Valve Just Enabled Native Ray Tracing On The Steam Deck And It Actually Looks Pretty Wild

© Drawing the future

So yes, ray tracing is now on the Steam Deck. It used to be doable if you wanted to dig in and make some tweaks to Linux, but with the latest beta release, Valve's OS is starting to become native. For a device that costs less than the price of an RTX 3050, a graphics card that no one should buy at this price point, the ability to turn on useful ray tracing is pretty impressive.

Valve announced a new Steam Deck OS beta on the handheld preview channel, updating the device's operating system with the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver. It's dry for now, but what's interesting is what it actually means in terms of gameplay. First, it fixes some graphics corruption issues that exist in the current version of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, as well as GPU crashes "in several future games".

The update also includes ray tracing in Doom Eternal.

Which company makes good ray-traced graphics for Steam Deck? You can ask. But deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffet, who made the announcement on Twitter, also showed off Doom Eternal's performance when activated.

They posted a screenshot to the stream, making sure it was taken on a performance-enabled deck showing a frame rate of 35 fps, with the associated frame timeline looking like a rock at that speed.

Doom Eternal isn't the last word in terms of unprecedented ray tracing effects, but its implementation is a clever use of technology to improve lighting and reflections throughout the game. 1080p minimum resolution tracking, shipped as RTX 2060.

This technology works directly through the Vulkan graphics API rather than through DXR through the Proton layer, which can slightly increase frame rates in DirectX games.

But Griffeis says, "DXR is in development, but not quite ready yet."

The idea that we can enable DirectX Raytracing in the Steam Deck is pretty crazy. I mean performance in DXR games will probably be harder on Deck GPU hardware than on Doom Eternal, but that's something I'd be interested in testing for sure.

I've been playing a lot with ray tracing on Linux lately after installing PopOS! on my Razer Blade 15 with an RTX 3080. I was surprised to be able to do both DLSS and ray tracing with Ultra RT gaming settings on a PC in Cyberpunk 2077 using the latest build of Proton.

Thank you Glorious Egg.

But for it to work, some preliminary arguments are required, and in The Witcher 3 it does not work. The idea of ​​not worrying about such Linux changes in Steam Deck is attractive. Although the performance of the Aerith APU probably won't be super smooth on something as demanding.

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