It has been a very long time coming, however Valve has lastly taken Steam’s previous Large Image mode—with all its blurry visuals and tabs that straight-up do not work—and changed it with a brand new, Steam Deck-inspired UI. It got here as a part of a hefty Steam client update (opens in new tab) launched yesterday, and in my testing appears to work fairly effectively, however some customers are reporting a number of kinks that also have to be labored out.
I’ve put some footage of the brand new UI under, and it will be extremely acquainted to anybody who’s futzed round with a Steam Deck. It is just about simply the usual interface of Valve’s handheld blown as much as match the size of a correct TV. The mode now drops you straight into a listing of your recently-played video games, slightly than letting you choose between Retailer, Library, and Group (the primary and third of which normally simply crashed Steam each time I picked them) just like the previous model.
On my Xbox One controller, navigation is now carried out by whacking the glowy Xbox button on the high, which brings up a listing of tabs like Latest, Retailer, Library and so forth so that you can flit between. It is a sleeker system than the previous one, the place related tabs simply loomed on the left-hand fringe of your display screen when you browsed your video games. I count on it really works equally for folks utilizing non-Xbox gamepads, too.
It ran just about flawlessly on my machine—a mardy clunker working a 1080 Ti, 16GB RAM, and a Ryzen 3700x CPU—however person warning is suggested at this level. Plenty of Reddit users are reporting Steam Big Picture issues (opens in new tab) with in-home streaming, black screens, excessive CPU utilization, damaged controller inputs, and common lag within the UI. There’s nonetheless work to be performed, clearly, even when the one drawback I had was {that a} bunch of the prompts nonetheless reference the Steam Deck as an alternative of ‘Your PC’.
You should not must delay the replace if you wish to give the brand new Large Image some extra time within the oven, although. You may nonetheless use the previous mode by working Steam with the ‘-oldbigpicture’ command-line choice. Valve will probably be eradicating that choice in a future replace, thoughts you, however we have that security web for now.
Nonetheless, as somebody who used previous Large Image mode just about day-after-day, and who hasn’t had any issues with the brand new model, I’ve to say it is a marked enchancment. With the ability to really use the shop in Large Image mode after years of it spitting errors at me looks like a minor miracle, and the entire thing simply typically feels much more modern and fashionable. It is shallow of me, I do know, however the way in which the brand new mode jumps between screens—all accompanied by Nintendo Swap-like clicks and whistles—simply feels higher. It is good to play video games on my TV and really feel like I am utilizing software program made this decade.
