A hefty stable Steam Deck update gives the Dock a brand-new feature

By wazup on November 17, 2023 Comments Closed / 61 views

VRR for the official Dock — and voltage offset, and Starfield performance, display color adjustment, and more.

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

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Valve’s new Steam Deck OLED just went on sale today, but there are goodies for the original LCD model, too — the company is now rolling out a stable build of SteamOS 3.5.5 with a hefty list of fixes, changes, and upgrades.

Some of the biggest are ones we’ve already seen in a September beta, like support for VRR and HDR external displays, the ability to tweak your screen’s color and undervolt your processor with new firmware, and a graphics driver update with a big performance improvement for Starfield (though it still looks like mud in cities).

But there’s one thing on the list I didn’t expect: The update gives the official $79 Steam Deck Dock the new ability to support VRR external monitors itself. (Last I checked, the Steam Deck Dock page said “FreeSync support is in-progress, update is forthcoming”.)

Personally, I’m most excited by the ability to customize the MangoHud performance overlay to show what I want it to show. For example, I’d like a minimal version that’s just FPS, wattage, and battery life remaining.

There’s also “slightly improved sleep resume speed,” “Improved Bluetooth connection stability, especially with multiple controllers,” lots of KDE Plasma changes to how the Linux desktop mode looks and works, and much more.

You can find the whole changelog right here.