The latter has a minor bomb Steam Deck OS preview updatewhich is mainly about fixing Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty questions By installing this update, you can enable correct full fat ray tracing on deck for the first time, namely in Doom Eternal. carefully!
So far it’s just a ray-traced rendering, as that’s the sum total of what Doom Eternal has got in its ray tracing patch in 2021, though that’s still more than I certainly thought I’d see running on a humble Steam Deck APU. This skepticism wasn’t just born of hardware, either – the fact that Steam Deck’s OS is based on Linux makes it difficult to use the usual path of using Microsoft DirectX for RT effects, even with the Proton Deck’s level of compatibility.
Armature engineer – says Pierre-Lou Griffe full DXR is “in development, just not quite ready yet,” meaning Doom Eternal’s amazing renderings are flashed before your eyes via the more Linux-friendly Vulkan API. I realize that the first half of the news post is full of boring words, so before anyone kicks me in the locker, let’s get into how ray tracing actually works in Steam Deck.
That’s not bad for a device that starts at just £349. After installing the OS preview update and loading Doom Eternal, I found that the latter never dropped below 30fps with a combination of RT renders and the Medium quality preset. This is also with dynamic resolution disabled, so the screen didn’t need to blur to maintain a playable frame rate.
After all, it also rarely rose above about 35fps, and the difference between that level of performance and the solid 60fps that Doom Eternal can easily achieve on Steam Deck without raytracing is felt more acutely in a shooter than in such movements. clip The renderings do look nice, with accurate environmental detail and/or the glow of demonic fireballs reflected on shiny surfaces, though avoiding even more of a framerate drop means having to lower most other graphics quality settings. You make the game worse to make it look better.
None of this is to say that ray tracing in Steam Deck has suddenly become unpleasant; it’s just that it might make more sense in slower games that can sit more comfortably on the inevitable performance drop. By the way, these reductions might not be so bad when true native support comes with DXR compatibility. So, it’s exciting times for the Steam Deck, a full year after it started shipping.
If you want to get your own portable Doom Eternal ray tracing experience, make sure you have the Steam Deck OS 3.4.6 beta installed. To download it, press the Steam button on your deck, go to Settings, then System, then select Preview as your system update channel. Click the “Check for Updates” button above and you’ll be prompted for patch 3.4.6.