Coming from the business side of gaming - this Valve Linux VRAM fix story is genuinely interesting to me, but not for the technical reason. A Valve engineer quietly drops a kernel patch, and suddenly a 4GB GPU that was practically unusable in modern games goes from 14 to 41 FPS in Alan Wake II. No press release. No marketing. Just a fix that triples performance for budget GPU users. From a growth perspective, that’s a massive retained audience - people who were about to give up on PC gaming because their hardware couldn’t keep up. Question for the devs here: how much do you think about low-VRAM users when optimizing your games? Is it even feasible at an indie level, or is that something only studios with Valve-level resources can realistically address?
Valve’s fix was to Linux swapping. It has nothing to do explicitly with Alan Wake. It just happens that it makes the game playable on a 4gb card on Linux.