Streaming your PS5 to the Steam Deck is probably one of my favorite ways to enjoy PlayStation exclusives nowadays. Sitting in my bed and holding the console in my hands has been the primary way I have enjoyed Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Unfortunately, the experience was unrivaled by my QLED TV with HDR support. Having the colors pop when I played made the game 200% more enjoyable, and I constantly missed it. But after today's new update, it's not something I will worry about again.

Chiaki4Deck150HDR1

Chiaki4Deck, a fork of Chiaki, the open-source PS5 Remote Play Client, that is designed specifically for the Steam Deck, got its 1.5.0 update yesterday, which brings in official HDR support for the Deck. To do this, a new Vulkan renderer, libplacebo, was added that not only brings in HDR support, but better picture quality in general with new post-processing techniques. This is a massive change that includes some near-essential visual enhancements that feel right at home on the OLED.

Currently, you can only utilize HDR support in Steam Deck's game mode, or Linux gamescope, so to do this, you will have to add Chiaki4Deck to your Steam's library. This can be done by, after downloading the tool from the Discover Store, adding a "Non-Steam Game" to Steam and selecting Chiaki4Deck, which should appear towards the top automatically.

Chiaki4DeckHDRCodec

The update also adds an option to use controllers by their positional layout instead of button labels, a launcher script was added for the appimage, and some basic FEC error concealment was added to make the streaming experience better. These are definitely nice to have, but in the end, nothing compares to the addition of HDR.

To connect to your PS5, you will need to register the device with your application. To do this, you will need to get your Encoded ID from FlipScreen. All you have to do is type in your PSN account name to get this. As for Chiaki4Deck's settings, I would recommend setting the BitRate towards the higher end of 20000 - 30000 and making sure the H.265 HDR and Placebo settings are enabled for HDR!

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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