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Games: Steam Survey and FEX 2506 Tagged
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PC Gamer ☛ Linux enjoys a small usage uptick with Steam users, though at 2.69% it still has a long way to go to topple Windows
It's that time again where we look to Steam's monthly survey and all feel slightly better about our own rigs. Just for starters, I may not be able to afford the latest Nvidia card, but I can still feel a wee bit smug that neither you nor I fall into the 37% of Steam users still rocking Windows 10, right? …Right?
Operating systems that are about to become an unsupported vintage aside, the real story from the May edition of Steam's hardware and software survey is that there's been a slight uptick in folks moving to Linux—by about 0.42%.
Okay, so it's hardly like there's been a massive exodus from Windows as the end of 10 approaches, but the fact that 2.69% of Steam users are running a Linux OS is worth drilling down into.
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Linux share on Steam grows rapidly, Windows 11 reaches 60%, NVIDIA RTX 3060 and both 4060s top the list
May Steam survey adds the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti to the list of the most popular graphics cards, Linux grew by a huge half a percent, and Windows 11 is used by almost two-thirds of gamers.
Windows 10 is nearing the end of its support period, and the operating system is rapidly losing gamers. In May, its share on Steam was 37%, down 1.09%. This number was distributed among other OSes somewhat unexpectedly. Windows 11 gained +0.46%, and from 58.3% it is rapidly moving towards a record round percentage.
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WINE or Emulation
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FEX ☛ FEX 2506 Tagged
This is an absolute banger of a change from our venerable developer neobrain. They have been working towards this as a goal for a while; The tricky nature of the feature making it difficult to land. Before we discuss how this improves performance, it is first necessary to discuss how FEX’s JIT worked before this change.
Before this change, our JIT would execute independently for every thread that the guest application makes, without sharing those code buffers with other threads. This meant that if multiple threads execute the same code, they would all be JITing it, consuming memory and taking precious CPU cycles. Additionally, if a thread exits then all of that code buffer gets deleted as well and not reused at all. Not only does this consume more memory, it’s actually worse off for CPUs because even if we are executing the same x86 code between threads, the ARM code is at different locations in memory, meaning we put even more pressure on our CPU’s poor L2/L3 caches. This is becoming an even larger issue for newer games where they have multi-threaded job-queue systems where any of the threads in the pool could execute jobs and it becomes random chance if the same thread ends up executing the same code. Usually just means every thread in the pool will end up JITing all the code multiple times.
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