14 DAY TRIAL // Now that the Steam Client received one of the biggest stable updates for 2016, the time has come for Valve's Steam developers to concentrate their efforts on some more awesome features for the cross-platform software.
And so, they announced on February 9 the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming stable Steam Client version, adding initial support for DirectX 12 games on Windows 10 operating systems (requires the November update), better support for the Steam Overlay with the DOOM game, and drag scrolling for the Big Picture mode.
Additionally, the February 9 Steam Beta Client enables scrolling in the dashboard view for SteamVR, which is now accessible via a grab and flick with the trigger or Vive controller's touchpad. It also updates the SteamVR friends user interface, which will now be displayed in the VR mode, and improves the performance for users with numerous groups.
Steam Controller has received numerous improvements
As usual, the main attraction of this Steam Client Beta build is the Steam Controller device, which has received support for saving bindings to local files, 5- and 10-minute auto power-off options, better support for pure mixed X-Input, mouse and keyboard, and better X-Input compatibility for games like Final Fantasy 14.
Changing settings while in-game has become much more reliable, the responsiveness of deleting Steam Controller configurations has been greatly improved as well, along with speed improvements when publishing and downloading those configurations. Additionally, the Joystick Camera has been fixed to send Pad Clicks when pressing at the edge of the pad.
The Big Picture overlay can now be used by games launched via the desktop client when at least one Steam Controller device is active, users can edit the configuration of a game directly from the desktop library context menu, and they can also use Desktop Configuration for shortcuts to improve Launchers' compatibility.
Steam Controller's mouse horizontal inversion has been fixed to respect the rotation correctly, and there's better support for the Suspend and Standby modes. Lastly, the frame rate for AMD Radeon hardware-accelerated video capture has been improved for GPU-intensive games in the In-Home Streaming feature.