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cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/3922769
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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/RevolutionaryAd8204 on 2024-09-14 15:50:43+00:00.
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I have never felt as much envy as seeing someone play BG3 on an 8 hr flight. That was what sold me.
To cap it off the SOB killed Scratch and the Owlbear Cub. That flight was actual torture for multiple reasons.
Was BG3 smooth? I’m getting jealous if it was. It’s a hot mess on my shitty PC.
It is. From my experience a couple months back its crisp. Not the highest graphics, and it took a little getting used to from a high-end PC, but it was really nice. In certain aspects even preferable xD
It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.
Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.
I didn’t play much of it but it ran well when I tired it. I just decided it was the type of game I wanted to plat with all the settings maxed on my laptop.
It couldn’t play at max settings?
Definitely not on Steam Deck.
I imagine certain scenes especially in the 3rd act would put alot of strain on the steam deck
In general the Steam Deck is not the kind of device that is going to run things at max settings. You are gonna play at 720p30FPS low settings but be happy you can play at all on a train or airplane. It’s really meant to be a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than a replacement for a gaming PC.
You can stream from your PC to your couch or bed if you are at home.
I think they were playing at a low res. 720p or maybe 480p. That said they didn’t even have stuttering. It was really impressive.
Mine is still on order haven’t got it yet.
I’d be happy if it played Owlcat RPGs at near full settings. Those games are allot more fun than BG3, imo.
I digress though. It’d be nice to be able to play recent games again. If the deck can do that on my TV, I’m down.
We hook our Steam Deck up to a 4k projector and it looks amazing. The built in upscaler from 800p to 4k is astonishingly good. Obviously not AS good as native but and many games are limited to 30fps but holy smokes it’s more than good enough.
Hell yeah another Kingmaker/WOTR fan.
WotR for the win. never played Kingmaker. And I just got Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader. I don’t understand how these games aren’t more popular.
I feel like BG3 is big just because the camera zooms in close to the characters.
Kingmaker is fantastic. I’m not that big a fan of Rogue Trader though. I kinda hate the Imperium of Man, in 40K I am Ork only.
If you enjoy Owlcat then the Pillars and Tyranny from Obsidian are fantastic.
I’m going to look up all of their games eventually. They go hard on the systems and that’s a severely lacking quality these days.
Rogue Trader is cool, I’m only a few hours into it though. But man, the camera kills me. It’s got a weird rubber band effect to it that I don’t like.
But it’s mostly a nice improvement, or at least some different takes, on the WotR systems. My main complaint about their games is even with auto end turn on it never automatically ends any turns.
Steam Deck screen is only 800p so that’s the resolution for all games. And it’s perfect for the screen size.
I’m so glad Valve did not give in to the tech-number-nerds who want 2K resolution on tiny screens, saves so much battery life.
Like I said it was clear and smooth. I don’t expect 4k in a handheld. Portable is it’s own metric.
Yep quite right, I was just clarifying because you said “low res. 720p or maybe 480p” - the Steam Deck is 800p native. Total agreement.
Wow 8hrs, I’ve never gotten more than 2 on a laptop
The plane had USB chargers in the arm rest, but not 120v unfortunately.
The most expensive Steam Deck is still cheaper in my country. €680. While the PS5 Pro is €800.
And many will just buy the cheaper version and replace the SSD by themselves. The 512GB OLED version plus a 2TB drive is only €50 more expensive than the 1TB version. So even with like for like storage it’s still cheaper than the PS5P
The difference is that Steam Deck is actually cheap compared to what the competition does. It’s also the first generation of Steam Deck and the upgrade with an OLED (and lot of other stuff too) is actually substantial. And there are multiple versions of the Deck available to choose less drive space. Imagine this was an option on PS5 Professional too. Contrary, the PS5 Professional is the most expensive console compared to its competition. It’s so expensive, that it set a new bar.
That’s the opposite of what Steam Deck does. Steam Deck is the only current generation game console that gets cheaper over time. Also one is a handheld format, which is hard to make cheap, especially because its compatible to PC hardware (and software).
