Steam Client Now Features Hardware Acceleration on Linux
The latest stable release of Steam includes a feature that Linux gamers have been waiting for that brings a much-improved experience.
Steam helped to herald in an age of gaming on Linux like no other software. But for the longest time, Linux users had to deal with performance issues that made it lag behind that of Windows. Animations would often lag and the UI (as a whole) wasn't nearly as responsive as it should be.
Say goodbye to those performance issues, thanks to the latest stable update of the platform. With the latest iteration, users can finally take advantage of hardware acceleration on Linux. The only caveat to this new addition is that it's not quite stable with NVIDIA GPUs, when running on the aging X11 protocol. Because of that, hardware acceleration is disabled (by default) for machines using NVIDIA GPUs. At the same time, DPI scaling may be problematic with acceleration switched off.
Other features for the new release include better KDE Plasma support, more options for notifications, an overhauled in-game overlay, new notes functionality (that includes rich text formatting, image pasting, and offline functionality), greatly improved visuals (including dialogs, menus, fonts, and colors), and numerous bug fixes.
You can read the full release notes from the official Steam blog. To update your Steam client, open the app and go to Steam > Check for Steam Client Updates. If there's an update available, make sure to apply it to enjoy these exciting new additions to the Linux version.
