Valve's Steam Deck Won't Be Compatible With NVIDIA DLSS

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 26 November 2021, 12:11 pm

Valve's Steam Deck handheld console won't be compatible with NVIDIA DLSS, according to a report by GameRant.

While this might be a bit concerning for some, the reasoning is simple: NVIDIA doesn't (and like will never) allow it. That's because Valve equipped the Steam Deck with an AMD RDNA2 graphics chip.

DLSS, which is NVIDIA's widely popular supersampling method that improves frame rates on a lot of supported games, requires one of the company's RTX series cards.

Since the Steam Deck is using AMD hardware, it will be incompatible.

This would be slightly off-kilter considering that Valve's Steam platform just added Linux support for NVIDIA DLSS, reports Tom's Hardware.

The Steam Deck is running a version of SteamOS, which is based on Linux and uses Valve's Proton software. Proton is meant to be some bridge to bring Windows and Linux-based gaming closer together.

With the new Proton update (6.3-8), Valve has also added support for 24 new games to run better on Linux-based systems.

This includes the award-winning shooter "DEATHLOOP," as well as older games like the original "Assassin's Creed," "Call of Duty: Black Ops II (only the single-player campaign though), and the classic version of "Mafia II" (not the definitive edition,), to name a few.

Valve announced the Steam Deck earlier this year, and the first hands-on impressions show a lot of promise. However, the handheld gaming console is not scheduled to come out in 2021.

As per recent build estimates straight from Valve, they expect to start shipping the handheld to customers by February 2022.

Big Performance Claims

Shortly after announcing the Steam Deck handheld, Valve made a very bold claim: it will be able to run everything on Steam's library literally.

(Photo : Dabe Alan/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
A Steam Deck handheld gaming console, taken on August 26, 2021.

Considering that Steam houses some of the current generation's most hardware-demanding titles (i.e. "Red Dead Redemption 2" and "Cyberpunk 2077" being perfect examples), this seems to be too good to be true. However, this is also where DLSS could have made a massive difference.

NVIDIA's supersampling algorithm can improve frame rates by rendering games at a lower resolution than that of the native display, then upscaling it to a higher resolution while barely losing visual details and performance. It uses machine learning to do the job.

With DLSS, people are now able to run several of the most demanding games right now at sky-high resolutions with maxed-out graphical details.Here's a video showcasing just how much performance DLSS can squeeze out of an RTX graphics card:

AMD FidelityFX To The Rescue?

DLSS might not be compatible with the Valve handheld, but AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) will.

According to TechRadar, official support for AMD FSR would be more than enough to catapult Valve's handheld console to new heights and be its "secret weapon," because it does the same job as that of NVIDIA's solution.

That's because, unlike DLSS, FidelityFX doesn't need a modern graphics card to be compatible. AMD has shown that FSR can run on graphics card architectures as old as that of the RX 580 series, which got a lot of gamers quite excited.

Steam Deck's GPU is based on RDNA2 (the same one in its RX 6000 series), so it is well within the hardware requirements.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce