this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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A quiet kernel patch just saved thousands of players from upgrading -are devs thinking about this? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by sophie_talks@lemmy.world to c/pcgaming@lemmy.world
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Coming from the business side of gaming - this Valve Linux VRAM fix story is genuinely interesting to me, but not for the technical reason. A Valve engineer quietly drops a kernel patch, and suddenly a 4GB GPU that was practically unusable in modern games goes from 14 to 41 FPS in Alan Wake II. No press release. No marketing. Just a fix that triples performance for budget GPU users. From a growth perspective, that's a massive retained audience - people who were about to give up on PC gaming because their hardware couldn't keep up. Question for the devs here: how much do you think about low-VRAM users when optimizing your games? Is it even feasible at an indie level, or is that something only studios with Valve-level resources can realistically address?

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[โ€“] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

A Valve engineer quietly drops a kernel patch, and suddenly a 4GB GPU that was practically unusable in modern games goes from 14 to 41 FPS in Alan Wake II.

Alan Wake II isn't even available on Steam, right? Epic keeps it exclusive on their store.

Kinda amusing to have Valve be the one fixing it.

[โ€“] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 5 days ago

Valve's fix was to Linux swapping. It has nothing to do explicitly with Alan Wake. It just happens that it makes the game playable on a 4gb card on Linux.