Deck Gets Ray-Traced DOOM, Wo Long Gets Proton Fixes, and Emulation Station Gets a Huge Theme Overhaul
A week full of exciting updates for all us Steam Deck owners and emulation enthusiasts.
Over the course of five days we’ve gotten four different updates worth highlighting. Probably the most exciting was seeing the Deck OS 3.4.6 Stable update on March 13th add Ray-Tracing support to DOOM Eternal. Gardiner already talked about that specific feature in the update in his previous article last week covering the preview of this update. Now everyone can view all of DOOM’s glistening ray-traced blood and gore without needing to venture outside of their stable OS release.
Other improvements include updating the graphic driver to Mesa 23.1, fixing a focus issue with Forza Horizon 5, and fixing graphical corruption in Resident Evil 4 and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. I’d say here’s the full release notes, but that was it. Short and sweet so less time reading changelogs, more ray-traced DOOM.
On the same day we got a Proton Experimental update. Notable improvements were better stability and performance in Bloodrayne 1 & 2 Terminal Cuts editions, fixing a memory leak and lockups in Wo Long, and fixing random hangups in Prototype. The full additions to the changelog are below:
- Improve performance and stability in BloodRayne: Terminal Cut & BloodRayne 2: Terminal Cut.
- Fix Richman: Clasic not starting in OpenGL mode.
- Fix memory leak while playing in-game videos in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
- Fix Wo Long: Fallen dynasty locking up after playing many videos.
- Fix Prototype hanging randomly.
March 14th brought us a Deck Beta Client Update with some fixes for LAN peer downloads, universal search hiding the keyboard, and added optimization for the DualSense adaptive trigger effects. I’m excited about that last one as it will help me feel like my $70 was well spent on a Cosmic Red DualSense controller. Here’s the full log:
General
- Fixed issues where some icons were drawn at the wrong size (e.g. the group chat channel selector)
- Fixed universal search hiding keyboard when first opening
- Fixed intermittent focus issue when exiting games
LAN Peer Downloads
- Fixed an issue where IP and hostname were cached, but were not invalidated when a client reconnects
Steam Input
- Added some optimization around DualSense adaptive trigger effects interaction with the Bluetooth stack
Finally going back over the weekend saw the Emulation Station Desktop Edition’s 2.0 release. For those uninitiated, Emulation Station is a frontend for organizing all your game roms and helps you seamlessly launch into said roms. The biggest element of this release is the new theme engine taking away some view styles but adding variants which they say are, “essentially theme profiles”. Being a Windows convert, what they show in their 2.0 announcement video reminds me of some of the theming in Launchbox’s Big Box, a paid fullscreen interface that’s similar to Emulation Station. Emulation Station already had some great themes but this update should take theming to the next level. They also included a vertical screen orientation mode (Tate mode) perfect for all of those with a $700 vertical monitor in their Steam Deck powered arcade cabinet.
There were a ton of bugs that were fixed along with speed and performance improvements to help speed up startup and lower CPU usage. There are so many changes that I can’t include them all here so instead I’ll provide you a link for you to comb over along with their announcement video.
Leon Styhre
That was a lot of updates to cover, but plenty to get excited about. What’s the most exciting update this week and if it’s not ray-traced DOOM, why? What do you use Emulation Station on and will you be taking advantage of the Tate mode? What’s your favorite controller to use for the Steam Deck when docked? Let us know in the comments down below!
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