cloudlessIs the Steam Deck getting outdated soon? Should I wait for the next gen?
NoerknharMy crystal ball says buy one now.
simpleIt depends, a lot of modern AAA games run fine but a good amount of them are very unoptimized and run poorly on the Deck.
Valve said not to expect a hardware refresh soon since newer chips are more expensive and not that much faster, just look at the handheld PCs selling for ~$900 that are only 25% faster.
There are plenty of benchmarks online so you can check if the games you want will work properly or not.
Yeah there isnt anything of the same size with significantly more power afaik. Gotta go with a laptop then if u need the power.
I actually have a laptop with RTX 3050, but it gets extremely noisy while playing games. I also prefer to play handheld. Currently I stream games to my tablet via the cloud or from my laptop.
It seems that most gaming laptops are noisy and expensive. The Steam Deck appears to be reasonably priced with decent performance.
Da Bald EagulIf you remote play from the laptop that you have now the performance will be better than playing directly from the deck, but the noise can be in another room. And since the deck isn’t doing much compute, battery life should be great too. And you can stream at the Deck’s native resolution so your fps will be higher than your laptop’s display (assuming that is full hd)
It’s new so reviews are just filtering out but it’s starting to look like SteamOS powered version of the Legion Go S (Z1 Extreme version) is a pretty great handheld that uses the latest AMD chipset with a sizable assist from Linux/proton efficiencies vs Windows to drive a 15-30% performance improvement which does make some more modern games more playable though it is significantly more expensive than the deck. I watched Retro Games Corps review of it yesterday. That said, if you’re okay waiting another couple years or so I bet there will be a Steam Deck 2 release but it seems like it mainly rests on AMD to deliver a significant (“generational”) leap with upcoming mobile APUs. Valve seems keen on not releasing a follow-up to the first deck until it is significantly better in every way and the chipsets available now just aren’t quite there yet it seems.
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…
katy ✨me, who bought the steam deck primarily to play roms of games from 30 years ago: never had a problem so far.
Yeah I will very likely spend half of the time playing retro games on it. At the same time I don't want to regret when there is a new AAA game that I really want to play. (There is nothing annouced that I considered as "must play", and I am not interested in GTA6).
CatZoomiesEven if a new AAA comes out that you’re eagerly wanting to play and the performance may not be great on Steam Deck, don’t forget about all the hundreds of games you also love that can be played on Steam Deck. Or the ROMs from nostalgic consoles that you love.
If you have a gaming solution now and you’re not ready to commit, just wait for the inevitable next gen Deck as you’ll be happier that way. Of course we’ll never know when it is coming.
Get a device now and play the games you want? Or wait ~2 years and get the next gen so you can play some games better?
Only you can make that informed decision that works best for you. Best of luck!
That's a very reasonable take. Thanks.
Sure thing. I also read more comments and saw you have a laptop and stream games to a tablet.
For my use case, I have a desktop PC for when I want to play at high fidelity and have serious time to sit down and game. The Steam Deck I have is for the free moments of gaming time I can get. I can be on the couch and game. Sit on my porch during a break and game for a bit. I can click the button to sleep the console and pick up in two days from right where I left off - either Steam games or ROMs.
A Steam Deck isn’t cheap so definitely weigh your options and find out what works best for you. If you feel you want the performance uplift and can just wait, then put your laptop in another room so you won’t hear it and steam it to a tablet with a controller in your hands or something. That’ll give you a great experience, too. Then you can get Deck 2 and feel happier with your decision.
If money isn’t as much of a concern, freaking get it now lol.
BigDaddySlimSame, the last roughly 40 hours of my gameplay on the Deck have been PS1/2 and Xbox games, with a few hours of New Vegas sprinkled in.
It works imho best for games in the 2014-2018 time range. Newer games work fine but can run at 30-40 fps. The UE5 Games I have tested run only with a lot of upscale (lords of the falling in particular) but still playable.
