What does your battlestation look like? PS4/5, XBox, PC or some oddball Chinese retro handheld?

  • Daedalus@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    As another steam deck user (~1 year of 1-4h daily usage):

    performance/compatibility:

    • modern AAA games can be played but expect low settings and 30FPS. I don’t play many of those so it’s not a problem
    • indies work, with good battery life
    • old PC games work well, e.g. Fallout 2 on Steam out of the box - the trackpads are important here to replace mouse. Don’t expect to play a micro-heavy RTS though.
    • AAA games from 2012-2020 (~PS4 generation) work with good enough battery life for my commute (~1+1h)
    • setup of emulators is trivial with EmuDeck
    • switch emulation works (a recent yuzu update bumped performance to ‘as good as switch’ for almost everything.
    • PS2, PSP, Wii (and everything older) emulation works, but don’t expect PS3 to work
    • most multiplayer games with anticheat don’t work
    • modding windows games (outside those with Steam Workshop support) is impractical, you need to go into desktop mode and mess with the particular proton ‘bottle’ for that game
    • adding third-party games is easy (add the game’s binary to steam and tell it which Proton to use)

    ergonomics/size:

    • it’s big, not laptop big, but a backpack is the most practical way to carry it (I carry it with my work laptop)
    • It’s really comfortable to hold - personally it’s more comfortable than my Logitech F710 (controller) - but I have big hands

    reliability/stability:

    • no SW issues so far, good cadence of updates
    • no analog stick drift so far
    • no measurable battery degradation so far

    hardware:

    • not the easiest device to take apart (e.g. if you want to upgrade the SSD)

    other:

    • a good big uSD card may be preferable to buying the most expensive model, I have e.g. Witcher 3 on an uSD card and loading is (subjectively) fast enough.
    • steam has per-game controller schemes which you can download from other users, this is especially convenient for strategy games where there’s no ‘common scheme’
    • you can set screen refresh rate and FPS limit per-game, e.g. for turn-based games I go way down with FPS (~20) to save battery
    • people complain about the screen, IMO it’s comparable with any ‘normal’, non-OLED monitor

    There’s also a considerable dev community around Steam Deck, e.g. decky-loader for plugins, and already mentioned EmuDeck.