Valve is taking Steam Deck game performance into its own hands, starting with Elden Ring

[Daniel Sims]

Why it matters: As Valve's Steam Deck releases to the public, many have wondered how both Valve and individual developers would improve the portable gaming PC's performance going forward. This week the company started indicating it would probably do most of that work itself.

When Rock Paper Shotgun asked Valve whether it predicts developers will tweak PC games specifically for the device, a couple of Steam Deck team members said no. Valve seems to think improvements for the Steam Deck shouldn't stay exclusive to the Steam Deck. Valve also said last November that it didn't see the use in developing games only for the Steam Deck.

"If we expect that people do any work, it'll be work that just makes their game better on Steam as a whole," said Steam Deck Designer Jake Rodkin.

The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing ELDEN RING for Steam Deck. Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental. pic.twitter.com/5oSnXtF2OG

— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) February 26, 2022

Rodkin noted that developers could improve things like controller support and readability on small screens. However, user interface changes step outside the bounds of Steam Deck development and will eventually be implemented into Big Picture mode on the Windows launcher. He pointed out that other game optimizations for Steam Deck should help their performance on lower-spec PCs in general.

Over the weekend, Steam Deck engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais showed off optimizations that Valve is working on specifically for Elden Ring. Griffais claims they address the game's stuttering problems, which users have reported on all PCs. The update rolls out later this week. However, users who sign up for the experimental branch of the Steam Deck's Proton compatibility layer can check out the optimizations now.

Elden Ring developer FromSoftware is aware of the Elden Ring issues and has already released one patch in response, with more likely to come. It also has some server downtime for maintenance planned for this Tuesday, May 1.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/93589-valve-taking-steam-deck-game-performance-own-hands.html

 

[Dimitriid]

This is an interesting insight as to why Valve switched from a base of Debian to a base of Arch Linux now: it's probably far easier to implement changes forward on a rolling release distribution so if they find any of their changes to Proton need dependencies to move faster than what Debian wants to move to they can just keep rolling forward: Since Arch is always on the latest version regardless of stability or regression is available to them.

I think this is the strategy they'll pursue going forward: If there's a big popular release or something that cracks their top 10 they want to be able to quickly fix it and get it optimized. While backlog and unpopular games might suffer is actually a clever strategy to keep on top of new releases: By cultivating an audience of "right now" they move the focus away from the massive backlog of games (Because let's face it: they'll never get through testing even 10% of all the games on their store, let alone optimizing for them) but also potentially encourage users to always buy the latest an greatest: those get the most attention, patches first and oh yeah, they make them the most money since they're not gonna be discounted so they might be able to start making more out of something other than their famous sale events.

 

[psycros]

Never saw the logic in going with less than 1080p. I mean, framerates are clearly a big reason but overall it really limits this platform.

 

[m4a4]

Never saw the logic in going with less than 1080p. I mean, framerates are clearly a big reason but overall it really limits this platform.

That and battery life.
It's meant to be portable, so that is one of the sacrifices to keep it powerful and portable enough (if you are ok with it) lol.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Never saw the logic in going with less than 1080p. I mean, framerates are clearly a big reason but overall it really limits this platform.

It's for people who can't afford other handhelds like Aya NEXT etc.

 

[dangh]

It's for people who can't afford other handhelds like Aya NEXT etc.

Deck have similar or better performance than area neo, so... Yeah.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I'm interested to see how well it runs and for how long on battery. Also the system and GPU driver updates.

 

[yRaz]

I'm interested to see how well it runs and for how long on battery. Also the system and GPU driver updates.

The hardware is open source so you don't even need official drivers

 

[Steveb8189]

Never saw the logic in going with less than 1080p. I mean, framerates are clearly a big reason but overall it really limits this platform.

Battery life, performance, to avoid tiny text size in games etc.

Plus it's 206 PPI which is plenty good enough for a hand held IMHO. With 20/20 vision the visual acuity distance is 40cm which means it looks the same as a 32" 4k screen at 61cm

 

[Puiu]

I'm interested to see how well it runs and for how long on battery. Also the system and GPU driver updates.

for AAA games that max the GPU and CPU then it will be around 2-3 hours of continuous playing. it's not great, but it reminds me of the Quest 2 and I have a portable battery that I use with that which extends my game time by 3-4 hours.

 

[Nobina]

Don't know about Steam Deck but the game stutters on PC as well. The fix is easy but it removes online functionality.

 

[Sausagemeat]

So is Valve going to be required to step in to make tweaks of every demanding release? What happens when they don’t do this? Is the game unplayable? How bad is the experience?

There are so many asterisks next to the steam deck at this point. It’s huge, it needs games optimised, you need to cap your frame rate otherwise it burns out quicker than you in the gym, the screen is only 720p, you can only play your steam library etc etc.

I think it’s an ambitious project, trying to squeeze X86 hardware into a handheld was never going to be easy. Hopefully Valve can find a way to leverage mobile ARM hardware to get both more performance and smaller more efficient devices. Sure it will need a custom OS and optimisation per game but apparently it needs that anyway.

 

[hwertz]

So is Valve going to be required to step in to make tweaks of every demanding release? What happens when they don’t do this? Is the game unplayable? How bad is the experience?

There are so many asterisks next to the steam deck at this point. It’s huge, it needs games optimised, you need to cap your frame rate otherwise it burns out quicker than you in the gym, the screen is only 720p, you can only play your steam library etc etc.

I think it’s an ambitious project, trying to squeeze X86 hardware into a handheld was never going to be easy. Hopefully Valve can find a way to leverage mobile ARM hardware to get both more performance and smaller more efficient devices. Sure it will need a custom OS and optimisation per game but apparently it needs that anyway.

Will they be required to come out with endless tweaks for each new demanding game? No, running plenty of games in Proton and wine what I've seen is a patch listed to speed up or fix "x new game", but it also will speed up other games, whatever uses that portion of Direct3D gets a speed boost.

As for using ARM... it's so close. I ran an ARM Chromebook a few years ago (Acer with 4GB RAM, quad-core (+ 1 low power core, big.LITTLE.. and yes it worked both in ChromeOS and Chrubuntu.) Since it was Tegra K1 based, it had fully functional nvidia drivers, both opengl and cuda. Besides the usual full Ubuntu install (ARM native), I also installed qemu and thanks to full "multi-arch" support installed the x86 and x86-64 wine, it installed about 100 x86 and x86-64 libraries and it'd then run any x86/x86-64 Linux app I threw at it. qemu actually ran virtually any Linux app (native or x86-64 version), even openGL stuff could run both native and x86 or x86-64. I even got wine running... BUT.... it wouldn't run anything more complicated than notepad since almost everything on Windows uses threads. qemu emulating x86 on ARM doesn't work once you're using threads (ARM has weak memory consistency, x86 strong, and this jacks up threading).

If qemu had some solution for threading, I do think it'd actually run wine/proton applications. (Solution one puts in memory protection instructions that ARM needs for thread memory access everywhere, which of course makes emulation way too slow... there is no solution 2 yet.. there must be some way to do it since M$ now has x86-64 emulation (I assume with threads) on ARM-based Windows.