Ray tracing
Faster ray tracing on your Steam Deck
Through the wonders of Proton, Valve Software, AMD APUs and, least of all, Neil Mohr, you can enjoy ray tracing on the go.
STEAM
Credit: www.steampowered.com
OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr can’t pry the Steam Deck from his nine-yearold’s hands since he discovered the joys of Portal.
It’s not something we’ve written about and it wasn’t even part of the launch marketing, but the Steam Deck is capable of ray tracing. We should, however, manage your expectations – though where those expectations might have been in the first place is anyone’s guess – because ray tracing is phenomenally demanding on hardware and the Steam Deck wasn’t tuned to run ray-tracing titles, so frame rates are going to struggle to make double figures. But with the right tweaking, it can be done, as we’ll see.
Our main focus is the Nvidia-released Portal RTX. This is a rerelease of the classic 2007 Valve Software game with native Nvidia RTX ray tracing implemented, so it all looks shiny. There’s a couple of things there that should stop you in your tracks, such as: this is for Nvidia hardware and it’s using RTX ray tracing for Windows. How does that work on an AMD-powered handheld running on Linux?