Yeah that's my concern as many new AAA games will be UE5. I've also read that Oblivion Remastered struggles on the Deck. (I prefer the original Oblivion anyway).
Oblivion remastered runs perfectly fine on my steam deck.
It’s not necessarily UE5 that has issues with the Steam Deck, but what they do with it. For example, Clair Obscur plays well on Steam Deck, but I wouldn’t even try to play Ark Survival Ascended.
Good to know. Hopefully future UE5 games will be more optimised.
It’s already outdated for that because the hardware is weak. If what you want is AAA games, just buy a ROG Ally Z1E, it’s much better for your use case. Buy it used.
But I do need to point out that AAA games are trash and you should reflect on your life choices if that’s all you care to play.
you should reflect on your life choices if that’s all you care to play
That sounds a bit harsh. I just want a good return on investment which allows me to play a variety of games including retro and AAA. I don't know where you got the idea that I only care to play AAA games.
Just in case. Much better games in the indie and AA segments these days.
80% of the games in my library are indie and AA games. But I wouldn't want to miss out on games like TES VI and Fable reboot.
If you already have a good sized steam library then take a look at how much of your games are “deck verified” to run on it and decide from there. I have a decent desktop pc with a 4070 ti and 9900k cpu and I still do most of my gaming on my steam deck.
All games in my current library look fine. Just want to plan slightly ahead for upcoming games in the near future (around 2 years).
The deck is now 3 years old, so it’s not all that future proof. I expect to see a successor sometime in the next 2-3 years or whenever it makes sense for Valve to upgrade it without losing battery life.
I’m on my second Deck (LCD sold for an OLED), and I honestly couldn’t be much happier. I feel like the base models are one hellava good buy even still.
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
FlamekebabNow I'm thinking about the old e-penis hardware algorithm scripts for IRC!
I mean people enjoy crack and I’m not gonna tell em it’s good for them.
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.
If you are looking for an affordable device to play AAA games well on with no issues, get a ps5.
If you are looking for a hand held to play indie titles and the plethora of older games available I’d go for the steam deck.
I think it’ll be a while until we get a hand held experience like the steam deck but with AAA capable hardware.
Do you mean that the Steam Deck is currently not capable of AAA?
Its a complicated answer. It can play probably most modern AAA games. But it likely won’t be a great experience and I can only describe it as playable. If you want a very good experience with the steam deck, then use it for mid spec games or less and it’ll be perfect and have good battery life. If you want more then maybe try another hand held, or a console.
In the end the device you play your games on needs to do one thing well, and that’s to play the games you WANT to play.
UlrichI think it’ll be a while until we get a hand held experience like the steam deck but with AAA capable hardware.
That will never happen. Physically larger devices are always going to be more performant. And AAA titles will just increase the demands of games accordingly.
That’s a pretty personal opinion but I’m a Switch owner and if there is one thing I don’t miss on it, it’s AAA games. Not because I dislike AAA, but because I think in handheld mode I really preferred games with simpler graphics, like Mario games (2D and 3D), sidescrollers, the top down Zelda games or (S)NES games. I really had a hard time when I tried Breath of the Wild and ended up playing it in the dock almost completely. I think it’s a real missed opportunity that the new Pokemon games aim for 3D and open worlds because it not only hurts the games performance, but for me also the playability.
I’m interested in switching to a Steam Deck but I don’t think I would play visually complex games on it. That’s what my PC is for. But I don’t know if that’s just me or if other people feel the same.
I pretty much only use my Deck for older/simpler/indie games. I tried Ghost of Tsushima, and I definitely couldn’t enjoy it at the performance and detail level the Deck is capable of. However, streaming it from my PS5 is still a pretty great experience. That said, it still looks better on a 4K screen.
My brother has a Lenovo Legion Go (the original one, not the S). I am definitely in envy of the big display, the higher refresh rate, and the more powerful chip. However it’s a bit ehh in terms of ergonomics. It also runs windows but that’s irrelevant because you can install steamOS.
