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.

A new Deck client update has rolled out on the Beta and Preview channels. It’s small but contains a few bug fixes. You’ll particularly like this one if you dock your Deck to an external monitor and “have overscan issues.” Some bugs have also been fixed in regards to viewing guides in the overlay, or when viewing acheivements. Patch notes are as follows: Added ability to adjust image display settings for external displays that have overscan issues Fixed issues with some images being too large when viewing guides in the overlay Fixed spoiler tags in guides to be selectable so that they can be revealed Fixed issue with medium length game names in the Main Menu Overlay not properly scrolling Fixed Achievements page not updating properly when a new achievement was earned Patch notes can also be seen on Steam.

Great news for those of you who use Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch emulator. Vulkan is now been merged with the main build! You no longer need to use the PR build. This has been a long time in the making, and I’m not going to go over the tremendous amount of benefits this backend has over OpenGL; you can read the blog post from the Ryujinx team if you want to learn more.

Kernel 5.19 released as stable just a few hours ago. Notable features include further Zen 4 APU support, further support for the Intel DG2/Alchemist GPU, idle driver support for Alder Lake processors, initial support for Raptor Lake P processors, Apple M1 NVMe controller support, and tons of other features/bug fixes/performance improvements. There’s also supposedly performance improvements for the HP Dev One. Linus himself wrote regarding the ARM support for MacBooks:

There’s another Crankshaft plugin that I wanted to highlight: Compatibility Tools Manager. With this plugin installed on the Steam Deck, you can quickly obtain the latest version of GE-Proton without having to resort to Desktop Mode. Just install it, then you will be prompted to restart the Deck. It’s that simple. You can see here after installing the latest version (7-28 at the time of writing this) and restarting the Deck, it’s now available in the compatibility list.

Steam Deck I’m getting some skins for review. Should be getting them sometime next week. I may also be getting the DeckMate accessory for review as well. Good times ahead! if you haven’t already, subscribe to my YouTube channel, as I will daily be posting a different game being played on Deck SDHQ has a Crankshaft plugin in which you can easily check SDHQ ratings for games that have been reviewed capture footage with Recapture.

Dulsi (or Dennis Payne), one of the developers of Anagramarama (and one of our recommended FOSS games), has made mention on our Matrix channel that he’s working on another open-source game. It’s called Mojotron: Robot Wars. It’s a twin-stick shooter that has SNES-era graphics, in which you play as a monkey called Mojo. Per the game page: In 2085, the last of humanity died. The machines had won. Mojo doesn’t know why they continued experimenting on monkeys.