By There’s a lot to get through in Steam Deck news this week, and the big one is a release a lot of us have been waiting on: Lossless Scaling 2.0 is officially here. I’m also covering a frustrating change coming to Xbox Cloud Gaming, a fresh batch of Proton Experimental fixes, and a small but welcome readability update for EVERSPACE 2.
Lossless Scaling 2.0 Is Officially Here
LSFG VK — the Vulkan-based version of Lossless Scaling — has moved out of preview and into a full 2.0 release. The headline change is a new bindless pipeline with FP16 acceleration, which on its own is a solid performance win, but the bit I care about more is the memory optimization: it’s now using around 30% less memory than the previous build. On a memory-constrained device like the Deck, that’s the difference between frame generation actually being usable and it eating into headroom you need elsewhere. Alongside the performance work, 2.0 also adds proper benchmarking tools and validation health checks, so you can actually see what the tool is doing instead of guessing.
Xbox Cloud Gaming Is Getting Stingier With Hours
Not great news if you lean on cloud streaming for Game Pass on the go. Microsoft is rolling out monthly hour limits for Xbox Cloud Gaming: Game Pass Ultimate is capped at 15 hours a month, Premium gets 10, and Essentials gets just 5. Given what these tiers already cost, putting a hard ceiling on the streaming hours feels like a step backwards, especially for anyone using a Deck or similar handheld as a lightweight cloud client rather than a full local gaming rig.
Proton Experimental Cleans Up a Handful of Regressions
The latest Proton Experimental update is mostly a regression-fixing patch, but there are a few worth flagging. Lunacid: Tears of the Moon is playable again after being broken, Far Cry 4’s controller support is now working reliably, and The I of the Dragon has had a rendering bug fixed that was affecting the in-game carpet textures of all things. Achron also gets a fix for a warning that was incorrectly displaying about missing fonts, and Cool People Club is now marked playable for the first time. On top of that, small quality-of-life update: EVERSPACE 2 increased the font size of its main UI elements, which makes a real difference for readability on the Deck’s screen.
Takeaway
Lossless Scaling 2.0 is the one to actually go try this week — the memory savings alone make it worth revisiting if you’d previously written it off as too heavy for the Deck. Everything else here is smaller, but the Proton fixes are worth checking if any of those titles have been giving you trouble, and Xbox Cloud Gaming users should keep an eye on how those new hour limits actually play out.