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More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

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Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#121
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even witcher 3 that's verified have small text. Not too bad but I prefer it to be slightly larger.

It seems like a lot of games that would be green/verified are classed as yellow/playable solely because of small text, which is equivalent to being verified if you use your docked Steam Deck as a cheap gaming PC first and a handheld second.

Yeah but the situation isn't limited to deck, though deck makes it worse since the screen is smaller than average monitor.

Modern games without a big ass high res monitor will have text that's too small to be enjoyable.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's with mods, right? If you play vanilla, the Deck's 16GByte should be plenty. Most cities will hit the asset limit long before needing this much RAM.

That's fair, but i'd argue that mods are a pretty essential part of the game for most people

That sounds like a bold statement. I would imagine the large majority of players of any mass-market title don’t know about or use any non-built-in mods.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#123
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch Linux, btw

Does this make a difference? If I were to build a gaming PC based on Linux and Proton, would I need an Arch based distro to get that ~80% coverage?

In theory it doesn't matter, but in practice there are issues. On other distros like stock Ubuntu you won't have Flatpak out of the box and would need to set that up. Likewise on some distros you would have to worry about alternative repos or package architectures.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#124
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared with deck, no suspend continue. And I read that the button can stuck and it can get hot.

Both consoles get about as hot, but yeah, no good Sleep option in Windows is a shame.

> Both consoles get about as hot

The problem specific to the Ally right now is that it seems to get too hot where the SD card reader is, causing SD cards to fry for some users: https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-ove... . I'm sure this will be fixed in a future hardware revision, but for now it seems worth waiting on the Ally for them to hammer out the first-generation kinks.

Still, I'm happy that the Ally exists, both as competition for Valve and to help prove that this PC form factor has legs.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#125
post #9

For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.

Even if you have zero mobile use cases, it’s a comfy way to lay back on the couch and stream games from your PC. The controls are very nice and some games feel nicer in a small form factor embedded thing than desktop/TV gaming.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screen is kinda small for newer, high res games but still enjoyable. More suitable to PS2 1024x968 era so perfect for emulator PS2 and earlier. For indies or 2d like stardew it'll be no problem. Form factor is good, no problem so far with controller position. Rather big and rather heavy, not as portable as psp or nds but definitely portable. Battery lasts only 2 hours-ish for AAA games though, much longer for lower s…

> Screen is kinda small for newer, high res games but still enjoyable. Agree. When rewriting an older game for Steam I ended up in-biggening the artwork a touch to look good on the Steam Deck. Of course the game now looks positively Duplo on a normal PC monitor now.

Can't really blame anyone, nowadays monitor really ranged from small, deck sized to big, dual monitors sized with resolution ranged from 1200-ish for older or smaller monitor to 4k.

Without adjustable ui size the text will undoubtedly be small in some instances.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#127
post #9

For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.

I’ll go against the grain and say I don’t actually like mine very much and here’s why. I’ll caveat it with saying I got it for trips.

- it’s underpowered. I knew that going in but so many games have to be played at either a really low setting or you chew through battery life quicker than i can manage.

- battery life is pretty poor. Most games give me an hour or two of use. While I rarely game that long in a stretch, it means that on a trip I’m always thinking about battery. The charging port is in a location that shifts the ballance in an unfortunate way.

- you can’t download while it’s asleep or in the background. So if a game needs to be downloaded or updated, you have to leave it lying there, turned on and doing nothing. You can opt to have it download while you play but it stutters a ton if you do so.

- screen is mediocre. I knew that going in but it’s really hard to appreciate how dim and dull it looks compared to my phone screen for example.

- it’s loud and hot. It’s not something I can play silently therefore. The fans are really working overtime to relieve that poor SoC

- the ergonomics are so so. This one is really subjective. It starts out feeling pretty good, but I find the weight distribution makes it really uncomfortable for me after a whole. I feel a lot more cramping in my fingers and wrists.

Now, it was relatively cheap so I don’t mind, but I find myself not wanting to use it unless I’m on a solo trip or my partner is using the TV.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#128
It's an astonishing achievement from Valve. The plug-and-play nature is truly miraculous...I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box. I'm a very happy Deck owner from day one, despite having a relatively powerful gaming PC and a Switch.

As a dad with two very young kids I don't get much time for gaming, but the Deck helps me find that time and I am loving playing through some of my backlog of controller-friendly games.

Also a plug for https://www.protondb.com/ which has thousands of user-submitted reviews and optimization fixes/tweaks for playing games on the Steam Deck.

Re: More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

#129
post #12

oh finally, we see linux gaming rising.

Ha ha. In fact I started out building my game for three platforms (MacOS, Windows, Linux). I have a CMake file and all was good.

But after CLion's free period ended and they wanted to charge me, I started just testing my Windows build on the Steam Deck and was surprised at how seamless their Proton layer was. I ended up not shipping a Linux-only version of the game.

Honestly too, even supporting the two platforms is a bit of a pain — a third would be unwelcome.

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