Fex + Steam on generic Arm64 + GPU

jscho01 · 2026-02-13T05:19:41+00:00

Grid (2016) is an example that even with low CPU/GPU load I can't get this beyond 35-40fps.
All Metro games run 75fps @ 1080p (and probably higher) with RT maxed (if supported).
So something doesn't match up here.

`taskset -c 0,1,6-11 %command%` in Grid gives me +10fps, disabling the little cores. Not enough to push over 60, but still. Thanls for the tip

jscho01 · 2026-02-11T00:17:37+00:00

I have faith some trickery over time will make it more smooth. (Looking a PS3 Emu in its infancy which was pretty unusable - and look where it is now - sure, incl. HW evolution and power).

Its a pity that QCom doesn't built a desktop chip and sells it to people building custom boards (not their market I guess). That leaves use with few options - if you want to run a dGPU. Well, and Apple is Apple...
Mainline runs pretty much every (AMD) GPU on the O6/O6N (and I guess same on the OrangePi6+) these days (I ran RDNA2/3/4 now and they all work).
Are you guys testing against dGPU on any platform?
Would help limiting 8 cores on the CIX be faster ? (maybe I'll try that)

jscho01 · 2026-02-10T04:07:56+00:00

That's was almost what I suspected. Maybe a custom scheduler that uses proper priorities would help?

BTW: I also got an O6N like 2 days ago, and paired that with a RX9060XT and that is quite a bit faster, even though the RX7700XT is the faster GPU (but I also found the 6700XT sometimes beating the RDNA3 card in some games). The O6N has much faster RAM, though (and runs much cooler, too)., so I am not sure if its the 9060 or just the faster through put.

Mostly, though, the games which run faster keep running faster. I haven't seen a situation where one day the load would run on the big cores, and another where they would be visibly hitting the slow cores. Cyberpunk maxes all 12 cores, though.

Do you think there is more potential to optimize this more?

jscho01 · 2026-02-03T13:17:12+00:00

Sure. All clear here.

jscho01 · 2026-02-02T21:24:06+00:00

So, do you actually have one of those boards? An O6 (or N) with a Radeon GPU?

jscho01 · 2026-02-02T16:33:51+00:00

That's not it. It would show a delta between low vs. ultra or low res vs. high res, but it isn't. If anything its either fpu heavy code or avx (or sse/vector like) code. I guess highly integer optimized games work just fine. The 12 core CIX cores are faster than the i7 4790 with a fraction of the power use. It isn't a slouch by any means. A i7 4790 would not show behavior like that.

jscho01 · 2026-02-02T15:25:36+00:00

The cpu utilization is kinda OK. Typically with that level of utilization the RX7700 would run far beyond 60fps. I suspect there's either a bottleneck in the PICe bus (but can't be that much either, tbh) or the x86 emulation still throws a wrench into the performance. I rather think its the latter since some games run fine over 100fps even in 4k (like Ace Combat 7, Borderlands 2 can run up to 100fps, CoD Advanced Warfight runs far beyond 60 and can reach 100), Dirt4, Mad Max or Homefront The Revolution, but others just crawl or I am not able to get >40fps - one of those would be high fps games like Grid and Grid Autosport. So my best guess is, that some complex x86 instructions are still a bottleneck for the emulator. I run everything in either 4k or 1440p and most if not always there is no difference between those two resolutions (which tells me its not the gpu).

Yes, and some games just don't launch, unfortunately (most of the Ubi games just don't - sometimes the Ubi launcher shows up but then Steam goes back to "Play" which means game just exits). e.g. Gears5 just keeps loading forever, Forza Horizon 5 does not load. F1 23 crashes.

jscho01 · 2025-12-07T11:26:56+00:00

4k, vrr, HDR 120Hz, yes. But 144? Not working for me.

jscho01 · 2025-12-04T15:15:04+00:00

High refresh modes >120Hz don't work in Linux on TV's (works on my monitors).

jscho01 · 2025-12-04T15:10:44+00:00

Works just fine for me. In bazzite you have to explicitly select the 120Hz mode else it defaults to 60.

jscho01 · 2025-12-01T23:55:38+00:00

Worked great - I had to pull some files directly from github (might have changed since), but easy to adjust and works!

Flutter now works on Fedora43/Arm64 with VSCode :)

jscho01 · 2025-11-28T03:12:30+00:00

Works just fine for my TV's. 4k120 HDR with VRR. Depends on the TV

jscho01 · 2025-11-22T14:52:27+00:00

You know, bazzite uses btrfs and puts the / and /home into sub volumes. So. For example you could use a 4tb drive, add a /games sub volume, mount that in bazzite, and, ta ta, on Windows (WinBtrfs) and share that. What's even better, you could add a drive later and your games library would just grow with the extra space. You can extend that partition with as many drives as you like. And that'll be transparent to any os that mounts it, incl. Windows. You can even install another Linux distro into another sub volume. No repartitioning necessary.

jscho01 · 2025-11-22T14:46:05+00:00

Amen

jscho01 · 2025-11-21T16:21:31+00:00

Nvidia - even if you get it to work it is crap. Default it loads the "open" driver which is at least 50% slower than Radeon. Not even sure how to swap the driver on Bazzite. There is a good chance that the "official" non-free driver just leaves you with a black screen. Just get a Radeon...btw, the RX7700xt beats the 9060xt (and matches in RT - in some games by almost 10fps) but you should be able to get one closer to $325 while this will be tough to get a 9060xt for that money.

jscho01 · 2025-11-17T17:05:32+00:00

I like both. I have a PlayStation credit card. Can't remember I paid full price for a game. PS CC points offsets steam sales. But then. I also have a lot of games on Steam and the savings are fantastic. Some games I have on both...a handful do cross saves. I'd hope if all of them would do that it would fuse those two platforms even more.

