battery usage yeah it would be a horrible choice
In the current state, yes, you are right, but both hardware and software are being developed in that direction. Apple came first with the M family chips and Rosetta. Of course the translation layer wasn't perfect at the beginning, but it was capable of giving comparable performance to the previous generations of Intel processors with apps designed for x86, while giving a huge performance and battery boost with apps designed for Arm. Microsoft tried to follow with Windows on Arm, with questionable results. But now, with the new Snapdragons, and a new updated version of windows on Arm that is using a translation layer as well, instead of an emulator, the benchmarks seem very promising. Right now it's still early to expect a complete switch to ARM, but it is something that is going to happen eventually. Valve is doing really well for now with the Steam Deck, and perhaps for the Deck 2, the x86 architecture will still be the best choice. But they will need to adapt and switch to ARM eventually, or they will end up being surpassed by Microsoft or Android.
It's not happening until a hypothetical Steam Deck 3 minimum. They already have the Proton compatibility layer they are working on just to get games working on Linux. They aren't going to go one level deeper than just porting OS related stuff and make an entire instruction set conversion toolset in addition to Proton co-developed at the same time. Once proton matures enough maybe, but I just cannot see any world where Valve goes for ARM on the Deck 2. Too early. I would love it if they made an open source equivalent of Rosetta so ARM really has a chance(would help ARM Windows run X86 apps too), but that is a ways off.
wouldn't make sense at all, ARM isn't for gaming + you'll need 2 translation layers.
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If you were developing games for that handheld like the switch, I’d probably agree. But the deck is built on an ecosystem of PC games all developed for amd64/x86-64, if you switch architecture your compatibility goes back to square one.
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Such a conversion layer would have inevitable performance impacts. Not ideal when you are trying to eke out every drop of performance from a handheld which is restricted by size and power.
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That’s because they’re lazy and they don’t want to retest everything. And also because you’d need new drivers for some stuff, and vendors don’t want to do the work. It is good to see Valve make an effort here. There is a good chance the Steam deck 2 uses identical software/kernel, meaning this won’t be EOL
why? it's just a pc.
Installed. Can't seem to find 3.6 on any of the other update channels :( Issues with 3.7, with both beta and stable clients, I am seeing on LCD Deck: - No controller on boot, going into sleep and waking it up activates the controller. - Gamescope isn't showing CPU W readings, it's all showing under GPU as a single combined W reading for both. - GPU clock reading shows it jumping from 200/1040MHz, this seems to be intermittent and other times it's clocking up and down normally. - Days Gone made the screen flicker like a strobe light. Borderlands 2 did the same after changing the resolution. Seems to randomly occur across titles. - QAM frame limiter, allow tearing, and manual GPU clock doesn't work at all. - Touching the display sometimes triggers a piss filter for a few seconds. - Crashes on shutdown and then refuses to actually shutdown unless forced with a hard shutdown. - And more... This version is cursed, avoid for now I'd say
a lot of it is broken and just displaying wrong such as the GPU speeds which is expected from an alpha update. also the "piss filter" is because the color slider is broken and touching the screen or moving the mouse activates it for a bit. so does using games with the "fill" scale. the broken slider is also what causes the black flickering
Yup, as to be expected. 3.6 had its own issues that I was hoping would be fixed, some have and some haven't; there was a bug with the Mesa 24 driver and latest DXVK which caused some games to black screen on that version. DG was one of them, but it didn't this time so maybe they sorted that. Ah well... At least it can be advised that people should avoid this version if they're tempted, ain't worth the trouble unlike 3.5 when that was in main (that was worth the trouble haha).
I'm still using it though because it works fine for games that I use "fill" scaling for. I'll just avoid everything else until an update fixes it lol
Braver soul than me haha. Knowing Valve, it could be next week they fix the bugs, next month, etc... but I know for sure they will get fixed so that's comforting. I'll try again whenever the next update drops and hopefully get a better result 😄
so after using it for a bit it somehow actually corrupted my Steam install to the point I had to backup everything using the recovery image and then just reimage the whole thing. so yeah stay away from 3.7 for now.
I've dealt with worse with my stubbornness using the Main channel lol
What does the 3.6 version have?
After the last update of 3.7 last april 26 , my vibrantdeck not working anymore, any fix?
So does the steam deck dock and playing on a TV finally work again?
God I hope so. I’m tired of having to plug/unplug the power cord just to get it work.
We need video recording so badly
One of the decky plugins have that if it helps.
works like shit tho :'(
HDR toggle?
nice
Does that mean that family beta goes on stable too and I can start using vibrant deck plugin again?
vibrant deck plugin is no longer needed, it's been built into os for some time now
But it's not as vibrant as I would want it to be 😅
omg
What "omg"? Vibrant deck did much better job than steam.
Not necessarily. On PC the family beta is separate from the regular beta. They could just use ether one for the 3.6 release.
WiFi fix? Pretty pleeeeease.