There’s a fancy CRT-style overlay bundle available for your Steam Deck

While I’m not about to propose the tank-like CRT screens of yesteryear are better than modern-day OLED displays, I do think there’s merit in how phosphors, specifically, render pixels. That’s why I was thrilled to discover someone’s created a set of CRT-style overlays for the Steam Deck.

While CRT shaders have existed in some form or another for a while now as part of the ever-popular ReShade injector, getting them to render correctly is a wholly different can of worms. Some of them are also quite the performance hogs, and it’s no surprise that they don’t work great on low-resolution displays. The Steam Deck’s humble 1200×800 screen hasn’t worked well with the ones I tried. Now, however, Reddit user Traditional-Ad1708 has taken it upon themselves to fine-tune a number of CRT-style shaders specifically for the Steam Deck. The results are downright glorious if you’re nostalgic about the late ’90s and the early aughts.

Inject CRT effects into your Steam Deck gaming today

Traditional-Ad1708’s custom CRT shaders ire not going to be for everyone. Firstly, if you’re unfamiliar with CRT-style displays and why they’re of particular interest even for modern gaming, don’t expect to get much out of this pack. I recommend looking into Digital Foundry’s coverage of the matter, but otherwise, CRT visuals are an acquired taste.

Due to the rather archaic nature of CRT displays (electron beams, phosphors in place of pixels, etc.), old-school pixelated graphics mesh together in a way that’s extremely difficult to achieve on LCD and OLED displays with raw pixels. I’m being extremely reductive about this entire shindig here, but that’s the gist of it and why many of us are keen on them. Well, that and a whole lot of nostalgia about old-school gaming.

As the redditor featured above explains, “I tried one of these shaders with Dead Space 2008 recently, and the effect is transformative. The image seems so much more cohesive, and the strange quirks of CRT-like images (too complex to go into here) just manage to sell an ‘illusion’ of a very detailed image.”

The bundle of shaders they provided includes about half-a-dozen different choices that will suit different needs and use cases. If you’re watching YouTube videos on your Deck at a low bit rate, for example, this may be a way to deal with compression-blocking artifacts and excessive color-banding. Neat!

Getting these to work is no problem at all if you’ve got the Decky Plugin Loader running on your device. Once you’ve got that sorted out, just look for the ReShadeck plugin and install it. Then, download Traditional-Ad1708’s shader pack and unpack it into \deck.local\shared\gamescope\Reshade\shaders. You’ll need to sort that out via the Deck’s Desktop Mode, but as soon as the files are copied over, you can switch back into Game Mode and toggle them on to your heart’s content.

Note that using these comes with a performance drop, making them less-than-stellar for games that push the Deck to its limits. Yet, for games such as Moonlighter and Vampire Survivors, or for late-gen emulation, it works phenomenally well, and I cannot recommend it enough.