It’s impressive to me that games made by small teams or solo artists are going toe to toe with games made by the entire Western hemisphere. Stardew Valley is being played more than RDR2?
A graphically demanding game being high on this list is more impressive to me. BG3 looks like a claymation game on the deck, I wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near as high.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is certainly a surprise. I tried it on my Steam Deck, and not only could I not figure out how to make the graphics look decent on my monitor, but I had a problem where the game would eventually stop accepting mouse input, forcing me to quit and relaunch. I didn’t get far until I switched to the macOS version once it came out.
It works fine for me, with a few small settings tweaks. I’ve probably logged ~70 of my ~310 playtime hours playing on Deck.
Of course it’s mostly low settings, so it doesn’t look as beautiful as it does running on my desktop via a 3080 at 1440p… but it looks good enough and runs well enough to be enjoyable on a handheld. I don’t think I could enjoy an action-heavy game with the same performance, but for something turn-based that focuses more on the story, I’m having a blast.
That said, it sounds like that’s the crux: I’m playing it in a portable fashion, on the Deck’s screen directly, while it sounds like you’re playing on an external monitor, with keyboard+mouse?
Keep in mind, theres a giant community behind yhe steamdeck, and if a game allows mods(especially bethesdas), theres always a modder who has a modlist for tweaks specifically for the deck.
I think it runs almost playably out of the box, so I would imagine it would work actually playably with a few mods, e.g. to adjust settings not accessible through graphics presets and to enable disk I/O cache.
The benefit of a smaller screen is that you need less resolution to make it look half decent and with all the optimizing valve does with proton i imagine its quite playable. But the way graphics where implemented in star-field is shit and there are no excuses.
I feel good for CDPR. They fumbled the launch of Cyberpunk, but people are still playing the crap out of it, so I guess they handled it well in the end. It must be horrible to have worked on a game for years, only for it to blow up the way Cyberpunk did.
Edit: Though I suppose the launch was only “fumbled” on last gen hardware.
The media outrage was disproportionate and completely disconnected from how it actually worked. It was a success from the start. As you said, the fumble was on consoles mostly.
It’s certainly good though that they worked so long to make it even better IMO.
Yea that’s might be it, it is the case for me at least. Cyberpunk 2.0 and BG runs quite okay for me on Steam deck, so I am not compelled to update my PC yet.
Of course on PC it would always be much better, but I am holding on to setup a home office in my apartment first and that might not happen soon.
Moonlight is unreasonably capable. I initially dismissed it when I had shoddy performance between a wireless desktop and the steam deck. Then I set up tailscale and tried it outside the home during a lunch break, it was impossibly smooth. I thought maybe it was something to do with the fiber at my work. So I tried it at a friend’s place in the next town over with the same ISP, impossibly smooth.
Now I’m in the process of overhauling my home network to figure out why it’s better outside my home.
I’ve had the same experience with steam remote play, it works flawlessly outside my house, even off a hotspot from my phone! but in my house it’s dog water, feels more like playing a slideshow built for the Gameboy advance
It’s probably a result of wireless interference somewhere between the deck and the desktop. I also had a really bad experience with remote play and sunlight/moonlight before I hardwired my desktop to the router via an Ethernet cable. Just making that one part of the chain wired completely solved my issues.
Yeah OSI model says to check the connection between access point and deck. I remember back when I used the Steam Link to stream to my living room from my wireless desktop I would actually get better performance if the Steam Link was wireless point blank from the access point than if it was connected via Ethernet.
Hmm, because that makes me wonder if they also count it as a play for the host machine.
Also, how common is steamlink use? Would love to see how much it’s utilised on the deck/steam in general. I tried it myself but unless your host is connected over Ethernet it’s a bit on the slow side.
I really want to enjoy games like Fallout or GTA on the Deck but compared to mouse/keyboard it’s just really bad. I cannot understand how so many people like to play games like CoD or Battlefield on consoles.
