Board 8 > Steam Deck OLED worth it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

So I have a Switch. I mostly like it to play old PS2 games portable.

Is the Steam Deck good? Like I'm just now realizing a lot of stuff from franchises I like are just on Steam so it seems like it'd make more sense to upgrade to that than to go buy stuff on Switch.

I know it's going to perform better.
I know the library is going to be better for what I want.
I know on the whole because of Steam Sales they'll likely be cheaper there.

I guess my concern is whether a lot of games won't run well or will crash or there's going to be a super annoying learning curve for making them play well on the Steam Deck (ie have to install a bunch of mods for the controller to be intuitive or something) or the pad sucks or whatever.

It has a learning curve. It's a portable PC, running a type of Linux no less, which is one of its strengths but it does have those annoyances. The pad didn't work well at first but I'd say it's just stiff and needs a bit of breaking in. The performance is really quite good, and you can just run many Steam games without leaving the Steam interface.

I'm OK with a learning curve to some extent. I work in IT, use Linux PCs regularly, have done annoying things like modding a PSP when you had to use the battery things

I just don't want a huge hassle with every game.

i really like the steam deck oled i have. i find that i have very little problem using it, even with games that don't show as fully compatible. the control layout is intuitive and not that different from most console controllers, and the screen is beautiful. performance hasn't been an issue with anything i've tried playing on it so far, but i don't mess with a ton of super high end games so mileage may vary there.

It shouldn't be a huge hassle with every game. Theoretically no more than playing a game on PC might be. And there's a lot of info available on how to get any given game working because the Steam Deck has a unified set of hardware. I usually use ProtonDB as a first resource, and you can install a plugin to place a link to the ProtonDB page next to where you install or launch the game within the interface.

In terms of performance I would check to see what games are "Steam Deck Verified". Generally that's a pretty good indicator of whether something runs without any need for additional support/consideration. I wouldn't say it's perfect, but it pretty much works as expected.

My main complaints (I have the original, not OLED) are that the battery life sucks and it's much bulkier than the Switch. This makes it a lot less convenient for on-the-go gameplay. The battery also drains a lot faster in sleep mode than the Switch does-- I can often just forget about my Switch in a bag for a week and then have enough battery to play for a bit, but you can't do that with the Steam Deck.

I mostly use the Steam Deck for playing portably around my own place rather than while on transit, etc.

Oh. That Steam Deck verified thing is pretty cool. I somehow didn't see that when I was searching the games. Looks like all the stuff I was looking at was playable or verified aside from

Tales of Beseria
Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 & 2
Devil May Cry HD Collection
Devil May Cry 4 (ironically DMC5 is verified)

Does stuff get added pretty often and/or is the stuff that says "unsupported" geneally workable with some effort?

I love mine and even used it to play cyberpunk off and on when I didn't want to boot up my PC.

A lot of the "yellow" games are because of small text that is still perfectly readable in my experience.

Also super easy to mod, I have a sd card with basically every generation before ps3

I'd trust ProtonDB more than Steam verification for both directions, but especially don't rule out unverified games from being playable.

Yeah I wasn't too concerned with yellow stuff. It's mostly the stuff that just straight up says unverified I'm concerned with. I mean I guess I can just play my copy of Tales of Beseria on my PC but I'd prefer to play it on the deck.

The modding is definitely interesting to pick up some other games I have and might want to play on it that aren't steam based-- and that most of the games I looked at are playable or verified has me leaning towards getting it.

The playing literally on the go isn't a concern. It's mostly I end up at hotels a lot for my business and want to be able to whip out a steam deck and play at hotels if I want.

So yeah definitely leaning getting it. Thanks everyone.

https://www.protondb.com/app/429660
Taking Berseria as an example, these evaluations of it on Steam Deck seem pretty workable.

Ok yeah ProtonDB (I glossed over this as something I could preemptively search) seems to think all those games are workable which is good. DMC HD Collection seems to be the one they're having the most trouble with as it's only Silver

Seems better than the Steam thing as a resource actually. I'll be using that going forward.

Definitely will have to get the Proton plug in too

But yeah definitely encouraging. Will probably grab one. Part of me wants to wait till Black Friday but eh

100%, I play on it almost every day. Incredible machine, and the OLED is light years better than the LCD (Ive had them both).

Theyll announced Deck 2 as soon as you buy 1.

Berseria played great. Some framerate hitches here and there, but I didn't do anything to lock it or whatever. Setting it at a locked 30 or 40 might've fixed it.

And now I'm looking Metal Gear Solid 2 is only silver on this but verified. Wild.

Looks like
Platinum is 100% fine
Gold could get some small tweaks but doesn't necessarily need them (FFX remaster for example is saying "it won't detect an external controller automatically and you need to use the touchscreen for opening menus" which to me seems like nothing)
Silver probably needs some actual effort to get working well but can be done. Only three silvers on my initial batch so not concerned.

I'll say I was in your position this time last year and agonized over it for like three months, finally pulling the trigger around Black Friday.

