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I'm tentatively excited for this. The fact that they're using a custom APU and LPDDR5 will make it a lot better than existing handheld PCs. Off-the-shelf single-chip solutions like what the competition uses are not meant for gaming at all, and they all favor CPU power over GPU power. The ONEXPLAYER using an 11th-gen Intel chip with an IGPU that's roughly equivalent to a Geforce 1030 is an example of this. So going with Zen 2 coupled with RDNA 2 is really smart. You're not going to be doing any productivity poo poo on this anyway, may as well min-max it for gaming if you can get a custom chip. LPDDR5 offers a lot more memory bandwidth than even LPDDR4X, which alleviates one of the biggest bottlenecks for APUs. The hardware will be able to run much more closely to its full capabilities thanks to that. Though I think some people are going to be disappointed by the battery life. Two hours of 3D gaming is pretty low. There's not much they could've done to improve that given how big and heavy the thing already is, but it's still gonna be kinda annoying having to charge it so often. Anyway, I tossed in my five bucks. If it looks like it stinks from the early impressions, I'll just cancel it.
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Jul 18, 2021 00:48
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JazzFlight posted:I’m thinking about it more for the emulation scene. I think it’ll be able to run circles around all the current available Chinese handhelds (though they are in way different price ranges). I would actually wager that among all the devices out there, the middle and high-end models of the one xplayer will handle emulation the best. Its CPU is way more powerful than it needs to be for everything but emulation. But of course that's $1059/$1159/$1599, while the Steam Deck is $399/$529/$649. And the Steam Deck will be able to handle non-emulated games better. So... yeah. The Steam Deck will be the most economical emulation handheld, for sure.
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Jul 18, 2021 03:20
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Escape Goat posted:This would probably be amazing for running Dolphin. And the superior PC version of super Mario 64, lol. I'd wager it'll handle Cemu and maybe even Yuzu and RPCS3 too. Those are things the other handheld PCs would be better at. (I've seen the one xplayer running Yuzu pretty smoothly)
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Jul 18, 2021 03:55
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Mirage posted:Spec-wise, this weighs three times as much as the Switch. That's a bit of a buzzkill. ...No? It weighs 1.68x as much as the Switch and 1.59x as much as the Switch OLED. That's still pretty weighty, and I can see it getting uncomfortable during long sessions (especially for children), but it's nowhere near three times as much.
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Jul 18, 2021 05:13
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init posted:What do people think about the GPU on the steam deck? I think it will be quite capable, but I would temper your expectations. It's still running at a reduced power state compared to laptop chips. They seem to be optimizing it for gaming by skimping slightly on the CPU side and going in a bit harder on the GPU side, which is good. I think it will run some demanding games at 720p, but you may have to accept turning down some settings and running at 30fps. That's still quite good for a handheld, mind you. I also expect it to not have particularly good longevity. You'll run into games that are just not playable on it by the end of 2022, I reckon. It'll still be solid for emulation, 2D games, and undemanding 3D games. I bet Valve releases new models at a relatively swift cadence if it sells well. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jul 18, 2021 |
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Jul 18, 2021 05:38
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SCheeseman posted:The GPU should be fine. It mostly depends on how scalable games continue to be in terms of CPU usage, specifically how they deal with having half the amount of cores they do on consoles (single thread performance is about the same). If Valve make enough of a dent in the market, developers and publishers may end up incentivised to make sure their games run on it, adding options to reduce NPC density and the like. Valve is hoping other hardware manufacturers hop on board this trend, so with lots of different SteamOS handhelds on the market there won't be any one spec to optimize for. And it's also why I think Valve will continue putting out new models every couple years for as long as it's profitable for them. If this doesn't catch on, then they'll drop it as quickly as they've dropped everything else, though. Though this scenario presents a problem. Valve is using its monopoly power as the platform holder to sell the cheapest model at a very low profit margin, or potentially even a loss. That makes it borderline impossible for other manufacturers to compete. Valve can make that money back on game sales, but the other manufacturers can't. They'd have to either sell at a higher price and be undercut by Valve or attempt to corral users into their own marketplaces. So I don't really understand how Valve expects a robust ecosystem of handhelds to arise in this situation.
