Steam Deck, Valve's Answer to the Nintendo Switch; Now Set For February Release After Suffering a Delay

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gregc
Can I shout for just a second? I GOT MY EMAIL 😎🥰😁

More excited than any 50+ year old should be over a new toy, and I don't care lol...
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And you should!

50+ here also 😀
 
And it's HERE :D :D :D

(Im)patiently waiting for some games to install now, first impressions are really good though - it feels great in my hands, quality overall seems very good. Glad I went for the 512Gb version, not only for the storage but also the anti-glare screen.

Should keep me busy this evening!
 
I got my SD 2 weeks ago. Today I got te official dock. What a game changer this thing is. Forza Horizon on the go and on the couch.

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Shame FH4 does not run that well. After sleep mode the framerates goes down and is very unstable. It's the only game in my lib that has this.
 
As there's a pretty good chance most of us here who have Decks will also have a PS4 or 5, I thought I should put this here: https://streetpea.github.io/chiaki4deck/

I had set Chiaki up ages ago but found it lacking in things like touchpad support, Chiaki4Deck is miles better. I do still have problems with the stream quality, same as I had with Chiaki, but I think that's down to my awful router being awful, I need to work out if I can set it to short preamble or whatever because, well, it looks like this more often than not:

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Edit: forgot to note that if your router is awful like mine and doesn't allow you to split the SSID between 2.4 and 5GHz, nor switch off the 2.4GHz radio before the 5GHz (for some reason it will let you turn 2.4GHz off IF you turn 5GHz off first...), you can force your PS4 to only connect to 5GHz networks by pressing Options when you reach the network selection screen while setting up your network connection. It's also worth giving your console a static IP while you're at it.
 
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I've been holding off on getting a Deck, still wavering on that or a Switch 2 (absolutely coming next year). This is very tempting though:



 
I just sold my Deck the other week and got a Legion Go. Not happy with the Go. So it's GOing back and I will go for the new SD.
 
I'm kinda torn on the OLED thing.

One the one hand, I have no problem with the LCD screen or relative lack of battery life my 256GB model have, but I know the OLED model is better. I can't afford it right now, but if I could sell my one for about £250, I would upgrade.

On the other hand, I paid for the whole Deck so I want to use the whole Deck - I want to keep it going until it can't go anymore. When the battery dies or screen breaks and I can't get another I'll put the main board in a 3D printed case and have a (very) SFF PC for emulation or something, even if I have another Deck by that point.
 
I'm curious about how competitive the SDLCD/SDOLED will remain in the next year or two, now it's more or less sure that there will not be a major APU/memory upgrade soon-ish. Newer games such as Starfield and Alan Wake 2 already make on the edge in terms of playability if I interpret all the conversations correctly? Also considering the interview with Valve engineers about releasing SteamOS for other handhelds being a priority?

That said, SD remains king in pick-up-and-play experience, no Windows handheld, Z1E/7840U or not, comes close. Windows, Modern Standby and handhelds are not friends.
 
@NLxAROSA in my opinion - and I may have read this in an interview, forgot and then internalised it as an original thought - the Deck has always been a Trojan horse for Valve, the product they were actually selling as part of the Deck SKU is actually SteamOS. After the Steam Machines disaster they had to find another approach to make SteamOS desirable and creating a whole new niche of affordable, usable handhelds was a smart way to achieve that, so it makes sense that they should now put the Deck on hold until there's an APU that makes for a compelling upgrade and work on SteamOS instead to help drive new installs on competing platforms.

Problem is, the overwhelming majority of PCs that people use to play games on Steam are desktops and laptops and SteamOS currently does nothing especially useful there, in fact it limits your options because you can't play VR games, can't play a lot of very popular games that use certain anti-cheat packages, it's harder to install games from other stores, harder to mod games, you can't stream or record gameplay... The list probably goes on.

