In early July, a frame generation on Linux was made available to everyone thanks to a fan-made port of Lossless Scaling, the widely popular upscaling and frame gen tool. It’s just the FG aspect of LS that came to Linux thanks to modder PancakeTAS, but it has proven to be a success. A new update to the app (called lsfg-vk) has arrived with FP16 acceleration for a performance boost.

There was a little bit of controversy surrounding the launch and its implementation on the Steam Deck via a Decky plugin, but that was soon cleared up. FP16 acceleration arrives after a recent pull request on GitHub and drops the DXVK dependency due to not being compatible – a workaround was found instead.

FP16 acceleration comes to Lossless Scaling on Linux

According to testing, PancakeTAS claims a “roughly 2x-4x in normal mode, or 1.2x-2x in performance mode” improvement thanks to FP16 acceleration. These claims are based on testing on her Steam Deck and laptop. The technique, also known as float16, uses half-precision to (in theory) run shaders twice as fast, and its effects should “mainly happen on AMD cards”.

The dev confirms on GitHub that many Nvidia users will see less of a benefit, or even have degraded performance; this is why there is a “force-disable FP16” option available in the config. GPUs such as the GTX 1080 Ti or older are expected to have a performance decrease, while cards from the RTX 30 series onwards don’t benefit from FP16. That leaves the GTX 16 and 20 series, though no testing has been done to confirm how much they’ll gain from FP16.

In any case, Nvidia hardware is less popular on Linux. Even a Steam Deck dev claimed that Nvidia drivers are holding back a widespread SteamOS release; Nvidia’s open-source drivers are much more in their infancy compared to AMD, meaning there is more work to be done to support the Linux-based operating system.

PancakeTAS says she has run some benchmarks to compare Windows versus Linux performance with FP16 support (the Windows version already has this). “I can safely say that Linux consistently matches the Windows performance and in some cases exceeds it by a few frames.”

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.