Subscription for Internet access is the one that’s always baffled me. What a stupid business model. I guess devices not belonging to their buyers is not a new thing.
is it for “internet” or access to ps servers?
It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.
I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.
It makes sense because servers are expensive to operate. The real scam is nintendo where you pay for P2P multiplayer…
They’re expensive when you’re not already building a CDN for delivery of massive files all around the world. Economies of scale quickly matter there.
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.
Web servers are different from game servers. You need a lot of performance and fast low latency servers to keep up with realtime game play. Webservers however dont need that and can benefit of load balancing accross multiple servers. Scale of economy helps a lot, but with game servers the cost doesnt change much because a session has to be on a single machine.
As for distribution costs, most of the cost is manufacturing and physical distribution of discs. So yeah, they are making a killing by continuing to take a a huge cut from game sales when most of their distribution is online.
At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.
You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).
Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.
Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.
Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
It’s the same on xbox
Now that the Steam Deck and linux gaming has found some success I really hope Valve or someone else revisits the home console market with a similar approach.
You couldn’t really build a PC for the same price as a PS5 with the same performance unless you’re buying used parts in most places but that’s not because Sony is selling consoles at a loss right now like the olden days. A large system integrator like Valve (or xbox if they want to change their formula) could offer similar perf/price without all the downsides of these locked down consoles.
Isn’t that kind of what steam machines are supposed to be?
It won’t have the same performance as a PS5, but the new Minisforum MS-A1 with a user-upgradable CPU is a really interesting proposition. The Ryzen 8700G is pretty good, but I would expect solid upgrades to be available in the next few CPU generations.
I currently have an Nvidia Shield Pro (2019), and it’s fine. I have Moonlight installed and can stream from my desktop PC using Sunshine (I do this on my Steam Deck, too), but I don’t expect that Nvidia will make a replacement, and I don’t know if I would get it if they did.
The software outside of Steam’s big picture mode isn’t ready for a full Linux couch experience, but it’s close. The two projects to watch are KDE Plasma Bigscreen and Waydroid (some people are starting to get Android TV working) which would be a nice bridge to use apps designed for a TV UI until native Linux versions become available.
Honestly I think the trick for valve there would just be to release a build of steam OS people can install themselves into desktops (if they don’t already) and just have folks building their own machine for TV pc use.
If that happens, will that affect Microsoft’s share price?
Yeah. If Valve releases a remotely viable desktop console OS, I’ll immediately build one for my living room. If for no other reason, to keep the rest of the family away from my SteamDeck.
That’s always been their plan, but it’s getting hit with Valve Time. My guess is that they won’t do it until all issues the major with NVIDIA GPUs have been fixed, as a public build that doesn’t run properly on a majority of machines wouldn’t go well. The latest driver is pretty good, but the Big Picture mode is still pretty much unusable.
At the very least they’re currently trying to bring official support over to other handhelds, as they’ve already confirmed that they want to official support for the ROG Ally and pushed out a update to SteamOS for the controller support.
It is not “biggest game library on earth” I bet, that would still be a high-end desktop running windows…
At this point, it’ll be easier to count the games that wouldnt work on the steam deck.
Fair, still not biggest library on earth
So what would hold that title?
High end windows laptop
And I see that one can argue that try running it is good enough, but instant crashing file would I myself not call a member of the game library. If that would be the case, any device that is able to download files has the “biggest game library“
The deck can run windows, so if it didnt run in compatability mode in linux itll work in native windows. Now if you were to put a limitation that it must acheive 30fps in any game, you might have a point, but… thats really grasping for straws.
My point is that it has at least not to crash instantly on try to start. There are some games that do that on the deck 😇
While this is technically correct, it still doesn’t matter. I have built my own high end PCs in the past and it is a huge waste. I’m not even sold on the steam deck yet - I do all my non- critical stuff like lemmy on this 10 year old shit tablet running Android 7
Never told that it matters 😇 I game on an nvida 980 endeavourOS PC myself. Steam deck is probably able to run more games than that 😂
You could put Windows on the deck if you’re inclined to do so
But you can still not run all games that a high end desktop can
But then you are running windows…
Yes, but it has still a bigger game library as steam deck has and thus calling steam deck having “bigges game library on earth” is just bullshit.