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Jul 18, 2021 07:11
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Quantum of Phallus posted:Sounds exactly like what happened with Steam Machines tbh and we all know how that went It doesn't sound anything like that actually because Valve never released their own high-value steam machine, and the reason companies stopped releasing steam machines had nothing to do with being outcompeted by the platform owner (because the platform owner didn't compete)
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Jul 18, 2021 10:46
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Yeah, that's what I was getting at with my earlier posts. Valve is claiming that they want to foster an ecosystem of handhelds while simultaneously making it impossible to compete with them due to their extremely aggressive pricing that's only possible due to them being the platform owner. Honestly, they need to be careful not to end up with an antitrust lawsuit on their hands. Literally every single person I know who had a pending preorder for those other devices has canceled them so they can get a steam deck instead. So pour one out for that burgeoning scene that Valve just crushed. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jul 18, 2021 |
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Jul 18, 2021 20:26
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MysteriousStranger posted:It's not made for that though. It's made for a poo poo load of lighter games to bite into consoles and claim "PC master race" that's it. I mean, they're explicitly marketing it as a device that can run AAA games, while showing Control and Fallen Order running on it. (both around 50GB)
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Jul 19, 2021 01:32
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SCheeseman posted:All of those are also on last gen consoles and are designed to also run acceptably well off garbo laptop HDDs. Provided SD storage at least hits the same ballpark as that those games should still be playable. Once games start taking greater advantage of SSDs, that could be a problem. Yeah, honestly I think people are making SD load times out to be worse than they are. The MicroSD speed class Valve chose is basically equivalent to 7200 RPM HDDs. HDDs aren't great, but I still use them for some things and it's honestly fine for the most part. Load time gains from SSDs aren't proportional to the read/write speeds on their spec sheets. Even the fastest SSDs out there that are 50 times faster on paper tend to only cut load times in half compared to HDDs. Spending 60 seconds on a load screen instead of 30 is a bit of a bummer but far from the end of the world.
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Jul 19, 2021 01:47
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This article compares PC game load times between a variety of drives in several AAA games. The one HDD in the dataset is a 5400 RPM one which is slower than the MicroSD class Valve chose in theory, but I don't know how that shakes out in practice. Perhaps that can give some sort of perspective on the impact of storage speed on load times on the PC. Ultimately it makes a difference, and SSDs are quite convenient, but it's not a massive hit to quality of life or anything. The current xbox and ps5 consoles are doing special magic stuff to take advantage of SSD speeds in a way that PC games currently do not. (this may change in the next few years when microsoft releases directstorage and devs start taking advantage of it.)
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Jul 19, 2021 02:04
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Senator Drinksalot posted:But if you want the pared down experince then just buy a switch, they are much cheaper It's not a "pared down" experience if it's literally impossible to detect a texture resolution downgrade due to the lower screen resolution. Nobody's talking about making every game look like a PS1 game. They're just saying that textures wouldn't need to be as large to take full advantage of the Deck.
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Jul 19, 2021 02:08
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Wamdoodle posted:The incentive would have to be there for a publisher to make a Deck version just like there has to be one for a Switch version. Also, a question has to be asked, can and would the developer make a Deck version. Switch versions of games sometimes are farmed out to a specific porting developer. Panic Button, iirc, is one of the better ones. They made the Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal and Warframe ports, to name a few. That's one example. For another, Sythetik, was ported from Steam to the Switch by the original developer. All this is to say that there are considerations before wanting to make a different version of a game to "fit" onto a new system. The idea that developers will spend time making a special "deck version" of their PC games assumes that there will only be one spec to target for. Seems like a pretty rash assumption. If this device is successful, I expect there to be a variety of different specs on the market in just a few years' time (either from valve or third parties), meaning there won't be any one version to target. And if it's not successful, then nobody's going to bother doing special targeted builds/configurations. I know people can't help but compare this to a switch, but it's still a PC in a constantly evolving landscape. You shouldn't expect this to be just a single spec that sticks around for years like a console. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jul 19, 2021 |
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Jul 19, 2021 04:12
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The fast RAM is mostly for the iGPU's benefit. Modern graphics cards are designed with ridiculously fast GDDR6 (or GDDR6X in the 30 series' case). However, single-chip SoCs not only have to share memory between the CPU and GPU, but the GPU has to use regular system memory for VRAM which is several times slower than your typical graphics card's memory. It's easily the biggest bottleneck for AMD's faster APUs in games. The LPDDR5 in Steam Deck's configuration is meant to act as a power efficient way to get somewhat close to GDDR6 levels of performance. It's hard to tell how fast it will be exactly, but it's definitely going to be faster than your current desktop PC's memory, which is great. For the record, both the Series consoles and the PS5 just use GDDR6 for their system memory to sidestep this issue (though the Series S has a slow memory bus, which comically gives it worse memory bandwidth than the One X's GDDR5)
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Jul 20, 2021 11:37
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I perused through the Proton compatibility list the other day and it definitely reminds me of emulator compatibility, with all the unreliability that entails. Games that work great on some people's PCs but not others, users giving the thumbs up for "perfect" compatibility because their $2000 PC runs a game fine at 60 FPS (even though they'd get 100+ in Windows), lots of little random issues popping up that need game-specific workarounds for everything (on top of the existing pc game jank people already deal with). I mean, it IS cool that it's possible at all and better than Wine in a lot of cases, but unless Valve's secret sauce is going to radically change how Proton works in some way I wouldn't want to rely on it, especially on an underpowered handheld. I would not expect any demanding 3D game running through Proton to run well at all on the steam deck.
