Valve Posts Updated Steam Deck FAQs To Address More Community Questions
While the Steam Deck shipping date slipped into Q1 due to hardware supply chain issues, Valve continues making great progress on the software front and readying the ecosystem and developer partners for their much anticipated Arch Linux powered gaming handheld console.
Some of the many items covered in the updated FAQ today include:
- For determining the developers that are seeded with Steam Deck Dev Kits, Valve is analyzing the most-played titles of games for those who have reserved a Steam Deck.
- For those developing/testing without a Steam Deck, Valve recommends using an AMD CPU anyways for as close to the experience of the Steam Deck as possible.
- Valve plans to provide some APIs to help game developers in saving game data/state prior to suspending the device for a better suspend/resume experience, particularly around WiFi/Internet loss.
- AMD FSR will be included as part of a future Steam OS release, complementing the per-game AMD FSR support available already with some titles. This will allow easily using AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution for games not natively supporting it.
- Currently the Steam Deck is on a Linux 5.13 based kernel but working to move to a Linux 5.15 LTS kernel build.
- The main root partition will indeed be a read-only file-system treated as an immutable object. SteamOS updates will be distributed as an entire OS image. Those wanting to can go into the developer mode for mounting the entire operating system as read-write.
- Valve still publicly indicates "no strong preference" whether game developers target native Linux support or go the Proton route.
- Steam OS 3.0 will likely not be available separately to consumers/gamers until after the Steam Deck is shipping.
See partner.steamgames.com documentation for all the FAQs in full. Valve has also provided localized versions of their recent Steam Deck developer showcase via YouTube.
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