Steam Deck Portable PC Games Hardware

pixeljunkie

Whilst Drunk., I Found God., Booze = Bad.,
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QQ for those that have theirs:

Was there a plastic film over the screen you had to remove, or no?
 

SML

NEANDERTHAL FUCKER,
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It got here at 10:37 today. Didn't get the chance to let Reddit know Fedex had robbed me too.

First impressions:

If it were up to me, I would sacrifice the right touchpad to make the buttons a little more ergonomic. You need to do a little bit of a guitarist flex if you want to have your index fingers on the bumpers while keeping your middle fingers under the trigger lip. When my index finger is on the bumper and my thumb is on the B button, they're nearly touching each other. Not crazy about it, especially for games with a Fromsoft layout.

Speaking of, Elden Ring runs well. The frame drops and stuttering that everyone experiences on the PC is gone, though I think there might be some input latency.

I'm looking forward to using this on backlog games. Prototype runs very well on the Deck, as you might expect, while you have to do tricks to make it run on a PC with more than 8 threads. I never got around to playing it when it was new, but it'll probably be the first game I complete on the deck.
 

AppleiDog

Shamrock Chatster
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It got here at 10:37 today. Didn't get the chance to let Reddit know Fedex had robbed me too.

First impressions:

If it were up to me, I would sacrifice the right touchpad to make the buttons a little more ergonomic. You need to do a little bit of a guitarist flex if you want to have your index fingers on the bumpers while keeping your middle fingers under the trigger lip. When my index finger is on the bumper and my thumb is on the B button, they're nearly touching each other. Not crazy about it, especially for games with a Fromsoft layout.

Speaking of, Elden Ring runs well. The frame drops and stuttering that everyone experiences on the PC is gone, though I think there might be some input latency.

I'm looking forward to using this on backlog games. Prototype runs very well on the Deck, as you might expect, while you have to do tricks to make it run on a PC with more than 8 threads. I never got around to playing it when it was new, but it'll probably be the first game I complete on the deck.
Great that it came early as well.
 

SML

NEANDERTHAL FUCKER,
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How heavy is the weight
Objectively, pretty heavy. 673 grams according to my scale. It's spread out in a footprint that's about equal to the keys on a full-sized computer keyboard (without the numpad), so it's not that noticeable. The weight+leverage might take you by surprise if you're in the middle of a game and try to one-hand it by one of the grips.
 

pixeljunkie

Whilst Drunk., I Found God., Booze = Bad.,
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@SML was there a film over your screen you had to remove? Just curious as mine did not and it's the first device I've ever had that didn't.
 

Ajax

way more american than wyo, way more
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Deck in the house, two days early! Just getting it up and running now, but holy shit, hype!

The build quality seems very, very good, first impression. Can't wait to dig in!
 

SML

NEANDERTHAL FUCKER,
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All the talk about Valve devs being able to run "everything" they threw at the device is hype, at least if they were using SteamOS with Proton. *A lot* of games do work, but many don't. I'm mostly talking about some of the older games I'd like to run, but it applies to some big contemporary games as well. When I checked yesterday, the RE2 remake was still listed as not working. Some games require messing around in settings. Arkham City is listed as verified and I still had to toggle the fullscreen setting to get it to display. Alice: Madness Returns required me to turn off post-processing to stop the screen from turning black whenever I hit the shrink button.

Instead of bothering with Batocera, I have retroarch installed, using the Discover package manager in desktop mode, *not* the version that's on the steam store. For the most part, it seems to be running without any trouble. I'm using it with a 1tb sdhc card that I formatted on the deck, and my roms and steam games folders are sitting next to each other without any trouble. In desktop mode, you have a menu option to add applications to the game-mode launcher, so it's seamless.

I am still switching to desktop mode to launch standalone emulators with windowed interfaces, like pcsx2, but it's simple enough.

I like it a lot.
 

BlackaneseNiNjA

The Fatal Fury Disciple
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I’ve had a blast with this device for the past few weeks. Even though Valve has more work to do, it has also brought to light how much more successful Valve’s previous projects could have been had Proton been at this current state back in 2015.

