The new Steam Deck OS update improves a little bit of everything
It’s hard to pick out the highlights from the Steam Deck’s latest SteamOS update, 3.6.19, just because its collection of tweaks and fixes seems to span the entire gamut of handheld PC hardware as a concept. Graphics driver improvements! Third-party SSDs working better! More balanced display colours! No more “spurious power LED blinking”! Brilliant, I hate spurious power LED blinking. The original LCD Deck also now gets the Steam Deck OLED’s overclocking controls in the BIOS, which you’re welcome to try if you’re braver than I am about cranking up the temperatures of a already squished-in handheld chip.
Full patch notes are here. If some of these amendments seem familiar to experienced Deck users, that’s because they’ve been knocking around the Preview and Beta branches of SteamOS since at least May. Version 3.6.19 finally brings them all together on the Stable branch, the default and least bug-prone flavour of SteamOS that I’d suspect the majority of owners have never switched from.
Also, sod it, let’s pick out some of the best stuff. Improved microSD card reliability – especially for certain SanDisk models – sounds good, and I’ve actually bumped into the exact black screen issue when switching between Desktop Mode and Gaming Mode that this updates banishes. The LCD Steam Deck getting up to 10% better battery life “in light load conditions” might be handy for lengthy download sessions as well, and it’s nice to see that the older model specifically getting more love.
Don’t get your hopes up too much about the suggested graphics performance improvements; I’ve ran a few quick benchmarks in Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and neither seem to run any faster. But you might still see better stability in certain RAM-heavy games, and at the very least, I’ll take the higher responsiveness when flicking through the UI. I’ve been testing out the Zotac Zone this week (review forthcoming) and, like all Windows-based handhelds, it quickly made me pine for SteamOS’ snappiness.
Anyhoo, 3.6.19 is available to install right now for all Stable branch users; you can enable the installation in the System page of the Steam Deck’s settings. The only other thing I’d point out is that while the patch notes list some fixes for Game Recording, the video-clipping feature itself has still only got as far as the Beta branch. You can switch to that, from Stable, by selecting Beta in the System Update Channel section.
