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PayPalValve sure do give a lot of love to their games (okay, most, I hear the rumbling of TF2 fans in the background) and a new update has rolled out for the original Portal to help the Steam Deck.
Portal is one of the titles that Valve updated with DXVK-Native, which allows the classic to run using Vulkan instead of OpenGL, an update for this title I somehow missed from back in late February. They did the same for Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and the Half-Life 2 series. The problem with DXVK for both Native Linux titles and Windows games in Proton, is that it can stutter while it builds up a shader cache.
The new update for Portal lists that it "Added DXVK cache priming for the Steam Deck", which should reduce any stuttering to a minimum for Steam Deck. You can use DXVK to get Vulkan on a Linux desktop too if you run "-vulkan" as a launch option.
soulsource Apr 14, 2022
Last edited by soulsource on 14 April 2022 at 3:17 pm UTC
I cannot imagine that Portal would have performance problems on the SteamDeck when using OpenGL. Is using Vulkan just a battery usage optimization?
AFAIK, before it was updated to use Vulkan, it was using ToGL; Direct3D to OpenGL layer.
I don't think it stuttered as much with ToGL, but performance and battery life should be improved with Vulkan as long as the shader cache is built. Basically a necessary evil, and now that the shaders can be built before the game is launched, it's just a big win win.
soulsource Apr 15, 2022
I cannot imagine that Portal would have performance problems on the SteamDeck when using OpenGL. Is using Vulkan just a battery usage optimization?
AFAIK, before it was updated to use Vulkan, it was using ToGL; Direct3D to OpenGL layer.
I don't think it stuttered as much with ToGL, but performance and battery life should be improved with Vulkan as long as the shader cache is built. Basically a necessary evil, and now that the shaders can be built before the game is launched, it's just a big win win.
Oh, I wasn't aware that the OpenGL rendering didn't have a dedicated backend in the engine.
AFAIK, actually caching *vulkan* shaders should be automatic.
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