I just bought my deck a few months ago and love it. The new model coming out almost right after stings a little but I don’t think I’m going to upgrade untill I get a few years out of it and a more significant upgrade comes out.
But that asside I still wanted to do a bit of a comparison, so I took my OLED and steam deck, with vibrant deck, out and opened up the same game on both and here’s what I noticed
In terms of colours, I was actually surprised to see that I, personally, preferred the colours on my LCD ste deck with vibrant deck better, they popped more and my OLED switch looked almost as good but everything had this weird, verry slight, greenish black tint to it.
The blacks on the OLED were verry crisp and while the steam deck had the switch beat with colour imo, the switch OLED screen definitely took the cake for deep blacks and some darker colours (but not all).
I think it would have really been cool if I got the steam deck with the OLED screen but for now I’m happy with the version I have, maybe when the steam deck 2 comes out, I’ll wait for the OLED screen. I know there are other upgrades with the power consumption, fans and battery life but they seem pretty small to me personally for my situation. I’m still curious what everyone else thinks though, do you think it’s worth upgrading right now? Is vibrant deck close enough? Or any other thoughts on the topic?
Vibrant Deck (or Steam OS 3.5) plus ReShade with HDR shader looks very good. The HDR shader really does a good job of recovering those drap grays into darker shadows and blacks; similar for the highlights.
Here is some old screenshots:
With Hellblade you can really the difference.
It’s not as good as real HDR of course, especially with the huge jump in vibrancy from the OLED. But it’s much better than stock visuals.
Also most of my games looks even better now, because I have improved the reshade settings I use since then.