It'll be interesting to see how they continue to chip away at this problem to completely undermine Windows. I think within the next decade we'll see them launch an x86 compatibility tool to run any game on ARM processors, the Deckard standalone VR headset that has limited processing power of its own but zero config pairing with a more powerful device and a desktop/settop console along with a vastly improved SteamOS desktop environment and a controller that does something super desirable with half-arsed Windows drivers to help push people to SteamOS.

I doubt they'll ever crack the anti-cheat problem as it exists today but I could see them coming up with something superior and then when new games implement that instead, the old games that don't work on SteamOS will start to die off (as players move on to new games) and it's problem solved.
 
sesselpupser
@NLxAROSA in my opinion - and I may have read this in an interview, forgot and then internalised it as an original thought - the Deck has always been a Trojan horse for Valve, the product they were actually selling as part of the Deck SKU is actually SteamOS. After the Steam Machines disaster they had to find another approach to make SteamOS desirable and creating a whole new niche of affordable, usable handhelds was a smart way to achieve that, so it makes sense that they should now put the Deck on hold until there's an APU that makes for a compelling upgrade and work on SteamOS instead to help drive new installs on competing platforms.

Problem is, the overwhelming majority of PCs that people use to play games on Steam are desktops and laptops and SteamOS currently does nothing especially useful there, in fact it limits your options because you can't play VR games, can't play a lot of very popular games that use certain anti-cheat packages, it's harder to install games from other stores, harder to mod games, you can't stream or record gameplay... The list probably goes on.

It'll be interesting to see how they continue to chip away at this problem to completely undermine Windows. I think within the next decade we'll see them launch an x86 compatibility tool to run any game on ARM processors, the Deckard standalone VR headset that has limited processing power of its own but zero config pairing with a more powerful device and a desktop/settop console along with a vastly improved SteamOS desktop environment and a controller that does something super desirable with half-arsed Windows drivers to help push people to SteamOS.

I doubt they'll ever crack the anti-cheat problem as it exists today but I could see them coming up with something superior and then when new games implement that instead, the old games that don't work on SteamOS will start to die off (as players move on to new games) and it's problem solved.
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Having just sold my OG 512 SD the other week and jumped on the Legion Go bandwagon, I can say that I do not regret selling my SD ....... and buying the new SD later this week. The Legion Go windows 11 handheld is just too painfull compared to the smooth experience SD offers. The LGO would not come out of sleep or hibernate in a good way 95% of the times. And if it did both WRC23 and ACC crash.

As for moddability. On the SD I used custom skins in AMS2. Desktop mode works pretty good for that.
 
MarcoM
Having just sold my OG 512 SD the other week and jumped on the Legion Go bandwagon, I can say that I do not regret selling my SD ....... and buying the new SD later this week. The Legion Go windows 11 handheld is just too painfull compared to the smooth experience SD offers. The LGO would not come out of sleep or hibernate in a good way 95% of the times. And if it did both WRC23 and ACC crash.

As for moddability. On the SD I used custom skins in AMS2. Desktop mode works pretty good for that.
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LLGO has teething issues, mostly drivers that are beta/not great. Give it time. But yeah, having a single hardware config and a single OS helps a lot to keep things stable. Windows and handhelds means fiddling until you find your sweetspot. There's not a single one because folks prioritize different things when it comes to balancing battery duration, image quality, resolution and frame rate.

And even then I have different templates for different game types (e.g. racing 60FPS is a must, but single player RPG: 40 is fine really. Also: diminishing returns is a thing when it comes to TDP. For the Z1E/7840U it's around 20-25W. The Ayaneo Kun can go to 54W, so more than double the power, but you don't get double the performance, just a lot of heat/shorter battery duration. And last, but not least: drivers/BIOS/apps is a ******** with every new device from a vendor. Because there is no true handheld support, vendors need to resort to weird hacks to enable companion apps, such as disabling Memory Integrity and other security features you really don't want to disable. It's all pretty much in its infancy.

