August 18 turned out to be settle-your-debts day for PC gaming patches. Remedy gave Alan Wake 2 the native AMD upscaling path Radeon owners have been faking with driver substitutions and third-party tools, and Bethesda fixed a Fallout 4 crash that has followed Steam Deck players around for years. Valve's Proton team closed out the same day with a fix batch of its own.
Alan Wake 2 speaks FSR 4 natively
Update 1.2 (build 1.2.10 on PC) adds FSR 4 support that switches on automatically on supported Radeon GPUs whenever FSR Super Resolution is selected, plus a separate FSR Frame Generation toggle in the graphics settings (Remedy's update notes, The FPS Review on the patch). Nearly three years after launch, that closes one of the game's longer-standing gaps. Alan Wake 2 arrived in 2023 as the path-tracing and DLSS showcase, and getting AMD's machine-learning upscaler into it has so far meant driver-side substitution or unofficial DLL tools. A native integration is fed by the game itself, survives future updates, and no longer depends on tooling Remedy never promised to support. Which cards qualify follows AMD's own FSR 4 hardware list rather than anything in the patch notes, so treat "supported GPUs" as AMD's definition, not Remedy's.
The line with the widest reach looks smaller than it is: Opacity Micromaps and Shader Execution Reordering now run through Microsoft's Agility SDK, which in Remedy's wording allows "support across multiple GPU vendors". Both optimizations started life tied to NVIDIA hardware paths. Micromaps cut the cost of ray tracing alpha-tested geometry such as foliage, and reordering regroups divergent ray-tracing shader work before it wrecks GPU occupancy; routed through the standard DirectX 12 path, neither remains an RTX-only line item in this game. The update also fixes the lingering cinematic audio desync on all platforms, a New Game Plus progression blocker at the Crossbow Cult Stash, and a crash tied to Quick Slots.
Fallout 4 stops crashing on the Deck, and Proton mops up
Bethesda's same-day Fallout 4 update fixes the crash that ended the game every time a Steam Deck player opened the on-screen keyboard, a failure players have been working around for years while the game kept its Verified badge (GamingOnLinux on the fix). Skyrim carries the identical bug, and while Bethesda has an update planned for it, a keyboard fix there is hoped for rather than announced. The Fallout 4 patch also raises the BA2 archive limit from 256 to 1024, aimed squarely at large mod collections, and removes a frequent crash caused by a streaming audio error.
Proton Experimental's August 18 build is the unglamorous maintenance that keeps SteamOS viable as a primary platform: controllers are detected again in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Company of Heroes 3 gets its middle-mouse camera back, Arma 3 stops eating input after focus changes under gamescope, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and The Last of Us Part II no longer show GNOME's top bar over fullscreen (GamingOnLinux on the update). Three more titles moved to playable, and a release candidate of Proton 11.0-2 is already up for testing.
If Alan Wake 2 on a Radeon card or Fallout 4 on a Deck has been sitting in the backlog because of exactly these problems, both excuses expired this week.