Thanks, I asked for a thread like this earlier today: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/s/O2Q7J7zvma but was more focused on HDR games whose HDR feature doesn’t work on Steam Deck, of which I found:
Also tested myself, yes I can confirm Hogwarts Legacy HDR works now. Edited original post to reflect this.
My Hogwarts Legacy test was shortly after the game’s release (via docked external HDR display on SteamOS Preview) so the situation may have changed since then.
I’m not sure why Control is listed as HDR supported on Steam when it requires installing an unofficial patch. When I tried installing that patch, the game wouldn’t launch for me.
HDR never worked for me in Hitman 1 or 3 on Steam Deck LCD (docked to HDR display), and it doesn’t work on OLED either. I’m not really surprised; Hitman 3 is known for having had broken HDR for a long time.
Valve can control settings for text anti-aliasing in Steam, Steam’s Game Mode UI, and in the KDE that it shows with SteamOS, but subtitles and other text in games typically aren’t drawn by the OS but directly by the game’s own renderer. I don’t know if it would be possible for something like Gamescope to apply some sort of “filter” to games to mitigate poor text rendering in games; such filter would have to apply to the whole screen and might cause strange artifacts elsewhere.
Be aware that Nested Desktop will crash under some circumstances. Not sure why, but it crashed for me when I installed an app in Discover.
Also, Steam ROM Manager needs to kill Steam when it adds the shortcuts, but Steam itself is running the Nested Desktop session, so trying to use ROM Manager from Nested Desktop is probably a bad idea.
I use Steam Controller as a KBM replacement for high-precision/twitchy first-person shooters. The rear grips allow me to access critical functions like lean or crouch without taking my thumb off the trackpad. I use the left joystick for movement and the left trackpad as a virtual menu. The trackpad is my “aim assist” while the gyro performs the actual aiming. This style of aiming is very effective, but requires about three days of using it exclusively to get accustomed to it. Soon, it becomes second nature and your hands naturally move into the right position to line up headshots much faster than a traditional twin stick layout.
For third-person games, twin sticks feel better, but I use the DualSense controller so that I still have access to gyro for fine-tuned aiming.
Given the plethora of installation methods, can you clarify what you mean by “Works out of the box” when we’re talking about non-Steam games?
From my experience, games that are launched through the Flatpak distributions of Heroic or Lutris can detect the display’s HDR capability but can’t actually use it because the game is running through Flatpak’s Mesa distribution instead of Valve’s Mesa. I observed this firsthand in Diablo 2 Resurrected and Diablo IV running through Lutris; I’ve never tried an HDR game through Heroic.
A workaround for Heroic might be to use the AppImage instead of the Flatpak. A general workaround would be to add the executable as a non-Steam game, although this has downsides.