But maybe there is a joke in that, that woooshed over me…
steam deck can run windows afaik
Can run most windows games via proton atleast.
But has not the power to run all the games a high end desktop can.
Yeah but a Deck is a Pc, which can absolutely run Windows. Therefore, they are the same thing. A high end PC AND a steam deck feature the “Biggest game library on earth”.
Doesn’t even have to run well. The fact that you can attempt to play it in the first place let’s it win the medal.
Any version of Playstation can’t even attempt to play half the games on a deck ;).
I think they mean “console library”
Steam deck has an emulator so it should
Lol
Can you plug a steam deck to the tv and use a controller? Cause if not, I don’t want it
Plugging it into the TV & playing Jackbox games where everyone uses their phones as a controller is a great party trick.
You can do that with just a smart tv though
Yep. Connect using Bluetooth or via a USB dongle/dock.
Yeah, you can, haha (almost like the switch). You stick it in a dock with HDMI out and add a controller by USB, USB dongle, or Bluetooth.
The Steam Deck is a slightly funny shaped x86_64 laptop. It has an AMD APU in it. You can hook it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and do your taxes on it if you want.
Ah, my kind of fun.
Playing Accounting Tycoon on the Steam Deck.
What’s there not to like?!
Steam Deck + USB type C dock + HDMI cable + bluetooth controller. You’re done
That’s what I would do with it too. Good question.
Yes? Durh?
Not everyone is terminally online, dude.
This is why people think PC gamers are assholes
Sure, but don’t expect incredible graphics on a 4k display. It’s a handheld after all.
What does it go up to? I currently play on 1080p anyways
Hooked up to a TV or monitor it’ll do 4k. You can even use FSR upscaling to actually game at 4K, but there’s still a performance hit and I don’t think any recent games are actually playable in 4K. (Upscaled to 1080P, on the other hand, is a different story.)
PS5 Pro - only marginally better than an option that’s only $450.
Steam Deck OLED - only marginally better than an option that’s only $300.
Yeah, I don’t see any reason to upgrade either of mine. Really not worth it.
I think mid life upgrades targeting new customer and hard core types.
Regular folks just buy generational upgrades.
Like, they’re cool and tempting. But not anywhere near the price of a full unit when I have an already perfectly functioning one! If I could say swap the panel on the Deck (with relatively little effort), I would likely consider buying an upgrade kit but that’s not possible. Same thing with the PS5: if I could just buy the new gpu and replace the old one, I probably would. Never mind that it’s an apu so in this instance it’s really replacing the entire guts of the device, that’s a minor detail XD
I would actually rather like a Steam Deck without a display but with at least one full USB4 port and the ability to split it similar to a switch.
Yeah I’d love a modern stream machine kinda Deck plugged into a TV.
For now PlayStation is nicer for TV where I can get better performance from the couch with quick resume and all. If I could get a static Deck without portable power consumption limits and decent output on a 4K display that would be ideal. But right now the Deck works docked but when blown up to TV size so many games are a low rez mess. If we could get a proper SteamOS that I could install into a media center PC I’d make it myself. All I’d hope for then is a second gen Steam Controller.
For my use, I would still want the battery/portability. Just without an internal display because I use a 1080p HMD and like playing on the Deck in bed, etc. Add a capability like the joycons but symmetrical and with all of the Deck’s inputs, and I’d be quite happy.
Since buying a steam deck I’ve spent more money on games I can play on it than I would normally for the pc.
That’s still cheaper than buying a ps5 on its own without the extra cost of games.
Some of the points in the meme are weaker versions of the full truth:
Desktop OS and you can substitute your own.
Biggest game library and you can also side load your stuff from other stores.