I hope MSFT gets their act together and make a handheld layer for Windows 11.


sesselpupser
@NLxAROSA in my opinion - and I may have read this in an interview, forgot and then internalised it as an original thought - the Deck has always been a Trojan horse for Valve, the product they were actually selling as part of the Deck SKU is actually SteamOS. After the Steam Machines disaster they had to find another approach to make SteamOS desirable and creating a whole new niche of affordable, usable handhelds was a smart way to achieve that, so it makes sense that they should now put the Deck on hold until there's an APU that makes for a compelling upgrade and work on SteamOS instead to help drive new installs on competing platforms.

Problem is, the overwhelming majority of PCs that people use to play games on Steam are desktops and laptops and SteamOS currently does nothing especially useful there, in fact it limits your options because you can't play VR games, can't play a lot of very popular games that use certain anti-cheat packages, it's harder to install games from other stores, harder to mod games, you can't stream or record gameplay... The list probably goes on.

It'll be interesting to see how they continue to chip away at this problem to completely undermine Windows. I think within the next decade we'll see them launch an x86 compatibility tool to run any game on ARM processors, the Deckard standalone VR headset that has limited processing power of its own but zero config pairing with a more powerful device and a desktop/settop console along with a vastly improved SteamOS desktop environment and a controller that does something super desirable with half-arsed Windows drivers to help push people to SteamOS.

I doubt they'll ever crack the anti-cheat problem as it exists today but I could see them coming up with something superior and then when new games implement that instead, the old games that don't work on SteamOS will start to die off (as players move on to new games) and it's problem solved.
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Thing is: Zen4/RDNA3 is already here and we havent really seen its true power due to Windows. (SteamOS is way better optimized for gaming, unlike Windows which is not a good combo with handhelds to put it mildly) But even with Windows bloat/overhead, it's already the difference between running Starfield at Ultra (performance mod not optional ;)) at 40-60FPS at 1080p or watching a slide show at 800p. Same for Alan Wake 2. If the SD is struggling with these games now, I think it won't be able to keep up with all the UE5 madness that is coming. I don't think Zen3/RDNA2 will last more than a year or so. BTW, UE5 is great for handhelds because of TSR.

That said: if you don't play the latest and greatest, the SD is still King when it comes to pick-up-and-play experience. And it's cheaper than Z1E, let alone 7840U (those extremely low Indiegogo prices are gone :P).
 
NLxAROSA
That said: if you don't play the latest and greatest, the SD is still King
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I think that's it for me, I subscribed to the "patient gamer" thing years before the Deck was even announced, I always wait for patches and a sale. The fact that, say, Starfield doesn't run all that well on the Deck will remain irrelevant to me for years yet! That's not to say I don't want a better Deck, but I can wait for the next one I think.
 
Sorry for the double post. I just went through my Steam Replays and worked out, excluding offline play, I've used my Deck for at least approximately 1,850 hours since I got it in May 2022.

The battery health is down to 49% and the rubber has come unglued from the sticks (again - I've tried gluing them back on with superglue and clear Gorilla glue but neither has worked for more than a few weeks) but apart from that I don't think you'd be able to tell that I've used it for, on average, an hour and a half every day since I got it, it has held up really well. Of course it has a number of early adopter issues like the sticking B button, trackpads that rub and the noisy fan but they've always been like that.
 
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sesselpupser
Sorry for the double post. I just went through my Steam Replays and worked out, excluding offline play, I've used my Deck for at least approximately 1,850 hours since I got it in May 2022.

The battery health is down to 49% and the rubber has come unglued from the sticks (again - I've tried gluing them back on with superglue and clear Gorilla glue but neither has worked for more than a few weeks) but apart from that I don't think you'd be able to tell that I've used it for, on average, an hour and a half every day since I got it, it has held up really well. Of course it has a number of early adopter issues like the sticking B button, trackpads that rub and the noisy fan but they've always been like that.
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Thats pretty remarkable reliability considering the play time.

That is the one thing that scares me with handhelds if one thing breaks technically the whole thing is broken you cant just buy a new controller, dreading the day something breaks on mine.

Had my Steam Deck for 2 years now and no issues so far although nowhere near as many hours as played as you. Don't have an exact figure as I play a lot of Epic games and Emulation and it doesnt track hours played on them.
 
