… A little while ago, we saw one of Valve's contractors, Natalie Vock, release a new tool that prevents Linux from stealing your VRAM . Beforehand, when Linux had to free up room on your GPU's VRAM and move data to RAM, it had no context for which blocks of data were assigned to which apps. …
… Her work eventually led to tripling Alan Wake II's FPS on a Radeon RX 6500 XT , and because Linux is all about open-source, gamers don't need to pay a cent for the feature. Related A Valve engineer just stopped Linux from stealing VRAM from your 8GB GPU Games should run smoother now. …
… Related Linux just made 8GB VRAM feel like enough for the Steam Machine One dedicated developer is making sure Linux stops stealing too much VRAM The Titan made everyone desire the "unobtainable" GPU It became the red Ferrari of GPUs Before the GTX Titan, the x80-class GeForce card was usually the … …
… Modern games and their VRAM demands have ballooned egregiously, leading to a lot of people being convinced that GPUs with 8GB VRAM are obsolete now. While that's a separate and much longer conversation to be had, someone at Valve just decided that for Linux gamers, the game should come first. …
… Offloading layers lets me run massive LLMs on weak GPUs That’s how I managed to deploy Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on 12GB of VRAM Although your GPU is the ideal component for providing extra processing oomph to your LLMs, it’s not the only device capable of running them. …
… The drm/imagination PowerVR driver hit mainline back in Linux 6.8 for the AXE-1-16M and BXS-4-64 MC1 variants, and the BXM-4-64, which is the GPU in this board, was merged upstream in Linux 6.18. …
… The SYCL backend exists and technically works, but performance benchmarks have shown it hitting roughly a third of the theoretical memory bandwidth in some configurations. For comparison, Nvidia GPUs typically achieve 90% or higher in the same workloads. …
… The Steam Machine lineup quietly disappeared, and the common takeaway was that Linux wasn't ready for gaming. But Valve drew a different conclusion: waiting for developers to come to Linux wasn't going to work. If Windows games could just run on Linux as-is, the library problem goes away. …
… Remember: it's basically just a fenced off Linux process, and the Linux permission model is genuinely pretty good. …
… Keeping Linux as the host is simply a better deal Your main desktop should stay where your work lives Once Linux becomes the host operating system and Windows the guest, priorities become much clearer. …