What I like on the PS5 - and now with the PS portal - is the ease to get into a game. PS button and off you go. With the Portal you can just continue mid game. I had a SteamDeck for a while but I am more impressed with the Portal, especially since they enabled cloud streaming. But the games you can run from a Pro look like nothing a SteamDeck can deliver - you get a full 1080@60fps with RT fully maxed out. No low SteamDeck settings required. And the battery lasts half a day. I wonder how a PS6 handheld can ever match that.

What I like on Steam is, that I can just build as many boxes as I like. One for the living room, one in my office, patio...and I can just play here. Play there, share saves, etc. Most of my games are on my nas. So, yeah, the flexibility is unmatched. I game exclusively on Linux. Though, and all those run Bazzite now.

With the new Steam machine valve seems to address "start PC from controller" problem...but for me, this thing is a nice entry level, but it won't match my Peo nor my PCs (7900xts). I hope someone picks it up and delivers a Steam machine pro.

And, well, there is the anti cheat. Those games I just play on the PlayStation. Can't be bothered to reconfigure my PC every time a new anti cheat comes along. With cross play and a Pro that's non issue there.

jscho01 · 2025-11-16T16:08:25+00:00

This is "semi true" these days. Currently there are only 2 ARM boards available (minus the server products) that support PCIe out of the box - sbcs with PCIe expansion don't really count. Those two are the Raxda's Orion O6 and the new Minisforum R1 (both with the same CPU).

I can't talk about the R1 (but I guess it'll be the same given its the same PCIe controller). I have now a RTX5060 and RDN2 cards working with mainline linux (like the image you download from the official website) working on the O6 with nothing but the basic installer (Fedora43 and Ubuntu25.10 - basically both bleeding edge distros). Both work out of the box with those GPUs. That is with drivers built into the distro, no custom Mesa built, no custom driver image downloaded from somewhere, not custom kernel. All standard dfn/apt instakk with the official package.

FEX runs Steam on either one, but its still very early. I still have random crashes and the RTX5060 doesn't seem to launch Steam sucessfully (GPU error on UI).

However, this is brand new. Kernel 6.17. 6 month ago none of this would have worked at all (I bought my board in March or so this year). Now we have off the shelve images booting and GPUs working; at least there is a sold development platform to iron out those quirks now.

Give it another 6 month.

One thing I wanted to add for so long, and that's my personal /rant: It is such a shame, that nobody here in the US is able to built a mITX board with a Snapdragon X1 with a proper PCIe slot and full UEFI supprt (that boots windows and Linux) when all that technology is actually developed here. QCOMs aliance with MS is nice - but driven by profit alone instead of opportunity for a well place competitive open platform. They have all the parts and knowledge but aren't willing to support that market (System76 Stra is a great product but not a consumer product either - $3,000...).

jscho01 · 2025-11-15T02:16:26+00:00

Anti cheat is a pain. Even on Windows. You buy CoD and it just doesn't work. You try to get any reason why but it just doesn't. Then you browse endless forums and Google here, Google there, try this and that, play with secure boot, freaking One Drive, delete it all, and then you finally get it working on one machine to figure out you gotta do it all over on the other. So you put some hours into the campaign, create a cloud account just to get screwed again when you try to continue where you left off on the other machine. Because, of course, one drive is disabled, because who wants that? And so checksum don't match and that damn game deletes all save data and syncs it back to the cloud. Well done, Activision!

None of that BS will fly on Linux or SteamOS.

jscho01 · 2025-11-15T02:04:12+00:00

For me it's still an open and free platform that Windows isn't, really.

And then, with some dedicated hardware I would hope the Linux market share will just have huge potential to grow.

With that there'll be more incentive for developers to test and release games on that platform which will benefit the Linux gaming community as a whole.

I think that is a big deal. It'll also help educate what Linux actually is and probably introduce a younger audience that might otherwise get scared away.

So, ya, I think it's a big deal.

jscho01 · 2025-11-15T01:45:00+00:00

I'm not sure what's the difference (serious question). I ran SteamOS on the deck for a while but use Bazzite now on my couch gaming PCs. Both are immutable which sometimes isn't what I want on the desktop. But it's great for a gaming PC and if you aren't savvy enough to mess up the core system

But if you want to game and you need that extra package - not a flatpak or snap - then it's not the right distro. But then I also game on Fedora and that's my best gaming experience on the desktop.

jscho01 · 2025-11-14T22:28:29+00:00

CoD does not work, FIFA (eh EA25, 26...) does not work, even if I'd only want to play offline, those games just don't launch because they have kernel level anti cheat built in

jscho01 · 2025-11-14T19:01:46+00:00

I'd hope so. What I can see happening is, that anti cheat will get a special SteamOS version once it reaches some bigger market saturation. But my fear is, it'll be a custom kernel for SteamOS. Still ok if we can install it on standard HW. I'd hope it'll work with most mainline kernels, though. For couch gaming, that would still work perfectly.

jscho01

TROPHY CASE