The Steam Deck is an impressive piece of kit and a great value at $400 for the performance that you get in my humble opinion (thanks in no small part to the impressive APU and 16GB of new LPDDR5 Ram), but the true heart of this project has been the success and unbelievable progress of Valve’s Proton compatibility layer over the past few years.

One of the main criticisms of the failed “Steam Machines” was that the SteamOS (2.0) Linux Debian-based distro had very poor compatibility with the existing Steam game catalog. Since only a select handful of games would play on the Linux machines, the value just wasn’t there for consumers back in 2015. Valve then pivoted to streaming (via Steam Link hardware and then later an App) as a solution to bring PC games to your living room, but of course, this meant that you had to already possess a decent gaming PC.

Fast forward to now, and the Steam Deck’s impressive game catalog compatibility has been made possible thanks to all the community work that has gone into the improvement of the Proton compatibility layer since the launch of the old Steam Machines. Valve’s Proton compatibility layer (itself a vertically integrated fork of Wine via Linux) has since gone on to be completely integrated into the Steam Client (under the Steam Play functionality). The Steam Deck is the benefactor of this constant game compatibility improvement for Linux, but the trickledown improvements haven’t stopped there.

1) I’ve since pulled the newer Proton versions into an older Steam Machine pc which finally allows it to have game compatibility parity with the current Steam Deck (sans performance differences due to the Steam Machine’s older hardware/specs). Achieving this required the installation of “bubblewrap” via the Linux desktop of the Steam Machine’s instance of SteamOS 2.0 (based on the Debian Linux distro) to get the versions of Proton above 5.0 to work.

B298EC8E-EA9F-4603-8E31-B915748B5C85.jpeg

2) Using the old Steam Link hardware, the Steam Deck can wirelessly “dock” with any TV and be used as either a controller itself while you stream to the display, or as a wireless streaming system while you use a paired controller. This has been great for streaming RPG’s or any game that wouldn’t be impacted by latency.

7B019970-B09E-45F1-A1D7-18722ABFB473.jpeg

As a side note/observation, I’ve seen the Steam Controllers skyrocket in price since the release of the Steam Deck as well. Perhaps it’s time for Valve to take a stab at a Steam Controller 2.0 lol
 
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Lagduf

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Still waiting on my email.

Any play Valheim? Be interested to know how it runs on the deck.
 

SML

NEANDERTHAL FUCKER,
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I don't have Valheim, but it does look like the devs have made deck-targeted updates.

My deck lists 1520 games in my library (:emb:), and 177 of those are currently in the "verified" (aka "Great on Deck") category. I'm also running plenty of games that are currently classified as "playable" or "unknown," including Ultra Street Fighter IV, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, etc.

If a game doesn't run the first time, even on a fresh install, it's a good idea to verify the integrity of the game files. I don't know if that reverts some configurations that were stored on the cloud or what, but I've been surprised at how often it seems to fix the issue.

It hasn't been a real issue, but I'm keeping fighters and older games on the sdxc (UHS-1) and games that are more likely to have real-time loading on the internal drive.
 

Ajax

way more american than wyo, way more
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Valheim is in the "Great on Deck" category on Steam, and Forza Horizon 5, which isn't in that category, runs incredibly well and is pretty intensive. Take that for whatever that's worth.
 

Lagduf

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I haven't been an active PC gamer in about a decade (last new PC games I played were Diablo 3 and Skyrim) so my Steam library is pretty small but Valheim is one of the newer games I want to play. I think I'll be fine with less intensive games or indy games when I eventually do get my deck.
 

SML

NEANDERTHAL FUCKER,
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Prototype runs very well on the Deck, as you might expect, while you have to do tricks to make it run on a PC with more than 8 threads. I never got around to playing it when it was new, but it'll probably be the first game I complete on the deck.

I was wrong. It was Fez, a different game I never got around to playing. Fun little game. Sometimes it launched expecting a keyboard and I had to relaunch it, but overall the experience getting the first ending was great. The Deck's ability to suspend and wake up in the middle of a game is perfect for a game like this.

To criticize the game itself, the cryptography involved in getting most of the anti-cubes doesn't really complement the perspective-based gameplay. It just feels like the worst kind of auteur game-dev byproduct. Maybe I'm just mad because I've got a dumb monkey brain but I don't think that a retro-styled platformer should have more obscure puzzles than a Cyan Worlds game.
 
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