Valve's SteamOS has been gaining a lot of new hardware support in recent months, including support for dGPUs and Intel's Arc GPUs. ETA Prime, the YouTuber who has become synonymous with gaming handheld and SteamOS testing, has put Intel's Arc B580 to the test on SteamOS, finding impressive performance but an unfortunate lack of support for built-in Xe Matrix eXtensions (XMX) hardware.

For starters, it's impressive to see that Intel's Arc B580 GPUs now boot on SteamOS without the workarounds or experimental support that was previously required. Despite the seamless boot and installation, the Mesa driver being used by SteamOS still doesn't have support for Intel's XMX engines, making the experience of running XeSS far less worthwhile. In testing, XeSS still technically works, but quality and performance both suffer compared to XeSS running on the proper hardware. The lack of support for XMX engines also completely disables XeSS Multi-Frame Generation.

Running at 1440p, Cyberpunk 2077 at high settings still managed frame rates of 75-90 FPS with XeSS 2.0 on Quality mode. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered also ran well at 1440p and high settings, with XeSS at balanced resulting in frame rates between 62 and 73, which ETA Prime says is basically identical performance to Windows. The reviewer also tested the older Fallout 4 at 1440p and ultra settings, with the hardware and OS combo achieving 60 FPS with plenty of headroom to spare. The same was true for Elden Ring, which ran at a very stable 60 FPS at a native 1440p resolution and maximum graphics quality with no upscaling. In Forza Horizon 5 at 1440p, high settings, and no upscaling, the Arc B580 managed to achieve a relatively smooth 75-85 FPS, with occasional dips into the 60s. He notes that, in his testing, Forza Horizon 5 runs in the mid-80s at the same settings in Windows, suggesting that SteamOS is leaving some performance on the table.

The primary takeaway here is that SteamOS has seen significant progress in getting GPU vendors other than AMD running and gaming, once again showing Valve's commitment to allowing both users and OEMs to make their own SteamOS devices, despite Valve's all-AMD approach.