I usually use gamepad controls and try and shoehorn gyro as mouse input. Doesn’t always work but when it does it’s really decent for FPS all things considered.
I don’t play against keyboards generally. But yeah precision in aiming is a bad thing if I have to slap a whopping keyboard on my lap when I’m shooting people on my sofa.
That wasn’t an easy game. But it didn’t require the accuracy today’s competitive FPS shooters do. Even Duke Nukem 3D was pretty cool back then. Was super easy to hit your targets though.
I just had this horrific dream where my mouse input was functioning like a controller. I think it was PTSD from the days of aiming more with the characters movement than the joysticks.
Out of those 20, 10 of them are either already on my deck or match my queue of games to play. Any reason to play skyrim special edition over legendary edition? I plan on playing the game without mods. I thought legendary edition would give better battery life. I do not remember is special edition has any worthwhile upgrades.
I watched a video on the differences, but it didn’t really seem like it was anything other than graphical. Since battery is the same, maybe I’ll just install special edition then.
Thanks, I played it before any dlc came out for the game and I was not blown away by the graphical improvements. I’m just going to stick with legendary edition. Maybe it won’t be any different but I just feel like it will be more performant.
Thanks, I played it before any dlc came out for the game and I was not blown away by the graphical improvements. I’m just going to stick with legendary edition. Maybe it won’t be any different but I just feel like it will be more performant.
Is 40 acceptable? All I ever see is people complaining if it’s not 120 and I can’t tell if it’s just a meme or not. I play on console primarily for ease of use (I have toddlers), but I do have a pc that’s mid range that does well but I just feel so isolated from my family every time I sit at the computer. Thinking about the steam deck but I know next to nothing of it.
Steam Deck is only a 60Hz display (which your TV almost certainly is too) so anything over 60 fps isn’t actually going to make a difference visually. That being said, if you’re playing on a display capable of 120Hz, 120 fps will absolutely make a difference visually.
What you find acceptable is entirely based on your personal preference, how much you’ve already been exposed to higher specs, and how privileged you are in hardware, so some people are memeing and others are serious based on these. If console and mid-range pc gaming is all you know, the Steam Deck provides similar performance, and it’s a full on pc (with all the customization potential and non-gaming software availability you’d expect from a pc) in a handheld form factor, and a fairly console-like stock OS, if that’s appealing to you. But if you want 120-240 fps on latest AAA games, no, you won’t find the Steam Deck’s performance acceptable, but then also you wouldn’t be the target audience.
40 is a sweet spot between 30 and 60: feels much more smooth than 30, is much less demanding than 60. And by the way, 30 is acceptable too as long as it’s stable. Sure it will almost certainly feel less smooth than other options, but especially as you say you’re playing on console mostly… chances are you are already used to 30 fps. I, for example, feel the difference between 30 and 60 in Forza Horizon 5 (and the magic 40) but that’s not preventing me from doing well.
The one thing that I’m not sure has been mentioned yet, is that the Steam Deck targets 720p. The screen is small enough for that to work out fine.
The reason why 40 fps feels better is because even though its only 10 fps higher, the frame latency is half(25 ms) compared to 30(33.3 ms) and 60(16.6ms) on the two ends. So you work 33% harder for half the latency.
To put in perspective, the drop in latency (8.3 ms), is the same for example going from , 40 to 60, or 60(16.6) > 120(8.3 ms)
I use mine for indie games, mostly. I have a gaming computer for AAA titles. You can stream games from steam on your pc, but I haven’t fucked with that much.
It performs way better than I expected, but I am one of those that requires higher frame rates for some titles so.
The Steam Deck has roughly the same gaming performance as a PS4, but it’s an actual PC so it can run all kinds of other software without hacky mods. It runs a version of Linux by default, but you could install Windows on it if that tickles your fancy.
I was wondering why you were apologizing then I saw you were down voted like crazy. To be clear, I didn’t downvote you. I can see why you would have initially thought this was from one person.
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