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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

#231
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Maybe you were one of the unlucky ones and got the loud fan. They switched to a much quieter fan in the newer machines. You can try to replace it with some parts from ifixit or somewhere else. I refunded my first too because it was just too loud and I didn't had the right situation for it. Now one kid later and a newer deck with a silent fan, I'm very happy with the deck again.

I just checked and I have the newer fan. My deck is only a few months old as well.

It’s not that it’s making an unpleasant whining sound like what the older fan was meant to be, it’s that it’s trying to push out so much heat all the time that it’s perceptibly loud.

It’s the difference between tone and volume.

All my other devices in the house are relatively quiet compared to it. My switch, my Macs, even my PS5. None of them are fanless but they’re pushing out much less air at any point.

The steamdeck is fine for some games, but once it hits the thermal ceiling it gets so loud.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way I would ever do this. The Steam controller overlay is my killer feature! The Deck controller is brilliant. If they issued a v2 controller that copied the deck I would buy it in a heartbeat.

FWIW you can use the Steam UI to configure any controller if you launch big picture mode on desktop. I've used it to remap my Stadia controller and an Xbox controller and it works almost as good as the Deck configuration. I say almost as good, because the "Steam button + joystick" mouse controls don't work for very long; the Xbox button gets mapped to the Steam button, but holding that will turn off the controller...

Oh awesome. I suppose you can also do the menu overlays? Obviously there's no track pad to put them on but I imagine could work well mapped to eg a left joystick.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor the fact they still show ads before the movie you paid for.

I kind of wouldn't mind too much, but they start the movie around 30 minutes late just to show ads and trailers.

Then also arrive at the cinema late so you can skip the ads. I always arrive about 10 min late to skip the ads.

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

#234
This is amazing news, and I've found that thanks to Proton patches being upstreamed by Valve and CodeWeavers, not to mention the Wine community, that games that run on Proton tend to run using vanilla Wine as well, thus improving compatibility for Wine in general!

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

#235
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad your experience is better but I’d just point out a few things. Battery life is heavily dependant on the games being played. Yakuza isn’t typically that demanding so I’m not surprised you’re getting more. Playing something like Forza kills my battery pretty quickly. The screen is 400nits. It’s also not got great gamut coverage. That’s what I mean by it being dull and dim. It’s usable but it’s really dependent…

I played Harry Potter on medium-high settings. If you keep the resolution at the native screen resolution and turn off things that aren't needed on a smaller screen (eg AA or super sampling), the performance is better than PS4 and roughly the same as a PS5. Performance isn't really a concern for me unless I'm plugged into an external display.

But that’s exactly it. You’re playing at a lower setting by turning off AA and playing at low resolutions

I’m glad performance is fine enough for you though. I still find it quite underpowered, where every game I play requires both feature and resolution compromises. Playing without AA is just not acceptable to me in this decade. At least not unless I’m getting significant battery life or thermal freedom to compensate.

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

#236
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played Harry Potter on medium-high settings. If you keep the resolution at the native screen resolution and turn off things that aren't needed on a smaller screen (eg AA or super sampling), the performance is better than PS4 and roughly the same as a PS5. Performance isn't really a concern for me unless I'm plugged into an external display.

But that’s exactly it. You’re playing at a lower setting by turning off AA and playing at low resolutions I’m glad performance is fine enough for you though. I still find it quite underpowered, where every game I play requires both feature and resolution compromises. Playing without AA is just not acceptable to me in this decade. At least not unless I’m getting significant battery life or thermal freedom to compensat…

It's not needed on smaller screens. The switch does similar things. It's a common tactic on handhelds to disable those sort of features as they add no noticeable improvement.

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

#238

Valve had a sequence of strange failed experiments -- the Steam Controller, Steam Machines/SteamOS, Steam Link. But somehow these all came together to make the Steam Deck which is an astounding success. I don't know if Valve are geniuses or just incredibly lucky.

But were they failed experiments if they led to this?

Apple did the same thing with random features like LIDAR scanners in phones that you have no reason to use. Everyone questioned their thinking. Turned out they were doing that in order to make the best VR headset ever made.

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

#240
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s exactly it. You’re playing at a lower setting by turning off AA and playing at low resolutions I’m glad performance is fine enough for you though. I still find it quite underpowered, where every game I play requires both feature and resolution compromises. Playing without AA is just not acceptable to me in this decade. At least not unless I’m getting significant battery life or thermal freedom to compensat…

It's not needed on smaller screens. The switch does similar things. It's a common tactic on handhelds to disable those sort of features as they add no noticeable improvement.

The switch does it for *some* games when running portably and then enables most things when docked. A lot of that is battery management.

The steamdeck does not really have a concept of dual modes, per your own statements about playing on a bigger screen.

And I completely disagree that AA isn’t needed on smaller screens. You can see aliasing at any screen size.

Again, perhaps it meets your threshold of quality. That does not mean it meets mine nor does it mean that the form factor somehow obviates it. It just means that we have subjectively different preferences.

But again, I disagree that “it’s not needed”. That’s not why games will disable AA in handheld mode. AA is expensive and a cost they try and mitigate with art direction that tries to avoid much of the losses.

The steamdeck is not just playing games designed for a small screen. Many games suffer from shimmering and shifting. Whether that’s an issue for you or not is independent of whether they exist and might be issues for others.

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