Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

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Steam Deck owners and others eyeing other similar devices, here's something for you:

Valve is about to slash the file sizes of the Steam Deck's SSD-hogging shader caches in half
https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-about-to-slash-the-file-sizes-of-the-steam-decks-ssd-hogging-shader-caches-in-half/
Here's some exciting news for those of us with smaller Steam Deck SSDs or choice paralysis over what games to uninstall. A forthcoming update to the Steam Deck's open source video driver will shrink the gaming handheld's shader cache files by approximately 60%, Valve has confirmed to PC Gamer.

A recent report on Phoronix highlighted an update coming in Mesa 23.1, which "re-implements the RADV pipeline cache based on the common vk_pipeline_cache." There are probably a whole bunch of words in that sentence that don't mean much to you—most importantly, Mesa is an OpenGL and Vulkan video driver that Valve, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and others contribute to in a rare act of unity, and this change affects how the now widely used Vulkan driver caches files.

In the Steam Deck's case, Valve has created big shader cache files for individual games that are delivered during the installation process, improving performance and helping avoid the dreaded shader compilation stutter. The downside to these shader caches is how much space they take up: potentially multiple gigabytes for larger games. With the new Vulkan pipeline cache, however, they're about to get a lot smaller.

Steam Deck-friendly Windows Handheld Mode shown off in leaked Microsoft Hackathon vid
https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-deck-friendly-windows-handheld-mode-shown-off-in-leaked-microsoft-hackathon-vid/
A recent video leak shows Microsoft has been working on ways to improve Windows functionality on handheld PC devices such as the Steam Deck. At least, it has been encouraging developers to come up with experimental ways to get Windows to play nice on handheld devices (via Windows Central). 

There are a few reasons we've been sticking with SteamOS when it comes to the Steam Deck, not least due to the lack of full driver support for Microsoft OS. There are weird little bugs that crop up when using Windows on a handheld, too, not to mention the gaming performance on Windows is hardly comparable to playing through the SteamOS. Still, it looks like Microsoft is on the case, at least when it comes to the UI side of things.

This last piece could be important for the Rog's Ally.