Valve Left Me Unsupervised: Steam Deck Hardware Review

[jakkuh_t]

 

[DANK_AS_gay]

Really looking forward to the iGPU performance boost in laptops and desktops! As someone whose fastest discrete GPU is a GTX 480, having an iGPU capable of basic gaming would be really nice. Plus Vega 8/10 were already promising. This is the beginning of an era, an opportunity for AMD to work things out with the Steam Deck before selling their newest iGPU technology later this year.

[BiotechBen]

1 minute ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

Really looking forward to the iGPU performance boost in laptops and desktops! As someone whose fastest discrete GPU is a GTX 480, having an iGPU capable of basic gaming would be really nice. Plus Vega 8/10 were already promising. This is the beginning of an era, an opportunity for AMD to work things out with the Steam Deck before selling their newest iGPU technology later this year.

Currently owning an APU with Vega 10, the biggest letdown is the stupid 2gb maximum ram allocation. If it were allowed to get up to 4gb, it would be phenomenal. As it stands right now with 2gb, it feels artificially kneecapped.

[DANK_AS_gay]

3 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Currently owning an APU with Vega 10, the biggest letdown is the stupid 2gb maximum ram allocation. If it were allowed to get up to 4gb, it would be phenomenal. As it stands right now with 2gb, it feels artificially kneecapped.

Latency is bad enough as it is, I'm not sure the additional VRAM would really benefit the APU with the bandwidth and latency issues you get from using the far slower system RAM vs GDDRX.

[williamcll]

Can't wait to see the competition. Wonder how well a 6600U would compare. 

[samcool55]

That very last question about a conflict with savegames is something that we already know.

It will just ask which save is the right one. Had that happen a few times in the past.

Steam will just give you the 2 dates of the savegames and ask you if you want to keep the local one or the cloud one.

 

If u notice the time from the cloud one isn't what you expected because the steam deck didn't sync, you just cancel the sync, turn on your steam deck, let it idle for a few moments (it will sync in the background and afaik it won't always tell you it's syncing, if it does it shows as a download) and then u can launch the game again on your other device. You'll see the cloud sync date is correct now so u sync that and off u go!

 

Or if u notice your progress isn't there you need to let your steam deck sync too.

 

Also few suggestions:

 

How do you update the OS?

How do you install steam OS after an SSD swap?

What about backups?

What about the BIOS? Anything interesting there?

[Senzelian]

I was hoping for the software video to be released today. I don't really care about the hardware all that much.

What I am expecting is the Steam Deck to "just work" with Steam games. I just want to go into the Steam shop and download a bunch of indie and other titles and play them.

[Needfuldoer]

Sounds like the biggest complaints are in the software itself (the OS), or are at least addressable by software updates (haptics). I think that makes sense; software can be fixed relatively easily post-launch, hardware fixes would require a recall.

 

I think the first few months of general availability will look almost like a public beta. Core functionality will work fine, but everyone will run into their own issues as they run into edge cases that Valve may not have explored themselves. Hopefully, software updates will come quickly to address them once Valve has a mountain of bug reports and user feedback they can analyze.

 

What I'd like to see is the Steam Deck's OS running on commodity PC hardware. Could this be the beginning to a stealthy return of the Steam Machine?

[CerealExperimentsLain]

39 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Also few suggestions:

 

How do you update the OS?

How do you install steam OS after an SSD swap?

What about backups?

What about the BIOS? Anything interesting there?

Valve put a lot of restrictions on what could be shown at a this point.  You are surely going to see all of this from LTT and many others, but they can't do that till after the 25th, which is when they can do as they damn will please with the hardware.

[mahyar]

43 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

How do you update the OS?

 

sudo pacman -Syyu 

 

3 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

What about backups?

 

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=wherever

[mahyar]

39 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

Steam shop and download a bunch of indie

the main problem is AAA and anticheat stuff, indie title work just fine (in my experience) 

[BiotechBen]

1 hour ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

Latency is bad enough as it is, I'm not sure the additional VRAM would really benefit the APU with the bandwidth and latency issues you get from using the far slower system RAM vs GDDRX.

