Valve’s SteamOS is still in Beta, and has of course, lots of bugs and issues which Valve are ticking off one at a time, with the help of community feedback. Perhaps one of the more frustrating issues has been from AMD Radeon owners, who’ve been all but unable to game because of lack of driver and software support on Valve’s OS.
The good news is, a recent post on Valve’s own forums points out they they’ve for the most part, fixed this.
Pierre-Loup from Valve said on the forums: “This update upgrades the Catalyst driver in our repositories with a preview release. This build should fix the poor in-game performance and malfunctioning return to desktop functionality.
Known problems include tearing and poor overlay performance in-game; please install them and post your feedback!”
Users are reporting huge increases in their frame rate, even on older AMD hardware. One user, Sadboosh said:
“Pre-update I was getting ~7 fps at low resolution with most graphics options turned down. Now i’m getting 50-70 at 1920×1200 with more typical settings. I’m running my steamos box on older hardware (radeon 5770) and the numbers are not too far from what I remember getting in Windows.”
Others users have been less fortunate, one user by the name of Yabba has said:
“Load ctf_2fort and join a server. Play it in windows – enjoy the silkly smooth 120fps/120hz gameplay (except when pvhud updates charge bars – but that’s another issue)
Now do the same in linux with any AMD driver from the steam linux beta forwards. They all suck. Try jumping in the water and experience the lag and stutter.”
So I guess the best thing you can do is to give it a shot yourself, it likely depends on the hardware configurations that you’re running, and of course what games you’re trying to play, along with settings. Valve did warn ahead of the release of the Beta that there would be huge issues with performance / bugs because it’s a pre-release version of the SteamOS. If you want to try installing the SteamOS yourself with and don’t fancy formatting your hard drive, give our guide a shot which shows how to easily install the SteamOS on a Virtual Machine.
