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!
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if you playing Alan Wake 2, try setting up moonlight / steam remote play, and give it a go. if you have a decent wifi network you can crank the graphics and stream it to your beautiful OLED panel and play it in bed, it’s legit awesome
That’ll be one of the next things I’m going to do, together with chiaki for PS5 Streaming. *-*
How are the latencies with this, if the deck is using wifi?
My PC is kind of cable-connected? (Veeery minor 1.5 Metre 5ghz wifi bridge without any obstacles in between in my living room)
Playstation is pretty similar just that it’s not cable connected but instead just connected directly to the livin room wifi, where an Access Point is placed that’s connected via cable to my router. (Same AP my PC is connected to via cable, because PC is another room)
The Connection of my PC is good enough for VR streaming on a Quest 3 so I guess that’ll be alright?
My biggest issue with the console by far is that sometimes if you run the battery down it just breaks. You can’t do anything and the unit is running at like 200 amphs instead of 1600. The ONLY way to fix this is to go into the BIOS and enable Battery Storage Mode and you may have to do this twice.
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.
Maybe it was different in the past but you very rarely need to change Proton versions for anything. It’s super easy to do if you ever need to, though.
FSR is also super useful, and not very intuitive. If games have built-in FSR 2.0 then try that first, otherwise if you set the game to a lower resolution than 1280x800 and disable fullscreen mode, you can enable FSR in the Steam Deck performance settings. I didn’t know about the fullscreen thing forever, so I thought it just didn’t work in a bunch of games.
I tried it last night with ‘7 Days to Die’, which is a very poorly optimized game that struggles to get a stable fps on any system. I found that lowering the resolution and enabling FSR looks almost as good as running in 1280x800, and allowed me to use Ultra graphics settings.
Also, weirdly, ‘High On Life’ has FSR 2.0 built in to the game, but when I enable it it looks like garbage. The deck’s FSR 1.0 somehow looks miles better for that game.
Nice, that’s a great hint! I’m going to try that later!
Didn’t know either, that the game needs to be in windowed mode for the inbuilt FSR to take effect!I guess I know now what I’m going to try out the whole evening lol.
That’s what I did the other day. I used to think FSR was kind of bad, because most games I tried it on were fullscreen and so it didn’t work, and one game that it did work on was GTA IV. But GTA IV has no anti-aliasing whatsoever, so when upscaled by FSR it looks awful. For games with good anti-aliasing FSR looks surprisingly good. Subnautica is another example, you can crank the graphics settings up with FSR and it looks incredible on the deck.
Nice post, the only thing stopping me from going steamOS on my gaming PC is 1) state of nvidia drivers 2) lack of being able to install gamepass games
The whole OS seems so damn thought through
Go to the file explorer, open a directory; let’s say the "home
directory. Make the size column visible. What’s this? It says how many items are in it. Now sort by size. What? It’s sorting by how many ITEMS are in the directory, not the actual storage size of the contents?Remember:
The whole OS seems so damn thought through
Now try saying that again…
It’s a robust and customizable OS, yes. But there are ton of things that are counter-intuitive, or require more than the average casual computer user should need to do. I can use it, but I wouldn’t give a non-techy family member that OS to use.
Enjoy your deck mate!
Is Rise of the Tomb Raider good? I wasn’t sure which ones to get after the first reboot.
FWIW my favourite games so far have been Sniper Elite 5, Hitman 3 (although those hammer the battery), CrossCode, Baba Is You, Into The Breach, Tetris Effect Connected.
And I’m yet to try Dragon’s Dogma and Hades.
I find I really struggle playing shooters without a mouse now though. Like Max Payne 3 and Half-Life were both too awkward / difficult really.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is amazing. All of the new Tomb Raider games are. Kind of like Uncharted (Espacially Uncharted 4), if you played these but with a satisfying bow and arrow and a little bit more riddles than action. Story is pretty good as well in all of them. Had a great time with these games!
Glad you’re liking it!
There’s a lot of needless worry over Proton. I simply do not understand why.
It’s not like rolling back BIOS or installing outdated drivers because the new ones break everything, etc.
Check out these:
Users often (not always) post their working Proton version for any particular game on ProtonDB. There’s even a Decky plugin for ProtonDB so you don’t have to leave gaming mode.
Install ProtonUp-QT from the Discover Store and it’ll scan the games you have on your Deck and recommend which version to use, if that game is in ProtonUP-QT’s database.
And for any itch dot io game, just always use GE. It’s a miracle. You’ll find many useful tools along the way and yes, Linux is the only way to go, IMO.
I’ve had mine since last September. So 14 months? It is still my favorite purchase. I use it daily. Never had a single issue with it.
Check your headphone jack by plugging in headphones - is it buzzing?
I’ll try later with my MMX 300! I’m at work currently and only have my wireless in ears with me. I’ll head back to you as soon as I tested!
Here is a first impression, as I tested it now using my headset I use at work to participate in meetings. (Sennheiser Over Ear Headset)
The is a veeeeery quiet noise going on in the background. You are able to recognize the difference between the unplugged ‘silentness’ and the plugged in ‘humming’ kind of sound. It sounds like when you plug your headset into a low quality soundchip and increase the volume to max but waaaay quieter. In addition to that, the humming sound doesn’t become louder, if you increase the volume of the deck. It’s the same volume on 0% as on 100%. Also it’s so quiet, that it definitely doesn’t annoy me as you don’t hear it at all anymore, as soon as there is sound going on in a game or so. Definitely not a thing to trigger an RMA for me, if that’s what you’re thinking about. Of course, everybody is different regarding stuff like that but I would consider me pretty sensitive to these things as well.
Might be possible, of course, that there are people where that occurs much louder. Then it would of course be a reason to RMA the device but I think it would have been recognized in QA if it would occur on every third device.