This Linux kernel patch could give the Steam Deck a surprising performance boost

Published Jul 29, 2026, 2:24 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary The epp_boost Linux patch tweaks AMD P-State to enable EPP on busy cores, improving CPU boost behavior. Benchmarks: up to 31% better 1%-low FPS in CPU-bound games on Steam Deck (Civilization VI is cited as an example). AMD hasn't reviewed the patch; a wider release may take time despite potential Steam Deck gains. The Steam Deck and its custom AMD APU are pretty old by PC hardware standards at this point, coming in at roughly four and a half years. This means that it can often struggle to play modern games smoothly at decent graphics settings. However, a new set of driver patches shared on the Linux Kernel mailing list claims to have improved 1% lows on AMD CPUs by as much as 31% with some titles (via Phoronix). The new patches, which bring the epp_boost feature to the AMD P-State driver, boost CPU performance by improving CPU scaling and boost behavior by targeting busy cores and enabling Energy Performance Preference (EPP) when it's actually needed. David Vernet, a Linux kernel hacker at Meta and the developer behind these patches, explains the update like this in the Linux kernel mailing list as follows: When the epp_boost module parameter is enabled, an update-util hook samples each core's C0 residency (delta MPERF over delta TSC) at most once every 10 ms. If a sample shows the core at least 50% busy, the EPP field of its MSR_AMD_CPPC_REQ is set to performance (0) and held there until 300 ms pass without another busy sample, at which point the hook restores the request that policy management last stored in cppc_req_cached. The P-State driver patch still needs to be reviewed by AMD's engineers This patch could help Steam Deck owners hang on to the handheld for longer In Vernet's tests, this boosts FPS performance in games that are CPU-bound rather than tied to the GPU. With the Steam Deck, Vernet says that Civilization VI's "main thread runs at a 3.5 GHz median and the benchmark gains 31.8% in 1%-low fps (p=0.014) and 4.1% in frame-time p99 (p=0.015), with p999 and average fps unchanged." Tests with other titles don't seem to have been performed yet. Along with the Steam Deck, this patch should also improve Steam Machine game performance. AMD's engineers haven't yet reviewed the patch, though Vernet says that it was developed specifically with gaming in mind. This means that it could be some time before the patch gets a wider release. A few months ago, Valve increased the price of the entry-level Steam Deck from $550 to $790, reportedly resulting in sales plummeting by 82 percent, according to data pulled by Boiling Steam.