Intel Arc B580 Running SteamOS Impresses Despite Missing XeSS Driver Support

Valve's SteamOS has been gaining a lot of new hardware support in recent months, including support for dGPUs and Intel's Arc GPUs. ETA Prime, the YouTuber who has become synonymous with gaming handheld and SteamOS testing, has put Intel's Arc B580 to the test on SteamOS, finding impressive performance but an unfortunate lack of support for built-in Xe Matrix eXtensions (XMX) hardware.

For starters, it's impressive to see that Intel's Arc B580 GPUs now boot on SteamOS without the workarounds or experimental support that was previously required. Despite the seamless boot and installation, the Mesa driver being used by SteamOS still doesn't have support for Intel's XMX engines, making the experience of running XeSS far less worthwhile. In testing, XeSS still technically works, but quality and performance both suffer compared to XeSS running on the proper hardware. The lack of support for XMX engines also completely disables XeSS Multi-Frame Generation.