Even if it did something like prefetching, I wouldn't mind a longer loading screen if it was able to get a good chunk of the graphics data proactively, or do like the Xbox 360 did with a small amount of embedded memory to counteract the latency, which I think is how the infinity cache works.

[Quackers101]

um, did they say if they used the same resolution for all devices and if they messed up the fps comparisons, or was it all the same setting and resolution?

 

Also would the direction of handhelds to become more like the nintendo switch, in both having the controls in hand while the main system/monitor is it's own base? as mentioned in the steam deck being heavy to hold or use as an handheld in certain situations. Also when some things suffer when you put a "load" on the system you are going to hold.

Edited February 7, 2022 by Quackers101

[Ultraforce]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

How do you update the OS?

How do you install steam OS after an SSD swap?

What about backups?

What about the BIOS? Anything interesting there?

 

1 hour ago, Senzelian said:

I was hoping for the software video to be released today. I don't really care about the hardware all that much.

What I am expecting is the Steam Deck to "just work" with Steam games. I just want to go into the Steam shop and download a bunch of indie and other titles and play them.

As Cereal Experiments mentioned there are multiple levels of restrictions that Valve has and that only hardware is allowed to be shown from today's one with software being at some later date.
 

But for samcool as mahyar mentioned probably updates are going to be able to be done just through linux terminal and maybe Steam OS will also have either a dedicated app or just expect people to use Discover which is the graphical package manager(so it would have a bunch of apps and also allow you to update those apps) that comes by default with the desktop that Valve is using.

[GhostRoadieBL]

time to start drawing pentagrams and summon a non-scalped one before 2023. just saw a $2200 Feb pre-order confirmation on ebay

[CerealExperimentsLain]

27 minutes ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

time to start drawing pentagrams and summon a non-scalped one before 2023. just saw a $2200 Feb pre-order confirmation on ebay

Or just wait in the queue on Steam like the rest of us?

[GhostRoadieBL]

17 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Or just wait in the queue on Steam like the rest of us?

it's a joke. you may have missed that part

[Senzelian]

2 hours ago, mahyar said:

the main problem is AAA and anticheat stuff

I wouldn't want to play AAA games on the Deck anyway. For that I have my gaming PC.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

29 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I wouldn't want to play AAA games on the Deck anyway. For that I have my gaming PC.

Me, a retro PC Gamer: "AAA from what year? "

[RejZoR]

dbrand could solve the charging port positioning by giving their case a connector splitter that allows plugging in USB-C cable from top or the bottom and both would connect to the Steam Deck's top one.

[Arika]

still can't even reserve one in australia. it's going to be like the index; multiple years until it's available here...

[Helpful Tech Witch]

4 hours ago, mahyar said:

the main problem is AAA and anticheat stuff, indie title work just fine (in my experience) 

all the major anticheats work now, and in eacs care (the worst one) all the devs need to do is to flip a switch in the web portal, and no rebuild of the code is required. All non complient anticheat games should now be marked as unsuported though

[Skyyblaze]

I would like to say that physics rubberbanding in Forza Horizon 5 isn't something unique to the Steam Deck or its software. I had the exact same issue with my old 8600k CPU on Windows when I tried to run the game at 1080p 140fps with G-Sync. From my observation it happens when the framerate either fluctuates too much or when my CPU hit about 100% utilization.

 

It felt like the game tries to keep the graphics-pipeline running smooth at all costs once the CPU maxes out and then limits the physics thread or something like this. I could alleviate the issue by capping my frame-rate to about 70fps, then the issue never happened unless I somehow had alot of cars at once on the screen in a busy environment.

 

Not sure if Linus or Jake will see this but I wanted to put it out there, maybe try to run the game capped at 30fps and see if that fixes it also.

[MultiGamerClub]

Gone before i could even buy it, not so unusual.. given the current situations.

Said i could reserve for 2 seconds before refreshing saying nope.

COME ON GIVE ME OPTIONS XD

Edited February 8, 2022 by MultiGamerClub

[rushboarduk]

I think we can assume the "secrets" on dbrand's Killswitch page are as follows:

2. Built-in Kickstand
3. Grips
4. Upgraded Ports
5. Better Blade (paddles)

The only way to go even better, maybe, would be custom-branded surfaces on the case, or components we can 3D print.