Underlying the mistakes around understanding of RT on Steam Deck, and on Linux in general, are misunderstandings of the driver situation. For most recent AMD hardware Linux users have a choice of the AMD drivers (AMDGPU-Pro) and Mesa. The Mesa drivers are solidly outperforming AMD's own now, due in part to Valve's contributions to the shader compiler ACO (AMD COmpiler). This is what the Steam Deck uses. It was really strange to hear Digital Foundries say at 3:15 in that video:

"... before we do that this does offer us the opportunity to run the same games on windows as we've already done on Steam OS and to kind of try to calculate the efficiency of the proton compatibility layer."

No, it can't ever do that because you are comparing a completely different driver, with a code base truly varying at all levels of the stack. The comparison you are making is { Game -> Windows Drivers } vs. { Game -> Proton -> Mesa }. Mesa is doing so well, but lacking RT support.

It would be good to have an article clarifying which drivers are available, which are default, and their strengths, weaknesses and platforms supported.

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