SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains For The Steam Deck

Outside of games, when running various CPU/system benchmarks of the AMD APU within the SteamOS KDE Plasma desktop environment there wasn't much of a performance difference observed.

In some of the heavy multi-threaded workloads like Blender and other creator software, SteamOS 3.5 was slower in its current preview form than SteamOS 3.4.

Most of the gaming performance advantages with SteamOS 3.5 tended to be in the lighter-weight (CPU bound) game titles while the GravityMark ray-tracing run showed some improvements worth noting there too. With the Linux kernel upgrade and newer Mesa RADV and RadeonSI drivers, there's also the possibility of improvements in other titles not tested as part of this initial weekend benchmarking. Aside from performance, SteamOS 3.5 is bringing other exciting changes around HDR / color management, VRR for USB-C displays, and many other changes.