Hero image: Steam Deck. Image: Valve
Valve has a new SteamOS beta out, and most of it is about smoother frames. If you cap your framerate or play on a high refresh display, this is the one to try.
SteamOS 3.9.6 is out on the Beta and Preview channels. Valve’s release notes went up on Friday afternoon, Australian time. To opt in, go to Settings, then System, then System Update Channel, because the current stable release is still SteamOS 3.8 and none of this is on it yet.
Start with the framerate limiter, where frame timing is improved whether you use VRR or not. The notes give an example of what was wrong: a 30 FPS game with a 60 FPS limit on a 120Hz display could run at 24 FPS. Now a capped game whose framerate is a multiple of the limit no longer drops below it.
You should also see fewer missed frames on fixed refresh displays, where Valve has reduced the ones caused by slow wakeups from deep CPU idle states.
Play on a 240Hz or faster screen? Games running below the refresh rate on those displays are fixed, and so is a green screen in Steam Remote Play on NVIDIA GPUs.
There are smaller fixes as well. RPG Maker games using Fullscreen++, such as Waste Walkers, no longer load to a black screen. Left click no longer gets stuck after a two-finger tap on the touchscreen, and SDR content no longer looks oversaturated over HDR10 on displays that aren’t wide gamut. In Desktop Mode, you can add scripts with Add to Steam again.
The notes also list everything in 3.9 since the stable release. Desktop Mode moves from Plasma 6.4.3 to 6.7.3, and Valve links KDE’s Plasma 6.7 announcement for the detail. Support for the Steam Frame wireless adapter is improved, which follows the Steam Frame beta update Gamers Classified covered in October.
On a Steam Deck, idle power consumption is improved when no audio is playing. Preliminary hibernation support is in the build, but it is not in the Game Mode UI yet, and it is not enabled on Steam Deck because of an outstanding driver bug.
Under the hood, the Linux kernel is rebased on Linux 7.2, and the WiFi backend switches to wpa_supplicant by default. Valve says that improves compatibility with various WiFi networks.
The notes describe the Beta and Preview channels as carrying new features that are still being tested.
Source: Valve – SteamOS 3.9.6 Beta (Steam), KDE – Plasma 6.7, Steam – Steam Deck