Baldur's Gate 3 officially ended major development with Patch 8, but a new update has made a pretty substantial addition. While there's no reason to believe we'll ever get a Patch 9, Larian Studios has continued to release hotfixes to address major technical problems. The newest hotfix, however, goes above and beyond.
Baldur's Gate 3 now features a native Steam Deck build, as revealed in the Hotfix 34 notes on the official Baldur's Gate 3 website. While it was possible to play Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck before, the lack of official support meant that performance problems and some degree of additional work could be expected. For those without a Steam Deck, the patch optimizations should help performance on all platforms, and the hotfix also fixes some crashing issues on Xbox.
Baldur's Gate 3's Steam Deck version previously relied on Proton. This is software that makes Windows games run on Linux, the basis for the Steam Deck's SteamOS system, but it can come with some drawbacks. The patch notes explain the differences between the Proton version of the game and the new native Steam Deck version, noting that the latter reduces the CPU usage and memory consumption required to...