TypeRDC5
That is the one thing that scares me with handhelds if one thing breaks technically the whole thing is broken you cant just buy a new controller, dreading the day something breaks on mine.
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iFixit has a pretty comprehensive selection of spare parts and guides! If the battery wasn't £120 I would be interested in replacing mine but I don't use it on battery power enough to make it worthwhile so I'll just wait until I have to replace it.
 
sesselpupser
in my opinion - and I may have read this in an interview, forgot and then internalised it as an original thought - the Deck has always been a Trojan horse for Valve, the product they were actually selling as part of the Deck SKU is actually SteamOS.
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Did I mention I installed SteamOS on my ROG Ally a few months ago and never looked back at Windows? :D
sesselpupser
Sorry for the double post.
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Double post AND thread necro, there must be some award for that! :P

That said, it's nice to check in after two years and see the advances in the ecosystem. And you were right, SteamOS is the real product here, see also the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame. What Proton did for Windows vs Linux, FEX will do for x86 vs ARM. And the latter is not just a PC thing, folks are actually running SteamOS and playing games on mobile phones now. Microsoft is desperately trying with their Xbox/Game Pass, but gamers are NOT amused about shoving Windows and Xbox full of AI BS features nobody wants.
 
sesselpupser
iFixit has a pretty comprehensive selection of spare parts and guides! If the battery wasn't £120 I would be interested in replacing mine but I don't use it on battery power enough to make it worthwhile so I'll just wait until I have to replace it.
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£120 damn...

Hopefully mine holds on long enough so that by then the Steam Deck 2 is out.
 
I just installed GT4 and other GT games on the SD. I tried that already earlier, but kept getting issues at certain night tracks and wet tracks. You have to set Hardware Download Mode to "Disabled (Ignore Transfers)" For more information

GT4 spec II is also cool. It has the MX5 NC! Finally I can drive my own car in GT4 :)

Edit:
I have played many racing games on the SD. Forza Horizon 4 and 5 run really well. Project cars 2 also. Automobilista 2 as well, but AMS2 has this annoying problem that the loading times increase over time when you load races and go back to the main menu. Initially it is like 20 seconds for a 16 car grid. And it builds up to over 2 minutes after 6 races. PC2 does not have this problem and it runs on a same base engine.

Dirt Rally 1 and 2 run also great. Assetto Corsa runs also very good, although AC takes some effort to get running.

Looking forward to the Geoff Crammond F1 games. Hope they will run on the SD!
 
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Fezzik
I should've got one a while back. Now sadly they've become another victim of the RAMageddon.

www.ign.com

Valve’s Massive Steam Deck OLED Price Hike Pushes the Handheld Into High-End Territory, Raising Concerns for the Upcoming Steam Machine

Valve has announced a substantial price increase for the Steam Deck. The company announced today that all new OLED models are officially back in stock after months of being out of stock, but they will be getting a price increase.
www.ign.com www.ign.com
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I bought my 256 GB non OLED SteamDeck just before Christmas 2023. I can sell it second hand on ebay for basically what I paid for it new nearly 3 years ago. The world has gone mad.

Ive said it before and I think its now a confirmed reality, The PS5 and Steam Deck will be my last ever consoles and I'm done with anything new gaming tech. Prices increase during a consoles life cycle and a digital future is enough for me to not care about missing out on new games.

Back on the SteamDeck itself it was worth ever penny for emulation alone. A great handheld at what was a good price.
 
Luckily I bought the OLED version before it ran out of stock the last time. I can't believe the price increase. Do they even know the Xbox branded handheld is available?
 
Tired Tyres
Luckily I bought the OLED version before it ran out of stock the last time. I can't believe the price increase. Do they even know the Xbox branded handheld is available?
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I've been looking at one of the Lenovo Legion handhelds. £100 cheaper than the now-base Deck, double the storage, runs Steam as well. It has a LCD rather than OLED but that doesn't really matter to me.
 
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