Is the Steam Deck getting outdated soon? Should I wait for the next gen?
-
The thing that I would keep an eye out for is if Valve ever does a refresh with a VRR panel. With VRR, you don't need to have "so much excess GPU power that it's impossible to miss a rendering deadline".
Deck doesn't have vrr?
-
FYI- you can also stream from your laptop to the Deck. Technically you can do it on a per-game basis through Steam (which you may have already noticed), but I find it's even better to install Steam Link as a non-Steam game, similar to what you probably did with Chiaki. As long as you have a good local network it's great and uses way less of the Deck's power.
I have no idea why Valve hasn't added Steam Link to the Steam store. That would make things so much easier, and you get way more settings and fewer bugs that way than doing the per-game streaming option.
Check out out Sunshine / Moonlight and Moondeck if you haven’t already
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
Is the Deck going to be your first / primary gaming device?
I got my Deck primarily for indie games, 10-30 year old games, or other generally “light” / casual games to play on the go or while watching a show with my partner.
For more demanding games, I’ll run them on my gaming PC and stream to my Deck via Sunshine / Moonlight / Moondeck. This has the added benefit of very low power consumption, meaning that instead of a ~2 hour battery life I get 6 or more.
The added benefit here is that a lot of games seem to be shipping increasingly unoptimized. Things that might have finnicky performance on my 3840 x 1600 monitor run silky smooth when I squish them down to 1920 x 1080 to stream to the Deck, usually with maxed out settings.
In the context of how I’m using it, Steam Deck is probably never going to be obsolete.
If you’re considering it as your primary device and primarily want to play modern AAA games, you should probably be spending at least 2-3x as much on a laptop or desktop. For that use case, Steam Deck is more appropriate as a companion device.
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
Decks went from GDPWin with intel HD 615 integrated graphics, running desktop windows in 2016 (we were amazed it could run 2011's Arkham City 25 fps low (definitely playable! lmao)) to Steam Deck where people are still reasonably posting about it having console parity.
RE "outdated soon": this is a $350 handheld x86 computer with an APU powerful enough to drive complex 3d games at 720p. People are going to be buying Steam Decks until they stop making them. Capability and performance per $$ is extremely good for numerous use cases, including people who are gaming like OP.
RE devs optimizing for SD/Switch2/XBS: i hope OP is right? definitely where non-AAA studios are going to be aiming, but AAA studios have weird corpo masters who rarely operate in ways that would make sense to cool people.
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
As the Steam Deck isn’t new and is apparently struggling with some AAÀs, that’s why I got a used Steam Deck 2 months ago to run alongside my PS5.
I really don’t regret the move as I can play every future AAA I could want on the Playstation and so many games (including older AAÀs) on the Steam Deck.
For me it’s the perfect combo at under 1000.-(around 1000$).
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
Get a Steam Deck OLED. Just do it. It is currently and will remain for a very long time a very capable device.
I actually kinda HOPE they don't release a new generation for a good long while, so devs have some pressure to target it for new games, which also means that those new games will remain playable on other older hardware as well.
-
Is the Deck going to be your first / primary gaming device?
I got my Deck primarily for indie games, 10-30 year old games, or other generally “light” / casual games to play on the go or while watching a show with my partner.
For more demanding games, I’ll run them on my gaming PC and stream to my Deck via Sunshine / Moonlight / Moondeck. This has the added benefit of very low power consumption, meaning that instead of a ~2 hour battery life I get 6 or more.
The added benefit here is that a lot of games seem to be shipping increasingly unoptimized. Things that might have finnicky performance on my 3840 x 1600 monitor run silky smooth when I squish them down to 1920 x 1080 to stream to the Deck, usually with maxed out settings.
In the context of how I’m using it, Steam Deck is probably never going to be obsolete.
If you’re considering it as your primary device and primarily want to play modern AAA games, you should probably be spending at least 2-3x as much on a laptop or desktop. For that use case, Steam Deck is more appropriate as a companion device.
Yes the Deck will be my primary gaming device, but I don't primarily want to play modern AAA games. My gaming library will be a variety indies, AA and a few AAA games.
I don't want to invest in a gaming laptop or desktop, I would rather use cloud gaming in the cases I need better graphics.
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I feel like people have gotten Stockholm syndrome from phones with new generations every year.
Current hardware still works fine. If you have frame troubles, lower settings and mess with your battery/performance profiles.
Do not solve the problem by offering to give companies another 500 of your dollars.
(If you’re playing your Deck at home and have a beefy PC, though, you can always stream from your PC to your deck for better performance! On most networks, there’s virtually 0 latency! Highly recommend.)