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Jul 20, 2021 23:57
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Yeah, I saw those. I'm mostly just pointing out that unless valve works some real magic (and who knows, maybe they will), it seems like it's going to be a finnicky experience with additional overhead burdening an already underpowered device. I still think it'll be great for a lot of games, but I think Valve might be overselling the "it just works" aspect a bit. It looks like, as it stands, it's going to take a fair bit of fiddling with settings and stuff to get a lot of windows games to work right. Maybe it'll encourage more devs to port their games to linux though. That'd be nice.
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Jul 21, 2021 06:46
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:If it can, only in the most literal of sense that you could turn it on. All of the Nvidia cards that do ray tracing have hardware specifically for it and even then take a massive performance hit. I would expect single digit framerates trying to enable raytracing on this thing. RDNA2 does actually have hardware-accelerated ray tracing. It's not as good as Nvidia's, but it's nowhere near as bad as what you're saying. The 6800 XT gets around 60 FPS average in control with ray tracing set to high at 1080p, for instance, which is about equivalent to Nvidia's first-gen ray tracing efforts. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it's cut entirely from this APU. Ray tracing doesn't scale down well, and it seems like an easy and sensible feature to cut when making a low-power GPU. Nobody's going to be tracing any rays on a 15W SoC. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jul 21, 2021 |
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Jul 21, 2021 22:47
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I guess it's just baked into the architecture then. I look forward to watching people try to make it playable.
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Jul 21, 2021 22:53
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Heran Bago posted:Is Windows support confirmed? Might pick one up for Asheron's Call or some poo poo. Supports windows apps through Proton, and you can format the drive and install windows on it if you wish. It seems like it'll only support one boot drive though, so you'll have to choose between SteamOS and Windows. And Windows support may be kinda janky (will there even be drivers for the chip?)
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Jul 22, 2021 21:34
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anatomi posted:Shouldn't dual booting be possible? It's just a PC. I'm kinda dumb about this kind of thing. There's just a single drive—is it possible to dual boot using drive partitions?
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Jul 22, 2021 21:41
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It is quite big though, isn't it It'll probably be nice for kicking back and relaxing in a recliner, for car rides, that kind of thing. Doesn't seem like something you can easily carry with you as you're out and about, though.
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Jul 23, 2021 03:02
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Nuts and Gum posted:I have those grips too and they do make the switch feel huge. And crappy since it doesn’t have rumble This goes for game performance too. I expect windows to be a resource hog on this thing compared to SteamOS.
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Jul 23, 2021 03:34
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MarcusSA posted:Ok I lied Props to these mad lads for hand-counting every frame in the promo videos to see the framerates they're running at (locked 60 for doom eternal, 30 to 40 for fallen order)
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Jul 23, 2021 04:43
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The current common 1TB m.2 2230 drives will potentially not fit because they're too fat. The KBG40ZNS1T02 for example is a fatter form factor than its 512GB counterpart, the KBG40ZNS512G. Incidentally, if you search on ebay for the KBG40ZNS512G, you'll find some at around the $100 mark, but even then you'll notice the underside isn't quite flat if you pay attention to the pics. According to Kioxia's website, the 1TB model is "m.2 2230-S3", while the 512GB model is "m.2 2230-S2". You could conceivably order the 64gb Deck and slap a $100 512GB after-market SSD in there and have the $650 model for $500 (minus the bonuses), but I'd be wary of doing this until the device is in people's hands and we know what is and isn't compatible, and how easy such a swap would be.
Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 22:56
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edit: ^^^ Transfer speeds are not everything. As Antigravitas said, the random read/write performance of SSDs are far superior to HDDs. There are a lot of factors to load times beyond resource load speeds too. It's complicated, and we need Valve to give us more information.sigher posted:What's the price range for the best of the best/fastest 1TB MicroSD? You pay a price premium on 1TB MicroSD cards. They tend to be around 2.25 to 2.5 times the price of their 512GB siblings from the same brand/speed class. It's better to just stick to 512GB cards. The fasted UHS-I versions of those are around $100. Valve hasn't yet stated what the exact set of speed classes the Deck supports, only that it's UHS-I. This is not adequate for making purchasing decisions, so I'd wait until we have more info. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 23:23
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Peaceful Anarchy posted:Wouldn't the better option be an external SSD? People seem to not be concerned with battery life because it'll mostly be plugged in and those are very light and small and 540MB/s is much better than an SSD card. It has only one USB port, and it's what will be used to charge the device. I don't think connecting it to a hub would allow you to simultaneously charge and transmit data. Even if it would, that's a lot of stuff you're attaching to a handheld device.
