SteamVR On Linux Currently Runs Well On At Least A GeForce GTX 1070/1080

In the days ahead I'll try out a Core i5 Kabylake CPU and see how that does for Valve's VR support on Linux with different GPUs. I am also rather curious how well RADV does with a RX 480 and R9 Fury given the rather stiff performance even with NVIDIA's Linux support.

But I do have hope that the performance of SteamVR on Linux will be improved in upcoming updates... While running Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, I used the Phoronix Test Suite to monitor some system vitals.

All four CPU cores of the i7-7700K were running at their maximum frequency while running VR yet this quad-core CPU plus Hyper Threading didn't end up making use of the entire CPU for VR gaming... Better threading support could alleviate some of the overhead of SteamVR on Linux. This was from a five minute chunk of time while SSVR: TFE was running constantly.

The reported GPU utilization on the GeForce GTX 1080 was also not maxed out during testing, further indicating the possibility of some bottleneck to overcome with SteamVR on Linux with neither the CPU or GPU being fully leveraged at this point.

Anyhow, I'll be continuing my testing so stay tuned for more updates regarding VR gaming performance on Linux.