While Team Fortress 2 has received less attention from Valve than its other team-based shooter Counter-Strike 2, it hasn’t been abandoned as some corners of the Internet claim. The game has been consistently receiving small updates every few months, tweaking maps and characters as Valve sees fit. The latest update is more substantial than usual, however, as it finally brings Valve’s 17-year-old shooter into the 64 bit era.
Valve pushed the new update to the game yesterday, adding 64-bit support to TF2 for both Windows and Linux users. The update also fixed a much more specific issue “related to uploading invalid custom decals that would crash other clients.”
Valve noted that the change “should include performance updates for most users” and this relates to more than just the transition to 64-bit. As noted on the TF2 Wiki (via PCGamesN), the patch also includes a couple of other undocumented changes that may also help speed up the game. The patch increases TF2’s maximum FPS from 300 to 400 frames per second, meaning the game can be even slicker than it already is. It also enables raw mouse input by default.
On top of that, Valve has added a -vulkan command line option, letting players render the game with Vulkan if they so choose. This feature is enabled by default on Linux-based systems, so anyone playing TF2 on Steam Deck will see the benefit from this outright.
The switchover hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing. Earlier today, Valve pushed a second, quickfire update to fix “an issue where the game would be falsely detected as malware by some anti-viruses”. Oops! Nonetheless, the update may provide a short-term reprieve from TF2’s much reported bot problem, making them incompatible with the game. That said, some users argue that, in the long run, the update will actually make bots easier to host.
Nonetheless, the update shows Valve still has one eye on its more colourful team-based shooter, though TF2 players are understandably jealous at the attention Counter-Strike has been getting. Last year, they even tried to meme a character into existence through the power of mass gaslighting, reminiscing about a missing tenth character class that never actually existed.