The Steam Deck packs incredible power for a portable device capable of running resource-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Dead Space Remake. Now the laptop is flexing its muscles in a way I never thought possible as it now supports ray tracing.
You might think we’ll have to wait for Steam Deck 2 before we see ray tracing support on Valve’s handheld, but the current system has the necessary hardware on it from day one. However, until now, this feature was not supported in the software since the recent release of SteamOS 3.4.6 Preview.
Shortly after the release of the official patch notes, Valve’s coder Pierre Loup-Griffet took to Twitter to share a screenshot of Doom Eternal’s ray tracing running on the Steam Deck. They were even kind enough to share indicators of performanceshowing the game running at 35 frames per second and with reflections in real time.
Testing the game myself with ray tracing enabled, I’m not sure I’d prefer to play it that way. Even lowering the settings to “Low” and lowering the game’s resolution didn’t have much of an impact on frame rates. However, I strongly suspect that Valve will work on optimizations and performance improvements wherever possible, and I remain deeply impressed that they achieved this on the Steam Deck in the first place.
Doom Eternal is currently the only game that supports ray tracing, but it probably won’t be the last. Give it a few months, maybe even weeks, and we’ll see more of the best Steam Deck games with fancy RT effects.
Image credits: Pierre Loup-Griffet
Source : PC Gamesn
