SteamOS 2.115 Switches From AMDGPU-PRO To AMDGPU+RadeonSI

Valve has pushed out a long-awaited update to SteamOS Brewmaster and in this latest beta update have switched away from the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver in favor of Mesa.

AMDGPU-PRO is no longer used on SteamOS 2.115 Brewmaster now instead favoring the completely open Radeon Mesa stack. The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been maturing a lot in recent months where its performance is now on par or superior to AMDGPU-PRO in most games, the game compatibility is getting good, and meanwhile there hasn't been too much noteworthy changes to AMDGPU-PRO. The RADV Vulkan driver also continues getting better although its Vulkan performance comes up short of AMDGPU-PRO.

With moving away from AMDGPU-PRO, they are now able to also upgrade their kernel and with this release are using Linux 4.11 stable. This Brewmaster update also pulls in the stable package updates of Debian 8.8.

The complete list of changes with this SteamOS update can be found via this Steam Community thread.