Digital Foundry tested running Steam games on PlayStation 5 based on Linux system. In certain cases, games running through Proton have shown performance close to native PS5 versions, but this does not apply to all games.
allows the PS5 to run Linux. Thanks to Andy Nguyen’s project, the PS5 can boot into the Linux desktop from external storage media through an existing firmware vulnerability in versions 4.5 and below. It also allows the system to access the PS5’s 8-core, 16-thread Zen 2 processor and RDNA 2 graphics core with 36 computing units. By default, the CPU frequency is 3.2GHz and the GPU frequency is 2.0GHz; after turning on the acceleration mode, the two can be increased to 3.5GHz and 2.23GHz respectively.
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tested a variety of games on the Steam platform, including "Black Myth: Wukong", "Red Desert", "Consciousness Existence" and "Control". In "Black Myth: Wukong", the performance when acceleration mode is not turned on can reach 99.9% of the native PS5 version, and it is further improved by about 3% after it is turned on. However, Shumaoshe emphasized that this is almost the best situation: when using Linux and universal drivers, it is very rare to achieve such performance parity with the native version of the host.
In addition, texture settings also play an important role. According to data analysis, the PS5 native version is closer to the low texture settings of the PC version. There will be performance degradation when using high textures under Linux, which is most likely related to the memory management mechanism rather than a lack of GPU performance. The main limitation of this simulation occurs in video memory calls. Although the PS5 has a unified memory architecture, Linux uses a split memory pool model that is closer to the PC. According to Datamaosha's assessment, dynamically allocated video memory is limited to about 6 GB. This also explains why "Conscious Existence" has serious lagging, while "Red Desert" has rendering problems, such as abnormal sky display.
Although Valve has not launched an official Steam Machine, running Linux on the PS5 allows people to evaluate the true potential performance of this console. However, this solution also has limitations: it only runs on older firmware and is not yet suitable for widespread use by the public.