> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.
What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.
Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!
The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.
It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity.
Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.
Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.
Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?
Steam could probably build in a system to guess the performance if there was some benchmarking data, but game performance can change dramatically after release between updates to drives or the game itself.
I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to telemetry, and couldn't give a damn if the reasoning for it is advertising, real world feedback on game design which would feedback for future patches or the next game, or a mutual benefit of "hardware like (this) generally performs like (this) at low/med/high quality preset".
Steam makes it easy to get a full refund for a game you don't like for any reason. So there's no risk in trying an install of a game that might not work well on your below-specs device, but then you shouldn't give it a negative review.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.
A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.
The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.
There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.
As for the Deck... it's not a powerhouse, but it's still impressive how much it can run with decent tweaks. BG3 on a handheld at all feels like sci-fi to my teenage self
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point?
Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but:
While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses.
The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore.
And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.
That'd be nice, though at the moment I hope that if the update instead breaks something on Linux -- a distinct possibility --, I can go back to the Proton version which has been working pretty much perfectly.
It's worth noting that the native Linux version of games is often buggy and a far worse experience than the Windows version running on Proton. Valve itself is infamous for this: the Left 4 Dead 2 native game has multiple very annoying bugs that have been known for 15 years, and that Valve still hasn't fixed. Unfortunately, there is (another) bug that prevents the Windows version running on Proton from connecting to VAC-secure servers or I would have ditched the Linux version long ago.
At this point game devs should just discontinue the native version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.
Oh, is that why steam still depends on trashy 32bit-libs? Last week, after updating my Debian, steam broke because of that s**, and now I have to think about using a separate windows-machine just for this, until steam removes the 32bit-dependencies (which seems to be planned for 2026).
I've had the opposite experience, getting great performance in TF2 for example and even Rust on Linux (but with Rust you couldn't connect to EAC secured servers, so, useless outside of testing stuff on a private server).
That's kind of the state of Linux in general. Binaries need to be build against the correct distribution and version. Even static binaries are a gamble.
The games by Loki Software are still running great for me. It's a matter of skill and discipline. SDL, OpenGL and alike are very stable.
The problems start when developers start to use lots of small third-party libraries and depend on particular versions of them, but IIRC on Windows it's also solved by simply shipping all the libs with the game.
I would tend to agree, I think dev time is better spent supporting Proton. I have even seen benchmarks where Proton on Linux outperforms Windows. As a Steam Deck owner, Proton is fantastic.
One of the reasons Proton has been so successful as a dev target is because the Windows API is not changing anymore and is thus stable.
The same, as I understand it, cannot be said about the Linux-native API. SteamOS may have stabilized it somewhat, but there's a reason why the readme on their site for this basically says "it may run on Linux proper, but we're not supporting it except on Steam Deck"
I started playing Silksong on my Steam Deck using the linux build. Only to discover that it maxed out at 720p (docked), and wouldn't bind right/left trigger for my controller. Enabling proton (to play the windows build) worked great. Controller worked flawlessly and the game ran smoothly at 1080p.
Yes, and sadly this is very commonplace. At this juncture, Linux builds don't make a lot of sense anymore, especially if they are not going to receive much attention when it comes to debugging. The performance penalty of Proton is small enough that it rarely matters. The worst I have seen is perhaps -20% FPS in Helldivers 2 (with an Nvidia GPU), but normally the impact is in the 0 to 10% range, so negligible for all intents and purposes.
This is specifically a Steam Deck version and _not_ a general Linux version, so it's likely not applicable in this case. Think of it more like a console native port.
I had tried to run BG3 on my Steam Deck a couple months back. It ran... okay. Lot's of hitches and I had to tune things way way way down, but somewhat playable.
I'm very grateful that they took the time to build a native Steam Deck release for the game, not really something I had ever expected. Hopefully with this I can actually jump in and enjoy the game!
No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I played God of War on Steam Deck and it was not a good experience, it was at the bottom of 'okay', and only because at that moment I wasn't at home to play on better hardware.
This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.
This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walking away for two hours and coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and hard-rebooted with the power button.
But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version. Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.
Background shader pre-compilation does not use all cores by default and the only way to change that is to manually edit a file. So unless you're consciously changing it, you won't have this problem. It'll only use all cores when you launch the game.
I have been having the issue with the system hanging up when steam is doing big writes. I had assumed it was due to something wrong with my drive and was contemplating reformatting it.
I have massive doubts about the "They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version."
This would imply that if I already calculated the shaders for the current game state than i could reuse them and not have to go through the whole compilation step (if no changes happen inbetween).
Matter of fact, i have to recompile the shaders on every game start for every game, even if i restart the game just x times in a row.
For context: using linux/debian and basically running everything on vulcan
The linux kernel’s handling of IO under memory pressure is abysmal. I have to tune dirty ratios and write back ages and swap and whatnot just to get the system to not hard lock when running multiple node microservices in stages which run fine, just slower, when starting them all at once on a MacBook.
I've had similar problems but no amount of tweaking vm and vfs cache settings helped. Swap or not, both 32gb and 128gb of ram. Manually reclaiming memory would un-lock the system (/sys/fs/cgroup/memory.reclaim).
A bit of a tangent, but I’ve seen these issues mentioned before and to me it’s always felt like more the OS’s fault than Steam’s. Like shouldn’t Steam be free to express full utilization of the available resources? And isn’t it the OS’s job to manage QoS?
