Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing
The recording from the livestream is embedded below for those interested, but some of the key takeaways from today's developer-focused Steam Deck event included:
- Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
- SteamOS 3.0 will be generally available in due course for those wanting to run the Arch-based Linux distribution on other hardware.
- SteamOS 3.0 is making use of PipeWire.
- Flatpak'ed apps will be supported.
- At least initially the Steam Deck is now making use of a global frame limiter but initially is being left up to the individual games to handle. We'll see how quickly such functionality or so is built into Gamescope.
- The AMD SoC powering the Steam Deck is codenamed "Aerith" and as previously reported is a quad-core Zen 2 design with RDNA2 graphics. The TDP range for Aerith is 4 to 15 Watts. The Steam Deck should support up to two 4K screens at 60Hz via the USB3/DP 1.4 DSC interface.
In case you missed it from yesterday, Valve also published some new documentation for the Steam Deck including a recommendation of using Arch-based Manjaro Linux until their own Arch-based SteamOS is available.
Also today, Valve released a new Proton release candidate for testing. Proton 6.3-8 RC fixes a number of Windows game issues, including support for select BattlEye games, improved CEG DRM compatibility, DLSS in DX11/DX12 games, supporting the latest Steamworks SDK, and a wide variety of different fixes. Among the games tested to now be playable with this Proton 6.3-8 RC are Age of Empires 4, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, DEATHLOOP, Eve Online, Mafia II, The Riftbreaker, and others.
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