Steam Deck two years later

Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with video games and I wanted to play them anywhere I went. I’ve had a Nintendo DS, but for most of my life I’ve been a PC gamer and I really wanted to play them without being tethered to my big case PC.

In a way, the Steam Deck is my childhood dream come true.

I’ve been excitedly following news about it ever since it was first announced in July 2021. I watched all the videos IGN put out and I got captivated by it. A portable PC in an almost Switch-like form factor for just 2499zł (256GB version, $529 USD)? Compared to other handhelds, that was a steal. Needless to say, I got my reservation in pretty quickly.

Fast forward to March 2022 and a few variations of that one Asuka meme later, I got an email from Valve, saying my reservation is ready.

I did not think twice about it. It came in the mail about a week later.

i got it

I’m writing this on July 10th 2023, but I remember that my very first impressions of the Deck were REALLY good. And the software back then wasn’t exactly that mature!

For the next month or so I would be playing around with it and trying every possible game I could think of on it. Yes, of course one of the very first things I did was put Rayman 2 on it. I tried it out with the redream emulator first since I like the Dreamcast version the most. It was playable but I was met with graphical glitches that were a quirk of the Mesa drivers for AMD (which has since been fixed!). Oh well, at least the PC and PS2 versions worked fine. (I would later learn that Flycast is also a very good Dreamcast emulator)

a small tangent about emulation

Speaking of which, oh my god, the Deck really is an emulation beast! If you need a bunch of emulators up and running, you should check out EmuDeck. I don’t have much else to say about it, but in case you haven’t seen anyone talk about emulation on Deck (if yes, how? a lot of retro enthusiasts have been praising the steam deck), I will say that it will do a lot of things (not counting the PS3 and Xbox 360) at full speed. Even The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom runs at a fairly stable 30fps like the Switch!

a small tangent about performance and what you can expect

Anyway, it’s a month after I got my Deck, and at this point I came to the conclusion that it’s basically a portable PS4 when it comes to performance. If a game does a 30fps cap at 1080p on the base PS4, it’ll most likely also run at 30 on the Steam Deck at 720p. When laid out like that, it doesn’t sound that impressive, but it was a huge deal to me, especially considering how much it costs!

Though, with it being essentially a PC, there’s a surprising amount of settings to work with. When I got my hands on the PC version of Lost Judgement (a 30FPS game on both PS4 and PS4 Pro), I was very surprised that the default settings they picked for it were for a 60fps cap. And it’s mostly thanks to FSR 2.0 that they were able to do it. Upscalers are a really good thing to have on a platform like Steam Deck.

the time jump

You may have noticed earlier that I mentioned I wrote this on July 10th 2023. That is true. I’m still getting used to writing stuff, and we’re here in 2024 when I’m writing this section. Treat this as me writing thoughts on the Steam Deck as I go.

the oled deck

In November 2023, the OLED Steam Decks came out.

I’ve been wanting an upgrade for the original Steam Deck that includes an OLED screen. I did not expect Valve to deliver that AND more!

Here’s a few things I really like about the OLED

HDR support

I have practically no experience with HDR displays, and even on my iPhone, it’s something that you don’t really notice unless something is actually using it.

It’s incredible how much it makes games look prettier by essentially letting the games make the pixels brigther.

Better battery life

I accepted Steam Deck’s worst case scenario of around 1h30min battery life long ago. So the amount of battery life the OLED Decks have gained is quite an amazing step up.

The processor in the OLED Decks is built to be more efficient, they managed to fit a better battery and the display draws less power.

Now the battery is at a point where if my Deck is fully charged, I do not need to plan for the most performance intensive games, I can just take my Deck and play until I get tired. Which with the bigger battery now happens before the battery runs out pretty much all that time.

How is it lighter????

why does 5% less weight make it feel so much better to hold?

The OLED display

I really wanted one. It looks great.

The LCD display isn’t so bad though! In mid 2023 Valve has released an update for the Steam Deck that has better color calibration, letting the LCDs be more colorful and it works great there.

God damn though, the colors on the OLED are really good.

If you enjoy my writing, please