In recent years, community-supported work on components like drivers and kernel improvements have made Linux distributions like SteamOS especially viable as gaming operating systems. Now, a new set of driver patches has been shared to the Linux kernel mailing list, and the developer behind the patches, David Vernet, claims to have improved 1% lows on AMD CPUs by as much as 31%. The new patches, which introduce the epp_boost feature to the AMD P-State driver, aim to improve CPU performance by improving CPU scaling and CPU boost behavior through identifying busy cores and enabling EPP boost on a per-core basis as needed. As per the explanation in the Linux kernel mailer :

When the epp_boost module parameter is enabled, an update-util hook samples each core's C0 residency (delta MPERF over delta TSC) at most once every 10 ms. If a sample shows the core at least 50% busy, the EPP field of its MSR_AMD_CPPC_REQ is set to performance (0) and held there until 300 ms pass without another busy sample, at which point the hook restores the request that policy management last stored in cppc_req_cached.