In accordance with the published by Valve July the annual report about the preferences of service delivery Steam games users, the proportion of active users Steam, using the Linux platform, reached a value of 1%. One month ago, the rate was 0.89%. Of distributions leads Ubuntu 20.04.2, which is used by 0.19% of users Steam, followed Manjaro Linux – 0.11%, Arch Linux – 0.10%, Ubuntu 21.04 – 0.06% and Linux Mint 20.1 – 0.05%
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Given the fact that the number of active users of Steam is estimated at 120 million, the number of Linux users on Steam is approximately 1.2 million. The growth of interest in Linux among Steam users can be explained by the announcement of a game console Deck Steam on Linux. It may be mentioned that the peak value of Linux users in Steam (2%) was recorded after the Steam beta for Linux in 2013. Then the figure began to decline and in 2017 reached the level of 0.6%, and then began a slow growth.
Additionally, you can note the teamwork AMD and Valve company to modernize the architecture of Linux performance scaling on AMD processors, which are involved in developing a game console by Valve Steam Deck.
It is noted that the existing kernel module responsible for the change in the frequency of the CPU AMD depending on the computing power needs of the application, based on outdated drivers ACPI cpufreq, which does not provide the desired efficiency ratio “performance / power consumption” on modern AMD processors because of the rather the slow pace of activation in high performance mode CPU (in some cases in order to achieve adequate performance, users are forced to disable automatic selection ENEGOSBEREZHENIE modes).
For the Linux kernel is developed a new architecture frequency control CPU AMD, which will allow to achieve higher levels of performance in gaming applications that run under the control layer VKD3D-Proton (implementation of Direct3D 12, working through the broadcast calls in API Vulkan). A progress report will be made September 17th at the conference X.Org Developers Conference 2021.