I got my steamdeck at the end of Q3 2022.
Then I tried different games on it that were not necessarily advertised as working.
One of these was x4. Now, x4 in september 2022 was a really tough thing to play on the deck. even at the lowest settings, I would get around 10 fps. (A couple of months later I tried Elite:Dangerous and it ran surprisingly smooth.)
Fast forward to last month, a new patch for x4 and surprise! The devs put in some elbow grease and the game is playable on my steam deck. Sure, no max level detail eyecandy but it runs acceptable and loads fairly well. I think this is a very nice example of how this piece of kit stimulated a company to look at some optimizations.
Anybody got any other examples of games seemingly optimized during their lifecycle for or because of the steam deck?
Tons, we’re at a point where optimization for the SD is expected by competent devs (which excludes greedy linux haters like EA, Ubisoft etc.) CDPR even implemented a “Steam Deck” graphics preset in Cyberpunk 2077.