Systems tend to not have particularly strong guardrails against pathological access patterns which aren't trying to use 100% but a large multiple of that or are abusing some subsystem or another. The application is almost always also unresponsive.
Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.
I get that on windows when there's no enough space on my disk to install a whole other copy of the game being patched.
So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over, thrashing you disk.
It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.
But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play anything, which for single player games is incredibly frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the thing you paid a lot of money for.
Can you no longer disable updates on a per game basis?
You could do that in the past and I did occasionally for single player games because my internet connection wasn't the best and I did not want to waste the little time I could allocate for gaming.
Update was intense for me too. 12 gb with hotfixes, downloaded after kids had gone to bed. It took about 30 minutes to apply. That was about the allotted time for me.
That pausing issue is plaguing me with several other titles. I think it tracks with background downloading of game updates, but haven’t had enough hours to entirely confirm it. What I did notice is that after installing Decky there are background jobs from some of the plugins that run native Linux updates (flatpak) and snapshotting.
Are you using full disk encryption (LUKS) without enabling the Cloudflare contributed flags? Because that's the most common syndrome of high IO causing high CPU usage until lockup.
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform.
This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS. It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux software environments. It's already crazy that they support so many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.
Makes me think they might not have the most knowledgeable people on the job. Hopefully they didn't just throw some unwilling Windows devs into the unknown.
Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.
When I left my phone (out of battery) on a plane, I went to the flightradar and checked all airports the airplane was visiting after. Then contacted lost&found at each of them individually and eventually got my phone back. It was found only a fifth flight!
Big tip: get the LCD and a DeckHD. The mod takes a long time, but it's not technically difficult.
Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR. It looks way better than the stock display one and runs better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding games.
That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very much so.
I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD modded one is just better.
IMO, there are better ergonomics on competitors. Over a thousand + of hours using one, a steam deck is death for your wrists in comparison. When I was playing Elden Ring on the SD for a few hundred hours, I almost thought I needed to have surgery. There are strategies to help with this, rest it on a pillow on your lap, or whatever, but you won't experience that with some of these.
Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running the Windows version through Proton.
That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.
Readit News
But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed towards simpler games.
In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.
Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!
https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969
That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.
Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?
Steam could probably build in a system to guess the performance if there was some benchmarking data, but game performance can change dramatically after release between updates to drives or the game itself.
The only thing I've seen which is close is Star Citizen's telemetry: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/telemetry
It's limited, but the limitations in a large part cancel out. It's still very capable.
IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.
A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.
The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.
It's because most of those games don't have the graphics to justify choking.
On lower end hardware it's extremely easy to notice who actually programmed the game and who just used the Unity defaults.
Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.
I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.
15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point?
Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but:
While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses.
The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore.
And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.
> Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
At this point game devs should just discontinue the native version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.
500 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
The syscall abi has been stable for decades, and any game that included glibc or compiled with musl keeps running just fine?
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
The games by Loki Software are still running great for me. It's a matter of skill and discipline. SDL, OpenGL and alike are very stable.
The problems start when developers start to use lots of small third-party libraries and depend on particular versions of them, but IIRC on Windows it's also solved by simply shipping all the libs with the game.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux...
The same, as I understand it, cannot be said about the Linux-native API. SteamOS may have stabilized it somewhat, but there's a reason why the readme on their site for this basically says "it may run on Linux proper, but we're not supporting it except on Steam Deck"
https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10
https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11
Roughly ~10% better FPS in Act 3 but the first benchmark average is pretty much the same.
You can download the native version on any Linux distro
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
I'm very grateful that they took the time to build a native Steam Deck release for the game, not really something I had ever expected. Hopefully with this I can actually jump in and enjoy the game!
This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.
But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version. Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.
I have been having the issue with the system hanging up when steam is doing big writes. I had assumed it was due to something wrong with my drive and was contemplating reformatting it.
This would imply that if I already calculated the shaders for the current game state than i could reuse them and not have to go through the whole compilation step (if no changes happen inbetween).
Matter of fact, i have to recompile the shaders on every game start for every game, even if i restart the game just x times in a row.
For context: using linux/debian and basically running everything on vulcan
Disclaimer: I don’t even like macOS.
I wrote a user space memory reclaimer and have not got a lockup since. https://gist.github.com/EBADBEEF/f168458028f684a91148f4d3e79...
What am I missing here?
Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.
So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over, thrashing you disk.
It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.
But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play anything, which for single player games is incredibly frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the thing you paid a lot of money for.
You could do that in the past and I did occasionally for single player games because my internet connection wasn't the best and I did not want to waste the little time I could allocate for gaming.
I am amazed this game is even playable on the steam deck. Was trying to find an excuse to play it after cyberpunk. I guess this one it is…
This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS. It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux software environments. It's already crazy that they support so many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.
Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR. It looks way better than the stock display one and runs better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding games.
That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very much so.
I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD modded one is just better.
- https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/handheld/legion-go/len106g000...
- https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handhelds-group/
Honestly, I think a gaming laptop and a controller makes more sense for most things, if you don't need that little bit of increased portability.
I used to be a great fan of Prey Project, but I don't think it's installable on the Steam Deck without leaving Steam mode.
https://preyproject.com