Although Linux has been a viable PC gaming platform for several years, with only a small market share compared to Windows, it’s often treated as an afterthought. However, with the success of the Steam Deck and Valve’s efforts with Proton, which have helped make Linux gaming with a SteamOS-like interface a popular and stable platform, more companies are beginning to take note.
A Steam Deck-like handheld with GeForce RTX graphics and DLSS 4 support? Sounds like it’s only a matter of time.
VIEW GALLERY – 2 IMAGES
And one of those companies is NVIDIA, which is stepping up its support for Linux as a gaming OS thanks to new ‘Senior System Software Engineer‘ and ‘Linux Graphics Senior Software Engineer‘ job listings. The first job is specifically tied to Vulkan performance, the API used for Linux gaming, with one of the key tasks for the new employee being to diagnose “GPU and CPU performance bottlenecks in Vulkan and Proton titles.”
And it isn’t merely about improving performance on the GeForce RTX side of the equation, as the role will also engage with third parties, namely the Proton teams, to make changes to the API to further improve performance. And it doesn’t stop there, NVIDIA is also looking for an additional engineer to enable “native-speed x86-64 gaming on Linux/ARM64 platforms.” What does this all mean? Well, it means NVIDIA’s upcoming N1 and N1X chips will also be for PC gaming.
NVIDIA’s upcoming N1 and N1X system-on-chips for the consumer market, developed in collaboration with MediaTek, are set to pair ARM-based CPU cores with GeForce RTX graphics for portable devices such as laptops.
A first-of-its-kind offering from the company, these job listings support the idea that NVIDIA is collaborating with partners like ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI to create and ship dedicated PC gaming handheld devices with a SteamOS-like Linux interface. Currently, the portable Windows and Linux gaming handheld market is serviced exclusively by AMD, with devices like the Steam Deck, Legion Go, and others all running AMD SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics.
With the expectation that NVIDIA’s N1 and N1X SoCs will fully support DLSS technologies like Super Resolution and Frame Generation, portable GeForce RTX-powered gaming handhelds could become the premier on-the-go gaming platform, thanks to AI rendering. Currently, devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Xbox Ally X only support the older, non-AI FSR upscaling technology, which delivers notably worse image quality at lower resolutions than DLSS. When it comes to energy-efficient chips that prioritize battery life, DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation could be a game-changer if these new devices can deliver 100+ FPS performance on a handheld.