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Forums - PC Discussion - The Official Steam Deck Thread

 

Will you buy one?

Yes, I'm excited to get one. 20 34.48%
 
No, I don't think so. 22 37.93%
 
Maybe, I need to see how ... 16 27.59%
 
Total:58
Jizz_Beard_thePirate on 13 March 2022
Conina said:
Captain_Yuri said:

Steam has over 10,000 games yet only 1300sh are officially compatible with the SteamOS.

And to me, that's not a good thing, especially with SteamOS is still in such an early stage. If Valve had 90, hell 80% of the games on Steam being officially verified, then sure. But instead, it's like 10% and they aren't even verifying the games fully to make sure they are flawless with SteamOS.

Steam has over 60,000 games. Over 20,000 games with a SteamDB rating of 70% or better.

But why do you assume that most (yet) unverified games won't work with SteamOS/Proton? The number of already compatible games without Valves official check will be in the thousands, maybe even in the ten thousands. Plus thousands of compatible emulated games.

So far I've started around 50 unverified games and almost all of them worked, from "The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles" to "Sunset Overdrive". In Heavy Rain some "six-axis" inputs are a bit tricky, f. e. rubbing Ethan dry after showering.

Sure, all I played are single player games / modes, but since I don't intend to play multiplayer modes on a handheld, I couldn't care less about "anti cheat" problems.

I don't have any doubt that most games will eventually be verified to work with the Steam Deck but that's not my issue. My issue is that the device is in it's very early stages with no safety blanket. When Valve said this would be a PC, I figured that Valve would do their own optimizations and what not on SteamOS but on Windows, the interface would work decently enough and the GPU driver support would be from AMD. The reality is that this doesn't seem to be the case which makes this a big issue because this is no longer a traditional PC. And that means that everything about it is up to Valve to do with some assistance from AMD.

This means that if say it doesn't pan out, then I can't just go to AMD's website and get the latest GPU driver and play the latest games at a reasonable performance on Windows. It also means that if Valve ever decides to stop supporting the Steam Deck, then it will be up to the open source community to provide driver support on Linux and not AMD. Now Steam Deck is obviously a success as the earliest you can get one is Q4 of this year and I am sure Valve will fulfill their promises eventually. But that eventuality is a long ways away and buying it now with limited Windows support feels too risky.

And even some single player games are having issues such as Horizon Zero Dawn as mentioned in the video. Once you go above 5 hours, it starts crashing or gives you stutters every 30 minutes because of Linux. Who knows what other issues games will have because Valve is clearly not testing the games fully.

Now maybe I am wrong and AMD just hasn't released official drivers yet on their website for Windows. Hell maybe I am just overthinking this in general. But at it's current stage with limited Windows support, I think I'd be better off waiting for the finished product which pains me because of how much potential this device has.

Chazore said:
Captain_Yuri said:

maybe I should get a refund and wait instead of committing.

Honestly, yeah, I would be in that same boat and it's why I'm just sitting back and waiting for things to pan out with the Deck. If I have to wait years and years for MS to finally release these features they keep boasting about for PC, then I'm going to have to for the Deck and it's supported games list/drivers as well.

At the end of the day though, I just want to move away from Windows, and that's taken time for Linux to reach this point, so with Steam OS, it will also take time to wait till it reaches a decent point for me to move over.

Everyone buying the Deck at this moment in time should know that they are all a form of early adopter, and it's why I choose not to be one, because I know the pitfalls of what that crowd get into when they choose to adopt stuff early on (it's also why I stopped bothering with AAA games day 1/month 1/sometimes year 1, because they mostly come out half baked, content and perf wise).

Yea like I knew I was going to an early adopter but I figured that the worst case will be that I can turn it into a Windows PC and have that as a fallback but alas, Valve decided to not go that route. While I still think it will be a success, I think I'd be better off with a wait and see approach. I wouldn't mind not using Windows once the Deck has reached it's final form but until it does, it's too much of a risk for me.

Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 13 March 2022

                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

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farlaff on 14 March 2022
Conina said:

Yeah, one of my favorite Xbox One game with 60 fps 800p on Steam Deck:

Even on Xbox Series X you have to settle with 30 fps 900p.

Looks awesome.



My 1000th post: https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9368779

farlaff on 14 March 2022
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. ;)



My 1000th post: https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9368779

Chazore on 14 March 2022
farlaff said:

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. ;)

See this is why I dislike most of what Linus does these days. The dude has stopped being all about in depth technical info, in favour of short cut videos on semi building PC's (and breaking them along the way, because that's Linus) and his biggest pitfall is him focusing more on getting those clicks and baity thumbnails.

Also doesn't help that the guy puts a lot of focus on "let's push this device/OS to breaking point and then bitch about why it's not as great as my already inflated expectations". I hate how he does this and hardly learns, because he expects everything to run near flawlessly out of the box, or for a specific company vendor to pander to his specific nit-picky issues, and when they don't, he goes and makes that a thing in his videos (like the focus on Deck and Windows drivers for example). 

I've since moved over to Jaystwocents and Gn, because those two seem to be more grounded and a little less baity than Linus (as well as not putting stupid insane focus on 8k this or completely overclock that).



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Jizz_Beard_thePirate on 14 March 2022
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

                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

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Jizz_Beard_thePirate on 14 March 2022

Steam Decks Emulation is pretty insane!

Some emulators have issues like ps3 with certain games and he didn't test switch emulation (especially as Nintendo is taking down a lot of emulation videos) but he did test up to CEMU (WiiU emulator) and they all run very well. On top of that, many emulation devs have said they are working on updates that will be optimized for Steam Deck specifically.



                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

Conina on 14 March 2022
Captain_Yuri said:

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.

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.

Well, my Windows laptop also has compatibality and/or performance issues with a lot of games.

Even many games where my laptop exceeds not only the minimum specs but also the recommended specs have issues like crashes or stuttering. Some games may never work on that device even if I'd bother tinkering with it.

But since neither my laptop nor my Steam Deck are replacing my desktop PC, I don't care if they not play every of my PC games flawlessly. I enjoy the other games which already play flawlessly on them (already hundred... probably thousand of them) and play the problematic ones on my desktop PC.



Jizz_Beard_thePirate on 14 March 2022
Conina said:
Captain_Yuri said:

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.

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.

Well, my Windows laptop also has compatibality and/or performance issues with a lot of games.

Even many games where my laptop exceeds not only the minimum specs but also the recommended specs have issues like crashes or stuttering. Some games may never work on that device even if I'd bother tinkering with it.

But since neither my laptop nor my Steam Deck are replacing my desktop PC, I don't care if they not play every of my PC games flawlessly. I enjoy the other games which already play flawlessly on them (already hundred... probably thousand of them) and play the problematic ones on my desktop PC.

That is a good point



                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

Jizz_Beard_thePirate on 14 March 2022

Mine has arrived!



Lets see how it goes



                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

farlaff on 15 March 2022
Captain_Yuri said:

Mine has arrived!



Lets see how it goes

Woohooooo! Congrats!!



My 1000th post: https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9368779