The Official Steam Deck Thread

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

farlaff said:

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!!!

I'm going to weigh in here and give you my honest 2 cents: first, it seems to be way too early to expect a good windows experience on a device that has just come around promising something totally different. And, at least for me, the most important is, we finally get a chance to "outwindows" the PC world in a potential popular device. Why should we insist on windows? Especially when the Deck was meant to sell steam games, first and foremost. At this point in time, I would not even offer windows drivers to consumers if I were Valve, because you are prone to bad exposal such as it happened in Linus's video (and he has to sound fatalist otherwise less clicks), but they went on and did it anyway. I'm not being critical of your positioning, because you are entitled to your liking, but I myself would love to have one right now to experience the gaming possibilities it can offer on SteamOS, and Linus for that matter (and this another thing, since afaik you can use Linux to have a PC experience on it; just not the windows one). Not to mention how good it can be for us, as consumers, to have the developers actually worried about proper optimization of PC games for not so powerful devices, which is just another win in my book.

So, if I were close to you, I'd offer to buy yours. ;)

I would agree with what you are saying if it wasn't for the fact that there are compatibility issues with SteamOS. Even some verified games single player experiences that seems to have issues such as Horizon Zero Dawn crashing/stuttering every 30 minutes after 5+ hours. Some games may never even work on SteamOS since they have anti-cheat or DRM. And on top of that, we have a situation where the list of verified games is quite small as of right now compared to how many games there actually is on Steam. (Technically, you can play most non-verified games without issues)

Now eventually, I am hopeful that it will get to the point where majority if not all games on Steam will be properly verified to the point where they will all work flawlessly. But until then, Valve should have given us early adopters a good Windows experience so that as we wait until Valve works their way through 60,000+ games, we could play the games that are having issues on the SteamOS on Windows. Plus having features like Suspend on Resume being a SteamOS feature will generally ensure people pick SteamOS if the game works on both Windows/SteamOS. So I really don't think they needed to go this far and gimp Windows for SteamOS to be a success.

With that being said, I will be getting my unit today and since Valve has 14 day return policy, I'll give it a fair shot since I do still want a device like this. So we will see.

Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 14 March 2022