Equipment

SteamOS 3.5 brings more warmth, vibrancy to the Deck’s colors-

Valve’s let slip a preview for SteamOS 3.5, the system that runs the Steam Deck, among a few other things, and you can now opt-in to an updated build rich with visual improvements and tweaks—among a few other fixes. 

The biggest single change is that Valve has rebalanced the Steam Deck’s default colors. It’s now using the sRGB primary colors, meaning it has a slightly warmer and more vibrant set of colors by default. By going to Settings -> Adjust Display Colors you can tune Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature, either with a test image or whatever game you’re running. You can also swap back to the previous color set or to a boosted color range that’s more vibrant but will possibly introduce some gradient clipping.

The big new feature is that a Steam Deck can now support High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) on external monitors, the trick being of course that the display and your USB-C adapter have to support it. Still, good news for those who’re docking up their deck to a living room TV or desktop monitor.

Smaller tweaks include stuff like a faster wake from sleep, a fix for touchscreens orienting on external displays, and better scaling on external displays. You’ll now be able to use stretch and zoom scaling on externals to handle different aspect ratios. Valve’s gotten some latency improvements for when the application’s rendering slower than the display’s refresh rate.

Valve’s also fixed a persistent bug where some programs would really hurt the performance of the Deck’s CPU unless you went and manually disabled SMT. A niche problem, but a big one for people whose favorite games and applications were affected.

There are also some base firmware updates to let you mess with voltage, and updates to SteamOS’ Arch Linux base that incorporate updates to KDE Plasma, the Steam Deck’s desktop mode, with new window tiling as well as updated discover searches and desktop widgets. You can read the full SteamOS 3.5 Preview patch notes on Steam.

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If you are one of the few that needs capacious amounts of system memory, you’re in luck. MSI has begun the process of rolling out Intel 600 and 700-series motherboard BIOSes that support up to 256GB of system RAM. These BIOSes are in addition to those it has already rolled out that add support for 256GB of RAM to its AM5 motherboard range.

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Cheaper, power-savvy versions of Intel’s excellent Raptor Lake CPUs are here-

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Final Fantasy 14’s live-action TV series is ‘dead’ due to a scale that ‘proved too much’, with Covid-19 twisting the knife-

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Unfortunately, it looks like that particular project is dead in the water according to Hivemind’s co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani on Twitter. When asked for an update on the project, he responds that it’s “Dead.” He continues to write: 

“We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig & [Jake Thornton] along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board. The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk. Amazon came closest.”

Jake Thornton, a scriptwriter on the project, also noted that the project’s failure “was a real result of Covid unfortunately. We took i…

Stardew Valley maker Eric Barone says he’s ‘trying to’ score a Fortnite collab and knows just who he wants in the game- Pelican Town’s smoky, middle-aged bus driver Pam-

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Barone was asked about his willingness to do a Stardew/Fortnite crossover by YouTuber Panedwards (via IGN). “I’ve been trying to,” came Barone’s reply, who particularly wants “Pam in Fortnite” but is “open to doing a collab” in general.

If you’re not up to date with the latest edition of the Stardew Yellow Pages, Pam is the character who’s a crusty, jaded old diner waitress in everything but, ah, her actual career. She’s the Pelican Town bus driver and Penny’s mother, a salt-of-the-earth working class kind of person who’s seen it all and knows what it’s like when times get tough.…

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