-
I feel like people have gotten Stockholm syndrome from phones with new generations every year.
Current hardware still works fine. If you have frame troubles, lower settings and mess with your battery/performance profiles.
Do not solve the problem by offering to give companies another 500 of your dollars.
(If you’re playing your Deck at home and have a beefy PC, though, you can always stream from your PC to your deck for better performance! On most networks, there’s virtually 0 latency! Highly recommend.)
This is why I am trying to decide whether to get one now or wait for the 2nd generation. If I buy one now, I will NOT be upgrading to gen 2.
-
This is why I am trying to decide whether to get one now or wait for the 2nd generation. If I buy one now, I will NOT be upgrading to gen 2.
Ohh. My bad.
Tech influencer folks predict a 2026 drop for the second revision, so if you can wait that long (or trust these predictions they’re making) I’d wait.
-
Check out out Sunshine / Moonlight and Moondeck if you haven’t already
Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?
I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.
Steam Link just... Works. It's an official Valve thing. There's a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it's not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I'm on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b
-
I feel like people have gotten Stockholm syndrome from phones with new generations every year.
Current hardware still works fine. If you have frame troubles, lower settings and mess with your battery/performance profiles.
Do not solve the problem by offering to give companies another 500 of your dollars.
(If you’re playing your Deck at home and have a beefy PC, though, you can always stream from your PC to your deck for better performance! On most networks, there’s virtually 0 latency! Highly recommend.)
Big vouch for streaming. I mostly use my deck at home so I can play on the couch instead of staying cooped up in the office after spending all day at the same desk for work.
The deck can run a lot of games natively surprisingly well, sure, but sunshine/moonlight are incredible. Even games that run fine natively, I'll still typically stream to my deck instead just for the battery life.
-
Deck doesn't have vrr?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You can have VRR when connecting to an external DISPLAYPORT (not hdmi) monitor. The internal panel is 60hz (or 90 on the OLED). You can adjust the refresh rate to any fixed value down to 40hz, but this doesn't happen dynamically.
With fixed frame rate you have the fundamental problem that any time the GPU takes even one clock cycle too long to finish a render, you drop to 1/2 framerate. With fixed frame rate you can't miss by just a little bit, every miss is rounded up to the next full frame.
-
Efficiency is also a major problem i think. You can always just slap a higher power APU in there, but then you also have to cool that thing. And that means either a higher RPM fan or a larger device with a bigger radiator.
Not to mention battery life..
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
Waiting on a next generation portable Linux machine is a win win situation. Unless you die in the next year.
-
Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?
I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.
Steam Link just... Works. It's an official Valve thing. There's a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it's not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I'm on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b
For me, the visual fidelity is better and I found it to be a lot more stable overall, particularly in the framerate / latency department. This was the case over the local network but became even more pronounced when I played from another city.
Back when I first set it up, Steam Link didn’t have HDR Support so doing regular navigation on my desktop looked all washed out and awful.I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out.
Moonlight is the client side, it runs on the Steam Deck that is AMD based. Sunshine is what runs on the host - you need both.
MoonDeck is a Decky Loader plugin that lets you run your stream for each game by its appid, letting you keep your controller layouts in order. Normally, you’d be launching Moonlight and then the stream, which means you’d have to have your controller layout for each game associated with the Moonlight appod and then have to manually switch between them depending on what you’re playing.
It’s certainly more involved than the simplicity of running Steam Link, but for me the benefits were well worth it.
-
Yes the Deck will be my primary gaming device, but I don't primarily want to play modern AAA games. My gaming library will be a variety indies, AA and a few AAA games.
I don't want to invest in a gaming laptop or desktop, I would rather use cloud gaming in the cases I need better graphics.
Well, in that case just be prepared for certain games to be unsupported or run very poorly.
Anything with kernel level anti cheat won’t be available to you.
Cloud gaming is definitely a good way to supplement
-
Jfc. Dude asked for a simple question, got handed down life lesson.
There’s two ways to live life: my way and the objectively morally wrong way. If anyone disagrees with me: my answer is my muscle flex. You cannot see it but I’m a 140lbs 5’10 manlet king with 14% body fat and well read in literature and philosophy. So basically imagine Plato flexing to win an argument. That’s me.
-
No need to gatekeep things in such a heavy-handed manner. People can enjoy whatever kind of games they do. Gaming is about having fun, not about measuring ego based on your self-imposed rules
I mean people enjoy crack and I’m not gonna tell em it’s good for them.
-
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I'm guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don't mind medium details.
Another benefit to waiting for the next iteration of handhelds is that the price of current ones will probably drop
