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As Steam Deck slowly approaches its fifth birthday next February, its owners are desperate to find a way to extend its life instead of investing. the most expensive competition. A new patch for AMD’s Linux drivers can significantly reduce low-end crashes when Steam Deck or other AMD-based gaming devices are running in Energy Performance Preference (EPP) mode.
Writing on the Linux kernel mailing list (thanks, Phoronix), kernel coder David Vernet explains a major problem that games often face in EPP mode. As a busy thread often sleeps for a short period of time, the latest AMD driver may misinterpret this behavior as a sign of slowing down its performance. When the thread wakes up, it starts up slower than desired, leading to increased latency, old frames, and longer frame processing times at the end of the distribution.
Switching the processor to “work” fixes the problem but eliminates the power savings that EPP mode is supposed to provide. And just adding a few more affected threads will result in lower performance, due to CPU/GPU management issues.
