Valve Loosens AMD’s Handheld Grip As SteamOS Gains Intel GPU Support

Source Domain: hothardware.com

As a software vendor, it’s dangerous to be beholden to a single hardware vendor. That’s why this latest move from Valve is pretty savvy; the company seems to have added some support for Intel’s Arc GPUs to its customized Arch Linux distribution known as SteamOS. This is borne out by both Reddit users who have installed it on desktops with discrete Arc GPUs as well as ETA PRIME’s testing on the MSI Claw 8 AI+ Lunar Lake handheld with Arc 140V graphics.The twelve games tested by /u/SaperPL on his Arc B580.

We say “some” support because the users in the Reddit thread are reporting very mixed results on Arc B580 cards. The original poster notes that while some games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man Remastered, are running well, in other titles he’s getting about half of the performance he would expect while running SteamOS, and other gamers in the thread have reported similar results. A couple of other users offer helpful hints, including to use a modified version of Proton as well as waiting for SteamOS to move to the latest Linux kernel.Valve’s patch notes for SteamOS 3.8.7 Beta, which specifically note MSI Claw support.

Indeed, the Intel Xe driver has been one of the busiest areas of kernel development recently. The latest SteamOS beta, 3.8.7, is based on Linux 6.16, but the 6.17 kernel should bring along further improvements for Intel graphics, including continued work on Battlemage support, virtualization features, and refinements to variable refresh rate handling. Recent kernel releases have also added support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM), improved telemetry and monitoring capabilities, expanded DisplayPort functionality, and numerous fixes aimed at improving stability and performance on Intel’s newer Arc and integrated Xe graphics architectures. We noted excellent performance from the MSI Claw 8 AI+.

Given how quickly Intel’s Linux graphics stack is evolving, some growing pains on SteamOS are probably to be expected. YouTuber ETA PRIME,…

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