Valve have upgraded Proton Experimental (ARM) with a feature that should hopefully improve some frame timings for devices like the Steam Frame.
Developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned on Bluesky:
"The FEX code cache is now enabled on Proton Experimental (ARM), and should exhibit improved 1%-low frame times, especially over subsequent runs."
What is FEX? FEX allows you to run x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices, similar to qemu-user and box64. It offers broad compatibility with both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, and it can be used alongside Wine/Proton to play Windows games.
What is the FEX code cache? In simple terms - it's basically a place where FEX keeps the ARM64 machine code it generates after translating x86 code, so it doesn’t have to keep doing the same translation work repeatedly. So with a cache it can read it should hopefully improve game start-up times and help with stuttering. It can't make a cache for everything though, but it's one tool in the box to improve things.
As expected, Valve will keep improving things like FEX, Proton, SteamOS and more that will make the Steam Frame better as times goes on.
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Quoting: MayeulCI wonder if they will put in place some infrastructure to share the cache among multiple users, like they do for shaders. It is a bit more tricky to secure correctly (I could submit arbitrary code, and boom, you get an RCE vulnerability), but I think it could be dine with a few server-side checks. Or even perform server-side translation and have clients submit the original x86 opcodes.Wait..Those downloaded shaders come from other users?
Quoting: TarosWait..Those downloaded shaders come from other users?Pretty much, making it future proof for all future GPUs.
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