I have played it nearly every day, despite also buying a 4070 last April to get way more into PC gaming. The convenience factor is real

The stability and optimization of every game I've played is actually absurd. They not only run, but they work with variable frame rate & refresh rate (so weird framerates like 40 look great) and there's built-in options for upscaling to make things look much better than they should on the low res screen. It even works well with my touch-based browser games on itch.io.

The Steam Deck has a very specific use case of "I want to play PC games without having to fiddle with them incessantly to make them work".

There is still some fiddling but 1) it's typically not that bad and 2) you can completely avoid it by sticking to verified games.

Definitely worth it to me.

Its an incredible handheld. Perfect for both Steam games and emulation. I havent encountered a game yet that runs poorly on it.

Looked up sales. Says usually isn't dropped more than 10% so meh.

We're getting it. I'll hold off on the dock till Black Friday but overwhelmingly positive response in here has sold me.

Got it. Went with the 1TB OLED.

Because the purge rate on this board is glacial this may become my "help me guys I can't get photon thingamjig working" stop but yeah

Hyped!

Oh yeah I definitely recommend looking up EmuDeck by the way

(For legally emulating software you already own, of course)

Also regarding the grey "Unverified" status on Steam: I believe that tends to be crowdsourced for older titles, which means that sometimes a title will be unverified if relatively few people have played it on Steam Deck (or if those players don't provide feedback).

Not sure how it works for new games, but I've seen some games show as verified prior to launch, so I assume there's some certification process.

I appreciate the quick reference for all my archived legally obtained software and will keep it in mind.

Yes.

and apparently geforce now works really well on the deck too. They have a 50% off subscription promo happening until tomorrow. I just signed up, will report back tonight how it runs cyberpunk and bg3.

I've been wanting to get one of these for a while now and the price has kept me away. I also think my whole family would want to use it so I'm curious if it's even feasible, if you can hook it up to a TV, what that means for Bluetooth.. I don't want anyone to answer these right now but it seems like it could get real costly and tricky real fast. But, being able to share the cozy types of games my wife likes and then all the various games my kids like and piping it to a TV with an external controller seems super cool. It just doesn't seem friendly to a casual player like your typical Switch or PSP would.

transience posted...

I don't want anyone to answer these right now

too bad

You can get a dock just like the switch that makes it real easy.

When I visited home recently, we hooked up my Steam Deck, everyone brought their Xbox Controllers, and we played Magequit, Duck Game, Nidhog, and a bunch of random couch-multiplayer games I got from Humble with absolutely 0 issues. It was so fucking awesome.

RikkuAlmighty posted...

Yes.

and apparently geforce now works really well on the deck too. They have a 50% off subscription promo happening until tomorrow. I just signed up, will report back tonight how it runs cyberpunk and bg3.

holy shitballs geforce now on steam deck works flawlessly. Cyberpunk 2077 at max settings on a portable device with no perceptible input lag is AMAZING.

FFDragon posted...

too bad

You can get a dock just like the switch that makes it real easy.

yeah I've seen. but how does it work? is it seamless to get in and out of the games or do you have to have some technical understanding of how the thing works? could a kid operate it easily? those are the things I need to look into, and I don't have the appetite for a thousand dollars right now (I would get the OLED) so it's kind of pointless until I'm willing.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

When I visited home recently, we hooked up my Steam Deck, everyone brought their Xbox Controllers, and we played Magequit, Duck Game, Nidhog, and a bunch of random couch-multiplayer games I got from Humble with absolutely 0 issues. It was so fucking awesome.

can you just sync an xbox controller to the thing? I guess that would work?

how dumb is this kid?

The game mode interface is like a console menu. You only need to go into desktop mode to set up things that aren't on Steam. And you can sync Bluetooth controllers to it, yeah.

oh that's easy. I assume any dock would do too. I'm sure there are millions of recommendations out there for that and how to set things up.

I didnt even use a dock, I just used a USB-C to HDMI cable, and we played 4+ hours each night without any battery issues. It was the promise of the Bring your Switch to a rooftop party for everyone to play fully realized.

edit: I did charge it over night afterwards, but we never ran the battery out

oh that's cool. you can probably lay the thing next to the tv and not have to run any wires.

is it easy to use multiple accounts or does everything require its own steam login? I'm thinking like the switch where you can create local accounts and have different saves, etc. I'm guessing you can't do that with PC games because they aren't designed for that kind of concept.

Got mine late last week but super busy weekend . May have some time to actually play it today. Hopefully!

Decided to go in with something that supposedly runs without any issue

Played some Devil May Cry 5

This thing is incredible. Game ran absolutely perfectly and the screen is beautiful.

I still haven't done anything but just stay in the standard Steam menus and if you do that it's super intuitive and nothing children couldn't figure out to alleviate transience's concerns. It starts you in the library and you just pick what game you want and it just goes. The loading menu will give you an idea of the control setup too.

I'll have to try a game that doesn't run well soon but yeah DMC5 was so effortless.