Doom Eternal is the first game to get native ray tracing on Steam Deck

Steam has enabled native ray tracing on the Steam Deck for the first time. The first game to support ray tracing is Doom Eternal. According to Valve, there will also be support for DirectX Raytracing in the future.

The support for ray tracing is added to the Steam Deck OS beta 3.4.6. Doom Eternals ray tracing uses the Vulkan API and consists solely of reflection and lighting effects. So they are not the most intensive ray tracing effects; they usually use DirectX Raytracing. The latter is a Microsoft technology, and therefore more difficult to implement in the Steam Deck operating system, which is based on Linux. Despite this, the DXR ray tracing extension is according to Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais for the Steam Deck is ‘in the pipeline’, but when it will become available is unknown.

Doom Eternal with ray tracing runs at around 30 to 35fps, it turns out a test of RockPaperShotgun with the graphics settings set to Medium. Without ray tracing, the game “easily” achieves 60fps with the same settings, according to the PC games website. RTX support for more games not announced, as one Reddit user claims that it is now also possible to activate ray tracing with Quake 2.

Doom Eternal with ray tracing on the Steam Deck (source: Pierre-Loup Griffais)