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Jul 24, 2021 03:10
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I don't know if I've ever had more than a terrabyte of PC games installed at any one time, and I have Flight Simulator installed with mods. Ideally, companies release 720p-optimized texture packs or something so you don't have to install 50GB of textures meant for 4K with every game. And Valve does whatever they need to do to support this in an intuitive manner. (The HD Texture Pack DLC some games have is kinda clunky)
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Jul 24, 2021 05:16
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Rebel Blob posted:I don't recall seeing it here in the thread and it's worth mentioning: Valve rejiggered something to move forward the 512GB version. So reserving right now puts you at Q2 2022, same as the other two versions, and those people who had an expected order avaliability of Q3 are now seeing Q2. That could potentially just be people canceling reservations, though maybe they managed to step up their production after seeing the demand. edit: for what it's worth, my position hasn't advanced from Q2 (put in my reservation around two and a half hours after it went live). So any queue compression either hasn't been enough to advance me up a quarter (maybe I went from May to April or something), or happened behind my position in the queue. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Jul 24, 2021 |
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Jul 24, 2021 06:50
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NmareBfly posted:Not... really. If you're lucky enough to have gig internet (or really like 500+) wifi's a likely bottleneck. It's WiFi 5. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech So you won't be able to cap out your gigabit internet with your fancy new WiFi 6 router, but for the 95% of other people using this thing, it'll be fine. WiFi 6 is probably something that will come in a revision down the line.
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Jul 24, 2021 23:43
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to be fair, that's also what he said about the steam controller. And, well,
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Jul 31, 2021 23:00
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There are very few emulators out there that don't have native linux versions. Basically every open source emulator has a linux build. Though Proton only working through steam is kind of lame since it strikes me as an artificial limitation just to force linux users onto Steam. How dependent is it on Steam, really? Could someone conceivably build a custom version that works with non-steam games? Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 00:45
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JammyB posted:What's the screenshot infatuation about, if you don't mind my asking? Am I playing Metroidvania games wrong by not using them? Or is it just pretty pictures...? Maybe he's using them to remind him of items and doors and stuff that he'll need to backtrack for later. Sometimes it's also just nice looking back on the things you did in a game and sharing them with other people. Steam has built-in screenshot support that you can bind to a button, and you can view those screenshots by going to the overlay. I don't think there's a dedicated button for this on the Steam Deck, but you should be able to bind one on a per-game basis.
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Aug 7, 2021 01:26
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I think windows on the steam deck will be an unpleasant experience and not many people will want to do that.
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Sep 21, 2021 12:53
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I like how the one part I randomly clicked to in the Odyssey video showed a CTD. Also, the Steam Deck is going to have weaker hardware than the hardware used to record those videos, so I wouldn't bet on Yuzu being super smooth all the time. PS2/GC/Wii emulation is the most advanced emulation I'd expect to work flawlessly, with PS3/Wii U/Switch being more of a mixed bag. If you want more consistent recent console emulation, then you should get one of the other handheld PCs out there that use laptop CPUs instead. edit: I was referring to 2:20, but that seems to be some other kind of weird error and not a crash, maybe? I assumed it was and they used editing to keep the video moving smoothly. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Sep 25, 2021 |
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Sep 25, 2021 22:58
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Futzing about with emulator settings is something I'm very well used to. I'm actually looking forward to using the Steam Deck as an inexpensive handheld PS2 emulator. It'll be really nice if it can do more advanced consoles too, but I'm not holding my breath.
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Sep 26, 2021 15:07
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The steam deck will not play switch games better than the switch lol
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Sep 26, 2021 15:35
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:This is an elaborate XCOM2 portable platform, if you think about it. 
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Sep 30, 2021 13:27
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Marx Headroom posted:Yeah I'm gonna lol if I can play Bloodstained, Witcher 3, MH Rise on the Deck better than the Switch but we'll see The Deck is a considerably more powerful piece of hardware. Like, by a lot. So yes, any cross-platform games will run much better on the Deck.
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Oct 5, 2021 03:48
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The Steam Deck's SoC will also be running at a 15W TDP vs the 25W TDP of those chips. It will probably be possible to modify the Deck so the SoC can run at 25W too, except you should expect some serious thermal challenges if you do that. The Steam Deck's cooling is designed for 20W of total system power. Valve and AMD min-maxed the SoC for maximum GPU power, and some CPU cores were sacrificed for more RDNA2 compute units.
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Oct 6, 2021 09:03
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The United States posted:I thought the Steam Deck was Zen 4? Zen 4 isn't even coming out on desktop until late 2022.
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Oct 6, 2021 13:11
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