Some Deck users were apparently experiencing stuttering issues with the SteamOS 3.3 update. Though I never had such a problem myself, at least it’s good to know Valve is addressing the feedback. I haven’t tested Red Dead Redemption 2 on Deck but it seems that game had a VRAM issue too. Here is what’s new with today’s SteamOS beta update: Temporarily reverted RDR2 VRAM workaround to pre-3.3 behavior Fixed an issue causing random 0.

A few months back Gardiner Bryant showed off the Half-Life vinyl wrap that he got for his Steam Deck. Come to find out he got the skin from Moskeeto Designs. I really liked the Portal-themed skin that he has, so I got in touch and asked if he would send it over for review. Turns out he sent me all four of his skins (for some reason he’s not selling the Minecraft skin anymore; it has since been replaced with the Space Commander skin)!

EmuDeck version 0.17.6 just came out a few days ago. For those who aren’t aware, EmuDeck makes it incredibly easy to get emulation of retro to more modern titles set up on the Steam Deck. And what’s nice is combined with the Steam ROM Manager, roms can get added to the Steam Deck UI with nice cover art, and you can launch the game directly through this interface. At any rate, the latest update adds support for the Anbernic Win600 and some other goodies.

Steam Deck new skins came in a few days ago! I put out a video applying a Portal-themed one. I’m also doing a giveaway for the Half-Life and Cyberpunk 2077 skins, more details coming soon! I also got the DeckMate the same day I got the skins, review coming up soon! broken shoulder buttons can be replaced with the shoulder sockets on the Xbox One pad Deck is now available to be reserved in Asian markets.

I love TronicsFix’s videos. Seeing him tear down various electronics and observing how he fixes most of them almost feels…therapeutic. And now that I watched his Steam Deck video, I now know what to do if either the touchscreen or the shoulder buttons go bonkers. In the video he buys a broken Steam Deck for $529. He doesn’t mention what SKU it was, but I assume it was the 256 GB model.

glibc, or the GNU C Library, has recently been updated to 2.36. While this release does contain quite a few bug fixes, it’s also created others. For gamers in particular, it appears that this update has caused a regression with games that use Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). That means MultiVersus, Elden Ring, Apex Legends, and any other game that uses EAC (depending on the version being used) will no longer work on Deck or on Linux via Proton.

Great news for those of you outside the US/UK. The Steam Deck is now available for reservation/purchase in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong! In a new Steam blog post, the following was mentioned: We are happy to announce today that Steam Deck is expanding to more regions. With the help of Komodo, Steam Deck will ship later this year in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. You can reserve via Valve’s authorized reseller, Komodo.

Since Vulkan has been merged into the mainline Ryujinx build a few days ago, curiosity got to the better of me and I wanted to do a comparison between this and the older OpenGL API. Vulkan, particularly on AMD – and therefore the Steam Deck – supposedly has a huge number of benefits over OpenGL, including faster shader compilation. I tested the following games: Metroid Dread (please be aware there are spoilers here!

Looks like all the changes from the SteamOS 3.3 beta have now been pulled in and put into a stable release. It seems the SteamOS update has been pushed alongside a new stable Deck client update as well, as the patch notes are combined. Among some of the many changes in this update include the removal of Firefox as part of the SteamOS image; it’s now replaced with the latest Flatpak from Flathub.

DXVK has been updated to 1.10.3. New features in this update include the support for shared fences, which is needed for Halo Infinite’s videos to work. Fixes and workarounds have been added to Need for Speed 3, Ninja Blade, and Ys Origin. The insanely popular Stray has d3d11.ignoreGraphicsBarriers enabled “to work around some GPU-bound performance issues.” Finally, a regression was fixed from the previous release that caused rendering issues in certain D3D11 titles, including Bioshock Infinite and Prey.