Everything we learned from the Steam Deck Developer's Conference

so valve had their steam deck dev conference and we learned quite a few interesting things though the conference was primarily aimed at developers the event was open for anyone to watch and even non-devs learned a lot of neat things about the steam deck in case you missed it or you wanted a summary here's a few details that we wanted to highlight the conference was divided into six separate parts and each part had a short q and a session afterwards there was a final q a at the end to answer developer questions that might not have had time to be addressed during the earlier q a portions the various parts included developing games for the steam deck without actually having a dev kit an overview of the steam deck hardware the general experience of using steam on the steam deck developer best practices to get the most compatibility through proton a deep dive of the apu layout with amd and steam input the big question that the team at valve answered is proton or native now i've seen a lot of people opine the advent of proton saying that it has basically killed all of the motivation for developers to actually make a linux native version of their games in the q a following the video segment with pierre lou griffey he was asked if valve has a preference whether a developer targets their game with proton compatibility or export the game natively uh well we have no strong preference really uh you know as we discussed it it comes down to whatever is the best experience uh so if it's easier for the developer to get to a point where uh the best experiences you know achieved through proton we think that's great but uh if they have the know-how or the resources to you know uh work on a linux linux build sorry native linux build that's a mouthful that you know has great experience and has all the functionality and they're able to maintain it we think that's even better in other words a developer who may be unfamiliar with linux won't have to worry about his game being supported on the steam deck provided it works through proton developing without a dev kit as valve can't keep up with the demand for dev kit requests they've made a few recommendations for creating a homemade solution lawrence yang one of the designers of the steam deck goes over what is recommended use manjaro kde since it'll use the same arch base as steamos and the same desktop environment get a device with similar hardware as the deck he recommended this amd nuk box with a ryzen 7 3750h a radeon rx vega 10 graphics chip and 16 gigabytes of ddr4 ram the cpu is a little more powerful than the dex but the gpu isn't as performant there's an affiliate link down below if you want to pick one of those up if you're a developer but i would not recommend you pick it up unless you're a developer and you want to do testing there's also a small 7-inch 800p monitor that's down below that valve recommends as well that is actually kind of neat they called it a hackin deck which is pretty hilarious valve also recommends using weyland as that's the default display protocol that the deck uses and they advised against using a vm as it will be difficult to emulate gpu performance though it can be used for testing menus and other less intensive tasks valve also recommended that game developers be using something like 60 or 30 fps limiters in order to conserve battery life on the deck valve is also working on their own global solution for this in the event that a dev doesn't add it developers are also encouraged to create a repository specifically for the steam deck or as valve calls it a depot so that when their game is downloaded the game size is as is kept as small as possible and that's because of lower resolution textures and the like that have been scaled for the hardware of the steam deck the use of launches is also discouraged but as brought up by pr lou in the proton segment if a developer really needs to they can use a qt-based launcher so as to avoid this problem of course anti-cheat software is also not recommended but if the anti-cheat middleware vendor supports linux then they recommend you turn it on for your game if a game has video playback files it's recommended to use open formats rather than windows media foundation as the latter may not work through proton when developing a game it's recommended to use vulkan as a back end opengl and directx use more cpu overhead which will consume more battery life if directx has been chosen or it's too late in development to change apis dx12 is recommended over dx11 due to better performance if a developer actually has a dev kit available they're encouraged to test the steam deck's suspend feature to make sure that the player can pick up where they left off but valve says most of the games they've tested work pretty well the use of the steam deck api for controller input is recommended this way it doesn't cause the player confusion for in-game button prompts an example mentioned in the steam input segment is the use of a jump button rather than a or cross the most fascinating thing to me and the thing that i've wanted uh steam input to do for the longest time is have valve or steam input provide uh button glyphs instead of having the game's built-in buttons uh being shown if valve can convince developers to actually use the steam input api like that something like the steam controller would have been so much simpler to actually use and wrap your brain around all