Being one of the most exciting hardware releases of 2022, the Steam Deck promises to deliver an entirely new sort of handheld gaming experience at the given price point. Since performance is a major concern for such a small form-factor PC, potential buyers have been wondering if AMD FSR would be an option for fast and lightweight image clarity improvements.
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While Valve did suggest that it would work on adding FSR support for the Steam Deck at some point, the latest production update for the device’s game rendering solution called Gamescope comes with full official support for AMD’s upscaling suite for all games available on the Steam Deck. This means that, at launch, the Deck will have the option to run games at a lower than native resolution, and then upscale them to improve image quality across the board with minimal performance losses.
The availability of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling was particularly important since Valve confirmed early on that DLSS will not be supported on Steam Deck. As much was to be expected, since DLSS needs physical Tensor cores for it to do its job, while FSR has no such requirement. Now that Valve’s Gamescope offers image upscaling functionality as a core part of SteamOS 3.0’s feature set, early Steam Deck adopters will have even more options to improve the device’s gaming performance.
Naturally, AMD FSR upscaling has other potential uses, too. For example, though Valve is trying to preemptively deliver Steam Deck battery life improvements via driver updates, simply rendering the games at a lower-than-native resolution and upscaling them back to 1280 x 800 could lead to longer battery life, too. On top of that, since SteamOS 3.0 is going to be available to download for free on any PC, FSR upscaling will be available alongside it as well.
Even though the gaming community at large wasn’t particularly thrilled when Valve delayed the launch of Steam Deck by two whole months, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution wouldn’t have been available at launch had the device come out during its original release window. This may be just one of the many pros to letting the device’s software support mature longer. Previews and early reviews of the Steam Deck should be coming in over the next couple of weeks, with the early adopters getting their hands on Deck soon thereafter.
Steam Deck is going to start being shipped to first reservation holders on February 25th.
MORE: Steam Deck’s Latest Developer update Is a Promising Sign for Multiplayer Games
Source: GamingOnLinux