It’s almost as if they’re two completely different markets
And the once PlayStation exclusive games have also been made available to Steam, thereby making them also accessible to Steam Deck. So the latter is infinitely a better choice!
If I’m playing modern games on a TV? PS5 easy. But still the pro over the deck.
I love my deck. As the handheld it’s intended to be. It’s not powerful enough for an acceptable experience running a AAA 3D game on a TV screen. You can ignore the resolution and artifacts and just generally low visual quality and poor frame rate on a small screen, because playing the games portably at all is a huge step up. You can’t ignore any part of it on a TV. It’s fine for indie games, older games, 2D stuff, etc.
But it doesn’t have the performance for a good living room experience if you’re looking to play modern AAA games. (Ignoring all their bullshit rootkits on PC that block a lot of multiplayer games out completely, which are the games you have to pay for on PS. You just can’t play most of them on Linux at all.)
Y’all just picky. 720 was fine 20 years ago and it’s fine now.
20 years ago was pre-bluray, so the most common video media was dvd with resolution of 720 × 480 (480p). So 720p was really good 20 years ago.
That, and monitor/TV size increased a lot at the time when flat panels became a thing, so you need a higher resolution just to achieve the same pixel density you already had on a smaller screen.
Well also the change to pixel based screens from CRTs meant that you needed higher resolution for the picture to look comparitively good.
It was not. 30 years ago, it would have been very good, though, as a lot of media was still SD.
Black and white TV was fine 60 years ago and it’s fine now
Yup. As someone who hasn’t had a dedicated gaming PC in about a decade, I’ve been really happy with the PS5 + Steam Deck combo (well, plus Switch, but that thing collects dust until Nintendo releases a Mario platformer).
I recently got a laptop that’s not made for gaming specifically, but can handle them pretty well (with Proton), and that has scratched any itch I’ve had for PC games that don’t lend themselves to Deck or console (your RTS games and such).
At risk of giving away the game… I think people would be very surprised to see how cheap physical copies of PS4 and PS5 games go for when you catch them on sale.
I love my Steam deck, and bounce between how heavily I use it vs the switch* or PS5 depending on the games I’m into at the moment. But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC (like the OP) doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.
The PS5 is probably my smallest library (and mostly PS4 games, a lot of which were before I had a PC), but it’s definitely plenty capable and I don’t regret the purchase at all. (The controller is also the coolest non graphics addition to gaming I’ve experienced in a long time).
*The switch desperately needs a 3rd party replacement for the controllers, though, because the joycons are bad brand new.
But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.
Did I do this?
No, the OP did.
Edited for clarity.
how cheap physical copies of PS4 and PS5 games go for when you catch them on sale.
Buy them while you can folks, sony et al is working OT to kill this option
Also the price scales wayyyy better. Steam Deck starts at 313,65€ now.
if you have less money, buy that, get an sd card, and if you enjoy it put an ssd in later.
That’s $346 in USD, if anyone is interested.
That’s the 512gb version even. You can get the 64gb version for $296 right now, which is a great deal. Upgrading the SSD later is pretty easy too.
Jesus. That’s a great deal. Makes me consider getting one instead of a new laptop.
Not to mention you can just toss a 1tb SD card in, with no skills needed and only minimal cost difference.
Yes, accessing your data off an SD card is marginally slower than off an NVME ssd… but we’re talking, iirc, milliseconds. If it really bugs you later down the line, then you can upgrade the SSD.
Well, sometimes load times matter. In Borderlands 3 going off SD card instead of disc drive caused a minute or more of loading time when launching the game.
That’s not the cause- benchmarks have been done on the matter, as you can see slightly down the comment chain. You’ve simply attributed the slow load times to what you think is the issue.
Does it have a USB port to plug in my external hd filled with games?
Usb-c port, so yes, though you may need an adapter… And a long cord.
Unless you also grab the dock, but then you also need a controller.
I’m a PC couch player, I’ve played with a controller for the last decade with my 75" TV.
I’d definitely get a dock for it.You guys are selling me big time on this.