right let's talk about the steam deck's hardware the deck uses bluetooth 5.0 there's plenty of bandwidth to allow wireless controllers and also audio speakers to be used at the same time that's a big deal the wi-fi chip supports ac networks and has a maximum bandwidth of up to 866 megabits per second which is like blazingly fast for wi-fi the steam deck is one of the first commercial devices out on the market to ship with lp ddr5 ram this class of ram was specifically chosen for larger memory bandwidth speeds and power efficiency over lp ddr4 16 gigabytes was chosen as the capacity because even though modern games generally consume between 8 and 12 gigabytes of ram the extra will come in handy for games that come in the future which may end up being more demanding because that's how games work the ram is unified between the cpu and the integrated gpu one gigabyte is reserved for the gpu but the gpu is allowed to allocate up to eight gigabytes depending what's on screen valve made a chart comparing the speeds between the different models of the steam deck you'll notice that game load times take the longest on an sd card slightly faster off of emmc and the fastest off of the nvme drives the steam deck takes 25 longer to load on an emmc model than it does nvme models speaking of performance of the deck whether it's plugged in or charging discharging docked or on dock it'll be all the same no need to plug in your deck to feel like you can squeeze a few more fps out of it the usb type-c port has 45 watts of power delivery this allows external devices that use up to 7.5 watts that means controllers keyboards mice hard drives etc are all supported from the usbc port the steam deck can also dock two 4k monitors at 60 hertz and if you lose a part or break something valve intends to have a part store available but they have no details on that at this time now we already know about steam os 3.0 when we know that it's going to be based on arch and we'll use the plasma desktop but we have learned even more details about the os here the first thing is steam os 3.0 uses an immutable file system this means that files on the device can't be deleted or modified if you use something like chrome os or chimera os these distros deploy a similar mechanism updates will be distributed as a whole image to replace the existing one flat packs should be able to be installed and used however additionally there will be a developer mode where you can modify the file system the new steam deck interface is going to replace big picture mode and it will have a universal search bar meaning when you actually go to search for something your current library titles from the steam store and a list of all your friends will be presented depending on your criteria the new deck ui is built using the same tools as the new steam library rather than a separate code base for both like big picture mode this means that valve will have an easier time keeping both of them up to date the steam deck also has a dedicated notification button from which you can access your achievements downloads messages from friends and other things are you going to try out cmos 3.0 for yourself well you're going to have to wait at least until february as val stated that they're not rolling out the new distro until after the steam deck ships other questions we get answers to will there be other steam decks in various colors uh that's something that valve is looking into but they don't have anything to announce right now though we did see a portal themed one that can't be bought at this time valve also confirmed that they planned the steam deck to be multi-generational which means we might see future iterations of the hardware the steam cloud is getting a major upgrade a player will be able to suspend their game on their deck and quickly pick up where they left off from another device however the developer has to incorporate support for this which is a little unfortunate it has been confirmed that valve is working with engines like unity unreal and even godot to support the steam deck which is awesome to hear shipping to countries outside the ones valve initially planned for like the us and the uk has been confirmed japan and australia are two that were mentioned directly in the conference however there's no details for when the deck will be available for purchase in those countries if you want to learn more about any of this stuff you can check out the steamworks documentation there's going to be links in the description for that so that was kind of a big info dump i would love to know what you guys think about this though let me know down in the comments but that's going to do it for now thank you very much for watching i want to give a special shout out to my patrons and my youtube members without whom i wouldn't be able to do this so thanks guys you mean the world to me if you believe in the work that i'm doing and you want to help support this show and help it grow you can head down into the description there are links to where you can support the show become a youtube member become a patron it's all very much appreciated don't forget to like and subscribe to see more videos from me and i'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Gardiner Bryant

Views: 21,828

Keywords: linux, gaming, The Linux Gamer, steamos, gnu/linux, steam os, Gardiner Bryant, linux overview, satire, critique, commentary, criticism

Id: vllkGwS6zh0

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021