Valve just enabled native ray tracing on the Steam Deck and it actually looks pretty wild

pcgamer.com:

So yeah, ray tracing on the Steam Deck(opens in new tab) is now properly a thing. It's been do-able if you wanted to dig in and do some Linux-y tweaking before, but with the latest beta OS Valve is starting to go native. For a device that costs less than the price of an RTX 3050(opens in new tab)—a graphics card no-one should buy at that price—to be able to enable ray tracing that's worth a damn is seriously impressive.

Valve has announced the new Steam Deck OS beta(opens in new tab) in the handheld's Preview channel, and updates the operating system of the device to the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver. So far, so dry, but the interesting stuff is in what that actually means in terms of games. For one, it gets rid of some graphical corruption issues that exist with the current build of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty(opens in new tab) and GPU crashes «in several upcoming titles.»

The update also enables ray tracing in Doom Eternal.

What business has the Steam Deck running the graphically intensive pretties of ray tracing? You may ask. But Deck developer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, who took to twitter to make the announcement has also demonstrated the performance of Doom Eternal with it enabled.

They posted a screenshot in the thread, confirmed to have been taken on the Deck, with a performance overlay enabled showing the frame rate at 35 fps, with an attendant frame time graph that is seemingly rock solid at that speed. 

Doom Eternal isn't the last word in overblown ray tracing effects, but its implementation is a smart use of the technology to enhance lighting and reflections throughout the game. As such it doesn't have high entry requirements for enabling ray tracing, with the 1080p minimum spec(opens in new tab) given as an RTX 2060.

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