The Official Steam Deck Thread

[Chazore]

Captain_Yuri said:

If you have been following my thoughts on the Steam Deck, you would know that I have been one of the biggest fans of it. But after seeing this video, it has raised enough alarms for me to be in the Deal Breaker territory for now.

If you watch the video, you will see that Windows is effectively unusable. Not only does Windows perform worse but the entire thing is buggy af. And the worst part about it is the fact that there is no Radeon Settings and neither CPUz/GPUz even knows what it is. This brings up a huge problem in the PC space. See AMD has had situations in the past where they leave their APUs/SoCs to OEMs only. What that means is that every time a new game comes out, AMD optimizes their drivers but the APUs/SoCs that are OEM only do not get those driver updates until the manufacturer of the product provides the updates. So the question becomes whether or not Steam Deck is an OEM only product or will it get driver support from AMD directly on Windows?

And this is a question that to me is a make or break situation. Because the Steam Deck goes from a portable "PC" experience to a portable "SteamOS" experience. Because the idea has always been, well if shit hits the fan, we can always go back to Windows and use it that way. But now, a lot of questions need to be answered. And if they are answered in a bad way, this will become a product that will heavily depend on Valve and their commitment to it.

So I suppose the dilemma for me right now is as my Steam Deck is coming in a few days... I can either keep it and hope that my concerns are a non issue or I can get a refund and if it turns out to be a non-issue, I'll have to wait until next year to buy one...

Dang it Valve!!!

The main question I have to ask Linus and others is: "why would you, when it's clearly made with one particular OS and storefront in mind?".

Like I get that you might want to tinker around with Windows, but Linus is in that "it's gotta have 8k and all the trimmings or it can fuck off" mentality, and tbh, his isn't even grounded with what people can currently afford, let alone know and want to use.

I want the deck, mainly for playing indies and older AAA titles I know the device can handle, because I've already seen benches done on the device, I more or less know what to expect with it, so playing brand spanking new AAA titles is mostly out of the question for me, but someone like Linus is going to just push the clock speeds and TDP higher, because he's just that nutty with wanting something to work now, instead of knowing when a limit truly is a limit.

At best, i'll probably use the already included emu's to emulate older games as well, but again, not pushing the device past it's limits, because I'm honestly not thrilled by burning a device or hampering perf for the sake of "I did it" (which is what Linus loves doing a lot of the time and again, I find that stupid at times vs what GN does or even Jay2C, both feel more grounded than Linus does at times). 

Also I'd expect more from MS when it comes to driver support and generally getting it to work friendlier with the Deck, than simply getting Valve to do MS's job with their OS, and we're still waiting on all these neat features MS has promised us over the years on top of that, so again, not expecting greatness with Windows on the Deck. We take the piss outta Valve taking their time, calling it "valve time", but I'm still here.... waiting for MS to drop their features and perf uplifts with DX 12 (when is "MS time" gonna start being a thing lads?, it's deserved by now).

Last edited by Chazore - on 12 March 2022