CryoUtilities didn’t perform any voodoo magic. It merely changed some system settings. System settings known to most Linux users, and, very obviously, to such proficient Linux experts as the developers of SteamOS. So if these tweaks magically gave a higher performance on most titles, why wouldn’t Valve have included these settings as default? Why even after a year of these magical utilities existing have they not realized the benefits and not set these settings as default in an update?
Simple. Because the supposed benefits have always been mostly placebo and inconsistent testing. Sure, some games benefit from more that 1GB of VRAM or perhaps from having some other setting changed. But there absolutely was never any real trend of these tweaks improving performance across the board.
Of course, voicing this would always be immediately met with a swarm of downvotes and people arguing that “it worked for me!” without understanding that this is exactly how placebo functions.
Just like stating that the backlight PWM is not related to the framerate of the screen in any way would be met with people piling on to tell you that they “clearly see the difference in backlight PWM when they lower the framerate”, without realizing that they obviously see something else. Some would even claim to see the wave effect you see when filming PWM-controlled lights with a digital camera which is a phenomenon caused by the rolling shutter of the camera, and thus impossible to see with the human eye.
CryoUtilities didn’t perform any voodoo magic. It merely changed some system settings. System settings known to most Linux users, and, very obviously, to such proficient Linux experts as the developers of SteamOS. So if these tweaks magically gave a higher performance on most titles, why wouldn’t Valve have included these settings as default? Why even after a year of these magical utilities existing have they not realized the benefits and not set these settings as default in an update?
Simple. Because the supposed benefits have always been mostly placebo and inconsistent testing. Sure, some games benefit from more that 1GB of VRAM or perhaps from having some other setting changed. But there absolutely was never any real trend of these tweaks improving performance across the board.
Of course, voicing this would always be immediately met with a swarm of downvotes and people arguing that “it worked for me!” without understanding that this is exactly how placebo functions.
Just like stating that the backlight PWM is not related to the framerate of the screen in any way would be met with people piling on to tell you that they “clearly see the difference in backlight PWM when they lower the framerate”, without realizing that they obviously see something else. Some would even claim to see the wave effect you see when filming PWM-controlled lights with a digital camera which is a phenomenon caused by the rolling shutter of the camera, and thus impossible to see with the human eye.