Valve has recently announced the launch of their new Steam Deck OS beta in the handheld’s Preview channel. This update brings a host of new features, including the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver that eliminates certain graphical corruption issues present in games like Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and prevents GPU crashes in several upcoming titles. But, what really caught the attention of many gamers is the fact that the update enables ray tracing in Doom Eternal, which is quite impressive for a device that costs less than an RTX 3050 graphics card.
The implementation of ray tracing in Doom Eternal is a smart use of the technology to enhance lighting and reflections throughout the game. Although Doom Eternal isn’t the most graphically intensive game, it’s still a great demonstration of the Steam Deck’s capabilities. Pierre-Loup Griffais, the Deck developer, confirmed the performance of Doom Eternal with ray tracing enabled, posting a screenshot on Twitter that showed a frame rate of 35 fps with a rock-solid frame time graph.
The implementation of the technology comes through the Vulkan graphics API direct, rather than DXR through a Proton layer, which can add some drag to the frame rate of a DirectX game. However, Griffais did mention that “DXR is in the pipe, just not quite ready yet.” The idea of enabling DirectX Raytracing natively on the Steam Deck is mind-blowing, though the performance on DXR titles is likely to be tougher on the Deck’s GPU hardware than with Doom Eternal.
Many gamers are excited about the idea of not having to worry about the Linux-y tweakery on a Steam Deck to enable ray tracing. This is especially true for those who have tried to get both DLSS and ray tracing running at playable ultra RT settings on their machines, but had to deal with pre-launch arguments and compatibility issues. Although the performance of the Steam Deck’s Aerith APU is unlikely to be super-slick on something so demanding, the idea of playing graphically intensive games on a device that costs less than an RTX 3050 graphics card is certainly tantalizing.
