Valve’s let slip a preview for SteamOS 3.5, the system that runs the Steam Deck, amongst a number of different issues, and now you can opt-in to an up to date construct wealthy with visible enhancements and tweaks—amongst a number of different fixes.
The most important single change is that Valve has rebalanced the Steam Deck’s default colours. It is now utilizing the sRGB major colours, that means it has a barely hotter and extra vibrant set of colours by default. By going to Settings -> Modify Show Colours you possibly can tune Shade Vibrancy and Shade Temperature, both with a take a look at picture or no matter recreation you are working. You may also swap again to the earlier shade set or to a boosted shade vary that is extra vibrant however will probably introduce some gradient clipping.
The large new characteristic is {that a} Steam Deck can now help Excessive Dynamic Vary (HDR) and Variable Refresh Charge (VRR) on exterior displays, the trick being in fact that the show and your USB-C adapter need to help it. Nonetheless, excellent news for many who’re docking up their deck to a front room TV or desktop monitor.
Smaller tweaks embrace stuff like a sooner wake from sleep, a repair for touchscreens orienting on exterior shows, and higher scaling on exterior shows. You will now be capable of use stretch and zoom scaling on externals to deal with completely different facet ratios. Valve’s gotten some latency enhancements for when the applying’s rendering slower than the show’s refresh fee.
Valve’s additionally fastened a persistent bug the place some packages would actually harm the efficiency of the Deck’s CPU until you went and manually disabled SMT. A distinct segment downside, however a giant one for individuals whose favourite video games and purposes had been affected.
There are additionally some base firmware updates to allow you to mess with voltage, and updates to SteamOS’ Arch Linux base that incorporate updates to KDE Plasma, the Steam Deck’s desktop mode, with new window tiling in addition to up to date uncover searches and desktop widgets. You may learn the complete SteamOS 3.5 Preview patch notes on Steam.