Yes, you can now do ray tracing properly with Steam Deck (opens in new tab). It used to be possible if you wanted to do a Linux-like tweak, but Valve has started supporting it natively in the latest Beta OS, on a device that costs less than the price of an RTX 3050 (opens in new tab), on a graphics card that no one should buy at that price, and for what it's worth, ray It's really great to be able to do tracing now.

Valve announced a new Steam Deck OS beta (opens in new tab) on its Preview channel for handhelds and updated the device's OS to the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver. So far, so well, so normal, but what is interesting is what it actually means in gaming. For one thing, it removes the graphics corruption issues that exist in the current build of Wo Long: graphics corruption in the current build of Fallen Dynasty (opens in new tab) and GPU crashing issues "in some upcoming titles."

The update also enables ray tracing in Doom Eternal.

Is it necessary for Steam Deck to run something as graphically intensive as ray tracing? However, Pierre-Loup Griffais, the developer of the deck, made this announcement on twitter and also demonstrated the performance of Doom Eternal with ray tracing enabled.

They posted a thread with screenshots, which are confirmed to have been taken with Deck, showing a frame rate of 35 fps with performance overlays enabled.

"Doom Eternal" is not the last word in exaggerated ray-tracing effects, but its implementation makes smart use of the technology to enhance lighting and reflections throughout the game. As such, there are no high entry requirements to enable ray tracing, and the minimum spec for 1080p (open in new tab) is RTX 2060.

The technology is provided directly through the Vulkan graphics API, not through DXR via the Proton layer.

However, Griffais stated: "DXR is in the pipe, but it's not ready yet.

The idea of being able to use DirectX Raytracing natively in Steam decks is pretty wild. I mean, the performance of DXR titles is going to be tougher on Deck's GPU hardware than Doom Eternal, but I'd certainly like to check it out.

I recently ran a RTX 3080-powered Razer Blade 15 with PopOS! Cyberpunk 2077, using the bleeding edge version of Proton, and was amazed to be able to run both DLSS and ray tracing on playable ultra-RT settings! I was amazed.

Thanks, Glorious Eggroll.

However, this would require pre-launch discussions to get it working, and it won't work on The Witcher 3. The idea of not having to worry about such Linux-like tweaks on a Steam deck is appealing. Even if I don't think the performance of the Aerith APU is super smooth for something so demanding.