Hey everyone,
I just wanted to share my first impression after coming from a Windows Gaming-PC and how my worries about linux ended up being true (or not). I ended up getting the OLED 512 GB so that’s the device my impressions are based on.
What I was worried about before getting the device:
- Having to tinker with Proton all the time, finding the right version for every game
- Having to set up control schemes manually for every game, that’s not supported on deck
- Receiving a device with greenish screen in dark areas, as I read about that issue here
- Receiving a device with pixel errors
- “Performance might not be good enough”
So, how did it turn out after the first day of tinkering around?
Proton, Controls and Performance:
First of all I installed a bunch of games and didn’t think about proton at all. I didn’t activate a special proton setting anywhere. Result: Every single game I installed ran perfectly, right out of the box. Even Heroes of Might and Magic V, which is consideres unsupported by the Deck, just started and was playable without doing anything except installing the game. Even the highest rated community Profile activated automatically and I could see in a nice graphic which button does what. I didn’t expect at all it would be so easy. The Games I installed where:
- Heroes V as mentioned
- Dark Souls 3
- Crysis Remastered
- Tomb Raider 2013
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Prey
- Doom
These where the games I tested and it turned out that I don’t have any hassle with any of them.Performance where great through the whole lineup. Both Tomb Raiders are easy to get between 70 and 90 fps on native resolution without even setting everything on low. Rise of the Tomb Raider is running on medium-high setting stable on 70fps without FSR. Realtalk, this is surreal. i remember a few years ago, that my pc struggled to reach 60 in that game on medium settings.
All the other Games run flawless as well, even Crysis running at stable 90 frames on low. The good thing is, and I underestimated this SO much, that you don’t even really see a difference on a small screen like this. You really have to search for the differences between Rise of the Tomb Raider on Ultra VS on Medium and the fps difference is like 40 vs 100fps. Even on low, every game look gorgeous on that screen and perfectly playable. Until now I used a PC with a RTX 3070 and a 1440p Ultrawide Monitor where I always tried to crank every setting possible to the max and had an energy consumption of about 900W for my whole setup… Now I’m at 15W on the Deck and I’m really questioning if that PC is still necessary. (Except for the newest highest End games like Alan Wake 2 maybe)
How is my screen you may ask?
Perfectly fine! It might be very possible, that what’s posted here on reddit is a small percentage of people having problems, while people who get a good device are all quiet. My screen gets dark as night without any sign of green artifacts or faulty pixels.
Addtitional stuff worth talking about: Linux is awesome. I’m seriously considering changing my main rig to linux, after doing a bit of research how Games run on a ‘normal’ pc. The whole OS seems so damn thought through, there are no popup warnings and everything is so snappy. (Even coming from a Windows PC with a samsung 980 pro m.2 SSD and Ryzen 7700x)It’s the small things that stand out for me sooooo much but make life so much easier.Also you get to feel what perfect freedom means again, after windows becamer more and more like apple and tries to dictate the user what he is able to do with his PC. There really is a special vibe especially when using Desktop mode. Though you still get what I’m talking about if you experience first hand, what you can even do while gaming.Just think about a nintendo switch letting you change your tdp, show your cpu-core-clocks, change GPU-clocks and stuff like that. Just unimaginable!
Even things like the ‘explorer’ (Dolphin here) are kind of a Wow!-Moment. you can customize literally everything on that device and it makes me so damn happy to finally have bought that thing after over a year of thinking “Is it really worth it?”
Yes, goddamn, it WAS worth it all the time and I hate myself and my electricity bill for not getting that thing a year ago already!
That’s my tiny little loveletter. Hope you liked it. Have a great day!
I agree that the deck gets away with a lot due to the screen quality and size…
I just got my first deck this week too (same model as you) and Cyberpunk was one of the first titles I was desperate to play.
I read so much online before my deck arrived about the steam deck quality preset being bad, but for me it looks fine!
Maybe it’s my untrained eye, or the fact I’m coming from a Switch… or that I spend a lot of time playing ‘old’ games still (eg. vanilla Skyrim) but personally I’m still in awe of 1) being able to play a game like Cyberpunk on a handheld device and 2) how great it looks even on low settings.
Right?! Low settings on that small (OLED) screen look somehow even better that medium-high settings on my PC-Monitor. Of course being OLED is a huge factor because colours and contrast are much better but even things like object counts an stuff like that are much more appearant on a large desktop screen if they’re missing.
In my opinion the brilliant colours of the screen have way more effect to the overall quality than pushing the settings from low to high and getting a few more objects or sharper textures (That you don’t even recognize that much on such a small screen anyways) out of that.