Earlier today, a new SteamOS update was released into the preview branch, and it brings with it a couple of changes. There is slightly improved tracking on the trackpads of the Steam Deck OLED, and there were two rare crashes that were fixed, but most prominently, ray-traced reflections had a performance improvement in Persona 3 Reload.

I thought this was especially interesting, considering how hard it is to run ray tracing effects on any handheld right now. I decided to test this out, and while there were some performance gains, it wasn't playable. On average, the framerate was increased by 6 - 7 FPS, but that's about it.

Persona3ReloadReflectionsOnBefore
SteamOS Stable
Persona3ReloadReflectionsOnAfter
SteamOS 3.5.14

Still, this is a welcome update regardless, and I am happy to see Valve so hard at work! You can try out the new update for yourself by going to your System Settings and changing the update branch to "Preview." And you can check out our review of Persona 3 Reload to see how well it runs on the Deck!

SteamOS 3.5.14 Preview Update Changelog:

General

  • Improved performance of ray-traced reflections in Persona 3 Reload
  • Slightly improved corner tracking on Steam Deck OLED trackpads
  • Fixed a possible session crash when connecting an HDR display
  • Fixed a rare session crash on application exit

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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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