Nice to see a developer listening to community feedback.
Valve has launched one of Steam Deck’s biggest system update providing many quality-of-life improvements such as achievements, guides, and night mode, alongside numerous bug fixes and performance tweaks.
Since this update has many changes, we will focus on the most important ones, starting with the introduction of a warning system signalling if your Steam Deck is too hot or too cold, thus enabling components to remain safe and run as intended.
As a recap, Steam Deck’s safe ambient operating range is from 0°C up to 35°C, and exceeding it may set off thermal throttling or even shut down the system for protection. This means that inside the machine, especially for CPU and GPU, temperature could be in triple-digit realm. In case you don’t know, at 100°C, the Steam Deck chip will throttle, and at 105°C, it will switch off.
As a reference, a Steam Deck will run at 60 to 70°C while gaming in a room at around 20°C ambient temperature. However, if you plan to go play outside during a below-zero winter day, think twice because the battery will not like that very much.
Another big change is the addition of an easily-accessible achievements section; just hit the Steam button while you are in a game and select achievements from the menu. Just below it, there is also a guide section written by community members to help if you are stuck in a game, searching for an overpowered technique to bully the AI, or simply to keep up with the latest glitches and mechanics. Just don’t forget liking the best guides, to thank the creator for their work and help other community members find the best ones.
Night owls among you aren’t forgotten, either. Now night mode can be scheduled, allowing you to choose when to start and stop, alongside the level of (yellow) tint applied depending on each’s taste.
Finally, before going into the full list of fixes, here are some worth noting. A new update selector offering a choice between stable, beta (for testing new steam features), or preview (for testing new Steam and system-level features). Improved external display scaling, and updated graphics drivers with compatibility and performance fixes.
The full patch note can be seen below:
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