There’s a good chance I’ll get a Legion Go next and stick steamOS on it unless we see a steam deck 2 soon that’s bigger and punchier. I know we all love our retro and indie games, but it is nice to be able to play more demanding games from time to time.
Yeah ergonomics is extremely important to me. I also try to avoid products from Chinese companies.
Are there electronic goods on the market that aren’t, in some part, made in China?
I am not trying to start a political discussion here, only stating my preference.
I didn’t think my question was political, but rather about logistics. I just don’t know of any video game console, or electronics manufacturer in general, that is promising that none of their components are made in China.
I never mentioned anything about "made in China". I said "Chinese companies".
Oh, sorry, I conflated those two things. So, if I’m understanding this right, you don’t mind if the components were made in China or purchased from Chinese companies, but the seller of the final product cannot be a Chinese company? That’s a far easier rule to satisfy.
I prefer to avoid everything from China, but that's not realistic. So for now I avoid products designed/sold by a Chinese company. That includes video games created by Chinese companies.
There’s a vast different between “a part made in China” and “made by Chinese companies”.
If you aren’t too sensitive to a bit of input lag, you could keep your laptop around and stream the more demanding games over steam link. Streaming these demanding games will also significantly increase battery life, but I don’t think it will work away from home.
Most games run quite well if you drop the settings (outside of those using intrusive anticheat), and it runs lighter games very well.
That's true. But I really hate the noise from my laptop. It can be heard from another room.
I don’t play retro games. I have the OLED. I don’t feel like it’s outdated. I don’t care about FPS and I play some AAA games.
Thanks for sharing your experience and your straight forward answer!
rotopenguinThe 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?
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 value down to 40hz, but this doesn’t happen dynamically. You still 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.
I wouldn’t be concerned.
We’re at a point in portable technology where increased performance means decreased battery life and makes the system need to be larger and less comfortable to hold (makes it release more heat, which has to go somewhere).
I do not believe there is enough demand to expect a larger, hotter, SteamDeck with poorer battery life to be released soon, or maybe ever.
TrihilisHere is my opinion. I absolutely love playing oblivion on my gaming laptop with RTX4080. It looks gorgeous and so do a lot of games.
That said, I’d rather play on the deck with somewhat less graphics and chill on the couch after a long day of work. I just love the portability. Performance is okay for most games (it even plays oblivion okayish with reasonable graphics). A lot of games are optimized pretty well for it.
I just see it as an open source switch you can do and play anything you like on. I have tried windows on it too but personally it has no benefit for me so I use steamOS.
Games I play on it: Oblivion remastered Borderlands 3 Risk of Rain 2 Elden Ring GTA V
I also stream from my PlayStation 5 to my deck with chiaki4deck.
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.
RomkslrquszCheck 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
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.
FubarberryThe next gen steam deck likely isn’t coming out for quite awhile still, so it’s probably not worth waiting for next gen.
Performance wise, the Steam Deck does struggle to run new AAA games if they’re poorly optimized, use UE5, or have mandatory ray tracing for lighting. It’s still possible to play most of these games, but it will depend on your tolerance for graphics quality or your willingness to install performance mods. There’s also no shortage of good games to play, slightly older AAA games generally work flawlessly and nearly all AA/indie games run great. I have enough good games in my library where I could never buy another game and always have something good to play.
The switch 2 in portable mode has nearly identical power to the Steam Deck, so if it sells anywhere close to Switch 1 I think we’ll see a lot of games target being able to run on it. The switch 1 was far enough behind modern platforms to not be worth optimizing for, for most AAA games/devs. But the switch 2 and steam deck generally have enough power to run new games at an almost acceptable level, and that makes optimization a much more appealing target.
Also worth considering is local streaming. If you have a decent PC/PS5 you can stream games to the deck. It can be a good compromise for the games that don’t run great natively.