I’ve been told (haven’t done it myself) that the ps5 controller pairs extremely well with the steam deck + dock. I would ask around though- I have an actual Steam Controller that I use, myself, but I don’t think you can buy those anymore.
You think a microSD is only marginally slower than an nvme SSD?
Found some benchmarks. Load times appear to be influenced by the CPU doing decompression. It’s not the SD being as fast as a SSD, but rather the SSD being as slow as a SD because of this. That’s… interesting.
Load times have always been bottlenecked by the CPU, so it’s not a massive surprise that the SSD is about on par with a decent SD card.
On the PS4 an SSD was faster than a HDD, but not by a massive amount. At least it was quieter though.
Yep. At some point maybe Valve will change that, but for now, it’s a great way to get a steam deck. And even if they do change/fix that later, you’re not really missing out on anything- everything will be the same speed it always was for you.
In the steam decks case yeah.
Eventually, Sony will stop supporting the PS5 and it’ll be a brick. If Valve ever stops supporting the Steamdeck, it’ll keep running.
All (most?) of your games will run on your future computers.
You can play DOS games just fine right now, so yes it’s a good bet. And a far better bet than the PS6 being backwards compatible.
The crazy thing for me is that I have a little handheld specific for dos games. The problem I run into every time is having to setup computer keyboard bindings for each game to play them using the built-in controller. I really want retroarch or another dos emulator to do profiles for different games and I haven’t seen that yet.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
And even then it’s no guarantee. Plenty of games needed support from the likes of GoG to run. Hell, I couldn’t even play Ex Machina because I had a HDR monitor and the game detected that and completely broke. Disabling HDR in Windows did nothing.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
well. there’s already winlator (basically box86 / wine-wrapper for android).
Not as polished and far as Proton is, but the bones are there.A CPU architecture change wouldn’t be a deathblow.
Ex Machina the movie or the 1984 “game”? That’s before Mario was even a thing.
Fucking auto correct…
It was Nex Machina.
That’s a 2017 game
Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.
That doesn’t make any sense. I can play multiple games from 2017 with no problem at all. I play games from 2012 and up just fine too. That’s something the devs messed up for that specific game, or it’s a problem with your PC.
After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.
The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.
Also I’m that scenario, you know Valve only gave it up for something dramatically better.
Device, maybe. What happens to the games bought from a DRM monopoly?
While valve has a lot of deserved goodwill, that’s always the problem - they’re well-behaved, but set up in a way in which the customer has no leverage if they where to change their approach tommorow.
Good thing drm-free games run just as well on the steam deck.
It plays piracy-reclaimed games just fine.
These devices have different use cases. Steam Deck also is digital only. If a publisher decides to kill a game, they can control whether you can or can’t play the game. PS5 Pro is expensive, but so are video cards nowadays. PS5 Pro is just following a trend set years before, including the shift from physical games and cost. The only way to stop anti-consumer trends is to stop buying expensive hardware (PS5 Pro included). Also, give some love to physical copies of games.
Saying the Steam Deck is digital only is like saying a tower computer is digital only. That’s purely false. If you can put it on a tower computer, you can put it on the Steam Deck.
All the Steam Deck, like many modern tower computers, needs for physical copies is a USB media reader.
If we can argue that Sony will stop supporting the PS5 in the future, who’s to say in the future, (without the good leadership), Steam won’t restrict what can be put on the Steam Deck? We have a lot of arguments for wanting a Steam Deck and an alternative OS to boot for gaming, but saying PS5 will be bricked in the future is not a strong one.
Beacause, Today, I can already load another OS on the Steamdeck. Not so much on the PS5.
- Take Steam Deck
- Wipe OS and install Bazzite/Nobara
- Install Heroic Launcher / Non Steam Launcher
- Install games from them
Nuclear apocalypse happens and internet is down
- Get ISOs of games in a USB drive
- Plug it into the deck and install
Because the Steam Deck is just computer hardware. I can already install whatever OS I want to and Steam won’t know that it’s a Steam Deck anymore.
