Monday, 6 March 2023

Steam Deck Beta Update Adds Support for Ray Tracing in Doom Eternal

The Valve Steam Deck isn’t the most powerful gaming machine, but it makes up for that by being a whole lot more portable than your gaming PC. Despite the modest power, Valve has managed to add one of today’s most demanding graphical technologies: ray tracing. This feature is live in the latest beta software, but it’s currently only available in Doom Eternal. There are worse ways to experience ray tracing, though.

The new beta release, version 3.4.6, includes several improvements to the graphics driver (known as Mesa). Players of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty will wave goodbye to graphical corruption, and some upcoming titles won’t have corruptions or crashes at all if Valve is to be believed. By far, the most notable change is the addition of ray tracing for Doom Eternal. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais posted an example of ray tracing on the Steam Deck, and it looks surprisingly good. That might not be the case for future ray-tracing titles, though.

Griffais provided a screenshot of Doom Eternal running on the Deck with ray tracing enabled. According to the status bar at the top of the screen, the Deck is in docked mode with the GPU maxed out and the CPU at about half capacity. The scene doesn’t have much going on, but the lighting clearly shows realistic reflections thanks to ray tracing support. The gaming handheld managed 35fps at the time the screenshot above was taken. That’s playable, but you wouldn’t want a fast-paced shooter like Doom to drop much lower.

The Steam Deck runs on Steam OS, which is Linux, and that will complicate ray tracing a bit. Doom Eternal is the first supported game because it uses the Vulkan graphics API for ray tracing. Other games rely on the Proton compatibility layer to map Windows and DirectX APIs onto Steam OS. These titles probably won’t perform as well with ray tracing. Griffais confirms in a follow-up tweet that Valve is working on DirectX Ray Tracing support, but it’s not ready for even a public beta release.

If you want ray tracing on the Steam Deck as soon as possible, head to the settings and join the beta channel. Everyone else should get access to Doom Eternal ray tracing in the next stable OS update. Further ray tracing goodies will arrive in the future, but you should not expect the kind of frame rates possible with discrete graphics.

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