Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing
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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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