Valve released new updates for the beta versions of SteamOS, Steam Deck, andSteamDesktop over the past weekend. With this update, Valve aims to improveSteam’s system on multiple fronts, fixing a bunch of issues and adding some useful features for users.
Steam is Valve’s flagship digital distribution platform and online gaming service.Steam currently boasts a massive library of gamesand over 132 million monthly active users on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Users can buy, download, and manage games, access cloud saves, chat, join forums, livestream, and even use built-in mod support on the platform, making it one of the most important gaming hubs. Besides being where tons of hit games got their start, the platform has evolved a lot over the years thanks to constant updates. Now, Valve is rolling out more changes to the platform.
For Desktop Steam, the new update allows players to set a hotkey to toggle the Performance Monitor on and off whileplaying any Steam titles, switching between off and the last corner they chose. By default, no key is set, so players must pick one if they want to use it. Additionally, Valve has added support for top-center and bottom-center positioning of the Performance Overlay. Players who’ve been dealing with overlay UI restarts will be glad to know the update fixes issues like that—such as problems when switching between showing GPU usage and just FPS on some older AMD graphics cards.
The patch also fixes a UI restart issue that happened when trying to type with an IME in olderSteam 32-bit games. Moreover, the Performance Monitor slider now makes the graph lines stand out more. For SteamOS 3.7.11 Beta, the changes are minimal—only fixing an issue with slider announcements that couldn’t be interrupted, and a problem where the screen reader would not work after a reboot.
There are a number of fixes for the Steam Deck Beta Client as well, including correcting the Screen Reader, which would not work properly when activated for the first time. Some UI issues in various locations have also been addressed, along with a crash that occurred when users were in the controls configuration, and a couple of other problems affectingplayers using their Steam Deck consoles. These changes will likely enhance the experience of the millions of players who log into Steam daily. As the platform continues to grow, Valve continues working to make it even better.
