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[IbizaPocholo]

SteamOS Beta Update Adds dGPU VRAM Management Patch

In April 2026, Natalie Vock, a software engineer famous for contributions to Valve's Linux gaming stack, published a series of patches to improve VRAM usage on Linux, largely directed at devices with dGPUs with limited VRAM, and now that patch has seemingly also been adopted by Valve itself in...

www.techpowerup.com

In April 2026, Natalie Vock, a software engineer famous for contributions to Valve's Linux gaming stack, published a series of patches to improve VRAM usage on Linux, largely directed at devices with dGPUs with limited VRAM, and now that patch has seemingly also been adopted by Valve itself in the latest SteamOS Beta update 3.8.20. The update notes denote this as "Greatly improved VRAM management, improving performance and stability in cases where VRAM is limited," which should help improve performance for Valve's Steam Machine at higher resolutions. Of course, this update should also improve performance for DIY Steam Machines and other dGPU gaming machines running Valve's SteamOS. It should be noted that there may be little to no performance improvements for iGPUs, since they share system memory and VRAM already, and overflowing to system memory was what was causing performance issues.

In Vock's testing and subsequent testing of an implementation of the dmemcg-booster and the patches on CachyOS, performance on low-VRAM GPUs was nearly doubled in some cases, making games that were previously unplayable just barely smooth enough to play on the aging hardware. The SteamOS 3.8.20 Beta update also updates the Mesa graphics driver to a new major release, specifically Mesa version 26.1.2, which adds support for a number of ray tracing features and improves support for new Intel GPU hardware and stability for both frame rates and shader compilation under OpenGL and Vulkan. It also includes fixes for bugs with the Legion Go S SD card reader, issues with streaming in desktop mode, and graphics driver issues preventing Sniper Elite 5 from rendering correctly.

 

[Area61]

So 8gb VRAM users will survive a couple of more years?

 

[b0uncyfr0]

So 8gb VRAM users will survive a couple of more years?

 

[Bojji]

So 8gb VRAM users will survive a couple of more years?

 

[CuteFaceJay]

RDR2 performance testing been done on Steam Deck since the change?

 

[riko]

RDR2 performance testing been done on Steam Deck since the change?

Might help, but it looks like this patch is targeting dGPUs with small dedicated VRAM instead of the shared VRAM setups like the Deck.

 

[RoboFu]

So 8gb VRAM users will survive a couple of more years?

is there an alternative to low cost gaming to replace the 8 gig gpus? until then.. yes

 

[CuteFaceJay]

Might help, but it looks like this patch is targeting dGPUs with small dedicated VRAM instead of the shared VRAM setups like the Deck.

just tested and strawberry puts me in the 20fps range. i'm sure this game was running at a smooth 40 T_T

EDIT : turns out update 3.8.2 has completely borked the sleep button while in desktop mode

EDIT: apparently is resets "Power management" settings "When power button press" it was defaulted to "do nothing" after the update, This was for On AC Power and On Battery settings.