It looks like our days of coming back to the cowboy world are on the way. Reported by Phoronix this morning, developer Samuel Pitoiset introduced 2 fixes to the upcoming Mesa 22.3 that address “memory explosion” issues, like the one Red Dead Redemption 2 has, specifically on devices that use an AMD APU like the Steam Deck. This was brought to our attention by Twitter user @tonyt3rry, thank you!
The first patch, “radv_enable_unified_heap_on_apu”, is an option that will force the driver to expose only a single heap of VRAM as some games tend to perform better. The second patch is to specifically force RDR2 to enable this option based on the process name. This means no other games will be affected by this new option.
Hopefully, this will be pushed out by Valve soon so we can start wrangling people up again. We will update our review accordingly once it is pushed out!
