A more customizable Home Screen.

Yes please, particularly I'd like to be able to put my 'Favourites' collection on the home screen.

Downloads with the screen off.

This is badly needed but it's also a somewhat challenging problem to address.

With phones at least, there's an established principle for how those work. You press the power button quickly to turn off the screen. You hold the power button down to bring up a power menu and turn off the phone entirely.

With the Deck, right now tapping the power button puts the whole device into sleep mode. I don't know how exactly would be the best way to add a 'screen off' mode. It'd be kinda awkward to change the default action now that it's been established. Perhaps holding down the power button should bring up some kind of menu, with 'Sleep' 'Screen Off', 'Turn Off' options? I don't know, tricky problem that one.. But we definitely need a solution. It feels 'dumb' having to sit the Deck in it's stand and leave it with the screen on while it's downloading. Even my desktop PC I can at least lock the PC and turn off the monitors when I need to wait for a long download for a game.

More "official" apps that can be installed easily in Gaming Mode in the Non-Steam section of the Library.

YES! I'd love for Valve to work with these companies to even create 'Steam Deck' versions of these apps, with UIs and control schemes tweaked to work better for the Steam Deck itself. Valve said something is coming for this eventually, lets hope we see that soon.

Let us move the on-screen keyboard in Desktop Mode. A properly compact version would be great too, it just takes up far too much space.

This one is a big one for me, the OSK is good but sometimes just in the way in a game. An option to make it smaller or move it around would be great. Predictive text would be nice too. Basically 'Look at Android' and copy some obvious features.

Let us pick what the Deck boots into between Gaming Mode and Desktop Mode.

If it was me, I'd offer three options:

Default Boot Mode:
[ ] Gaming Mode
[ ] Desktop Mode
[ ] Remember

Where 'Remember' just remembers the last mode you were in and boots into that. That could even be the default for most Steam Decks without issue I suspect.

Even more attention on Deck Verified.

Both more attention to the ratings themselves and of course always lots of effort put into working with game developers to ensure their hottest new games are Verified if possible at launch.

My 2 additions...

1. Steam Deck Optimised

Basically a new rating which is even higher than 'Verified'. Optimised would mean the following guarantees:

• Native: No Proton needed, the game is native to Linux.


• Vulkan: Game uses Vulkan for graphics for best performance.


• 60fps @ 1280x800: The game's default graphics settings on the Steam Deck allow the game to run at the maximum resolution and refresh rate of the Deck.


• 3 Hours Gameplay: The game's default graphics settings allow it to run for at least 3 hours of gameplay.


• Offline: No connectivity is required to run the game for single player content, first time or any time.


• Verified: All the same guarantees of Verified apply as well, since this is the level 'above' Verified.

2. Global Shipping!

My biggest wishlist item? I want to see everyone in the world, including us Australians, able to buy a Steam Deck off the website.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Did my part. I would seriously play this game, download it and install it, if it became compatible with SteamOS. I'd be willing to download it, give it a serious try for at least a week to see if it sticks. But until it's compatible with the Steam Deck, not interested.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Just good guy Valve doing good guy Valve things.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The trend line of that graph is certainly looking great. Does look like 1.4% is at least possibly within reach by the end of the year, which would be a fantastic result if we can hit it, given we started at 1.06%.

Here's an alternative way of looking at the numbers:

September 2019 - 0.83%
September 2020 - 0.94% (+0.11%)
September 2021 - 1.05% (+0.11%)
September 2022 - 1.23% (+0.18%)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I had no idea that was an electron game. Neat. All things considered it ran pretty well and I got great battery life on the Deck with it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Very nice improvement for the onscreen keyboard.

If I could have two wishes for the onscreen keyboard, I'd ask for these two features:
- An option to manually move the keyboard around the screen (and remembering the last position).
- A 'compact' mode where the keyboard is 2/3rds of it's current size.

With that, it'd be near perfect.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: GuestYou know why they implement RTX for those closed-space games or two decade old games? Because perfomance hit won't be as big as doing it for open world games with dynamic daynight cycle, where raytracing would help the most to provide GI or at least global occlusion.

Nothing to do with day/night cycles. They do look great with ray tracing. See Q2RTX, for example. It's because open areas need more rays in order to adequately hit every surface. Just geometry.

If there is no daynight cycle, then baking light and reflection data is possible, and there is not much need in realtime raytracing, that's why I mentioned it in the first place.

Exactly.

It's easy to take these old games from a decade or more ago, with their relatively simple lighting engines, and throw some raytracing on them for a noticeable difference. You could make a game like Portal look almost as good as the raytraced result by simply updating the game engine to a more recent version, increasing the resolution of the baked lightmaps, placing more light probes, and using more recent real time approximations of GI, such as screenspace GI, using more real time light sources with shadow mapping enabled, etc.

In traditional boxy shaped level designs of old first person games, like Doom for example, you could easily setup a lightmap, some light probes, reflection probes with parallax projection shapes, bake the result, and the outcome is going to look so close to the raytraced result, that in many cases the raytrace result is simply not worth it.

Even outdoor scenes, if the lighting is static, such as a counter strike or half life level for example, the results of baked lighting can look fantastic. And this is how most game engines have worked for a long time and how most engines still work today.

This is exactly what I do in Blender, when I setup a scene to be rendered in Eevee [External Link] instead of Cycles, I setup and bake lighting for a scene, bake reflection probes, etc, and the results I can get from a 2 second Eevee render are almost as good as 5 minute renders from Cycles, which is a full blown pathtracer.

The only issue is if there are dynamic changes in lighting, such as a dynamic day/night cycle, but even in those situations there are options, such as baking all the non-sky based lighting separately from the sky, and having different baked versions of the sky lighting if the day/night cycle is always the same with no weather variations, or other trickery to still fall back to baked results.

And sometimes, really, the difference is just not noticeable even if the baked result is sometimes 'wrong', if it's close enough most people would not be able to tell you if it is wrong or not by simply looking at it. They'd need a side by side comparison with the 'ground truth' raytraced result to know for sure where or how it's wrong.

There are more modern solutions like Godot's SDFGI which is real time too. [External Link]

And if you mix those kinds of algorithms with something like screenspace raymarching for global illumination, which basically takes that approximated or baked result and 'corrects' it where possible with any information available in the screenspace, the result is almost perfect and for a fraction of the performance cost of raytracing.

Why use 10x the processing power to compute a result that looks barely any different to an approximated result?

There's a lot of ways in which real time raytracing doesn't make sense...

The places where real time raytracing makes the most sense, are in situations where the lighting setup is so dynamic there is basically no room for baking. But there aren't many games which tick that box, survival building/crafting games mostly, or games like No Mans Sky, where the 'game world' is procedural and huge, so baking lighting is just out of the question.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: cookiEoverdoseHaha, every time - "quantum leap", they don't know what that actually means.

Yup every time I see a company describe something as a 'quantum leap' I feel compelled to point out to everyone that the definition of quantum is literally 'the smallest amount or unit of something'. [External Link]

Which means what they're saying is that DLSS 3 is the smallest possible improvement they could possibly make over DLSS 2? Did they fix a typo and increase the number?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I signed up to the beta for this, been trying it out, new app looks nice!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Love this application, donated to the creator multiple times. It's very simple and easy to use. Much nicer than doing the process manually too.

View this comment - View article - View full comments