Steam Deck (handheld from Valve)

[Dudley]

19 hours ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

Wait a minute, I thought the Deck would be able to handle PS3 emulation? If I try it, will it end in tearz?

 

It'll end in 20fps. If you're lucky.

[Camel]

I might get a different broadband account set up strictly for use with this thing. Or is joining the two-WAN clan a step too far? 

[earlymodernsteve]

18 hours ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

Noob question, since I'm completely new to this Linux lark. If I want to dabble in different regions of the Steam Store, can I just change the region in my settings? Or do I need to mess about with a VPN, or would a straightforward rebel DNS be enough?

Generally speaking, VPNs aren't a great solution for Steam as they used to be pretty quick with code revoking/banning etc. This may have changed recently but the portable Deck may be different anyway as you could feasibly move it between regions in your hand luggage

[Mr. Gerbik]

1 hour ago, Camel said:

I might get a different broadband account set up strictly for use with this thing. Or is joining the two-WAN clan a step too far? 

More than one WAN is a bit overkill if you're living in a standard 3 to 4 bedroom house. But I'm sure there are also rich forumites living in villas with like 36 chambers or something, and in that case it might make sense.

[Myshkin]

Chambers lol

[Calashnikov]

One thing I’ll be glad of with Steam Deck is the accuracy of the track pads. I’d been dreading playing mouse-controlled games like Chicory and Disco Elysium on a console with unwieldy analogue sticks, but with the Deck’s trackpads I can be all careful, click click.

[esar]

5 minutes ago, Calashnikov said:

One thing I’ll be glad of with Steam Deck is the accuracy of the track pads. I’d been dreading playing mouse-controlled games like Chicory and Disco Elysium on a console with unwieldy analogue sticks, but with the Deck’s trackpads I can be all careful, click click.

 

Playing games with your Uzi (Pinky Ring)s

[Uzi]

[Mallet]

Does anyone else check their Steam deck page every few days in the hope to see if their arrival time has been brought forward?

[Mr. Gerbik]

I can't wait for the Steam Deck, love the idea of bringing my Steam Library wherever I want. At home, on the bus, or the Brooklyn Zoo - everywhere!

[jonamok]

12 hours ago, Mallet said:

Does anyone else check their Steam deck page every few days in the hope to see if their arrival time has been brought forward?

Pffft. Every few days. 

[bm]

On 27/08/2021 at 08:34, jonamok said:

Pffft. Every few days. 

 

Me too. If there's gonna be any, I don't think we'll start to see significant movement until people are asked to start paying for it.

[jonamok]

A naive little part of me thinks they might start shipping sooner than December. Like somehow, despite the state of every other aspect of tech/gaming, Valve are ahead of schedule. And then I let out a bitter laugh, and stare again at the calendar.

[Lyrical Donut]

I hope we see a Shadowunboxin' and teardown soon.

[mushashi]

On 23/08/2021 at 14:19, Sane said:

I'm hoping for the same, the deck as a replacement for my old pc. I have an ancient i5 / GTX 970 combo that's slowly dying and buying something new seems utterly impossible and/or prohibitively expensive. Aside from its use as a portable I'm expecting/hoping the deck to be able to run things the same or better than my 970 hooked up to my 1080p TV , which is good enough for me. 

 

I'd reign in your expectations. The power limits, even if bypassed, means this doesn't stand a chance against even something as old as the GTX 970, which has both a significant processing and memory bandwidth advantage. The only relevant area the Deck is going to potentially match or beat your old PC is on the CPU side.

 

The lack of relative bandwidth and processing power on the Deck means it's best to keep to lower rendering resolutions anyway, otherwise you're just throwing performance away for rendering resolution.

 

 

People might want to keep an eye out for what happens with Intel's recently announced XeSS AI reconstruction technology, as it should be RDNA2 compatible, unlike Nvidia's proprietary DLSS. If that gets widely adopted, the Deck will remain competitive for a longer period of time.

 

 

[Calashnikov]

Camouflage chameleons, ninjas upscaling ya building.

[Mr. Gerbik]

Graphics displays melt the Deck like blacksmiths

[Uzi]

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B08HCHS64Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

200GB Micro SD card which meets/exceeds the speed limit for the slot on the deck for about £20.50-£21 delivered (depending on if you have a fee free card)

 

I'll stick the big games that need faster loading on the 256 nvme ssd and dump all the indie/smaller games onto this thing - should hold plenty

[Myshkin]

TIL that a standard sandisk saturates the Deck's SD slot. Guess it's best to leave the emu and smaller stuff on the card.

[layten]

On 29/08/2021 at 09:54, jonamok said:

Valve are ahead of schedule

Spoiler

 

[Alex W.]

23 minutes ago, Myshkin said:

TIL that a standard sandisk saturates the Deck's SD slot. Guess it's best to leave the emu and smaller stuff on the card.

Yeah, that’s a surprise. Even the Switch can go beyond U1 speeds.

[deKay]

5 hours ago, Alex W. said:

Yeah, that’s a surprise. Even the Switch can go beyond U1 speeds.

So why does Animal Crossing take 45 minutes to load?

 

Even with the fastest SD cards it’s rarely noticeably faster than the internal drive.

[Sane]

It's worth noting that the bigger cards are similarly priced per GB: the 400 GB is 39 euro and the 512 GB 53 euro. 

 

I think I will get the 512, always nice to have more storage. 

[Alex W.]

8 hours ago, deKay said:

So why does Animal Crossing take 45 minutes to load?

 

Even with the fastest SD cards it’s rarely noticeably faster than the internal drive.

 

Because even U3 is still not all that fast compared to a modern SSD.

[Myshkin]

On 01/09/2021 at 17:09, Alex W. said:

Yeah, that’s a surprise. Even the Switch can go beyond U1 speeds.

seems deliberate to drive people to the larger SKUs.

[Calashnikov]

To my crew with the SKUUUUU

[Myshkin]

this dude seems to think the specs allow for playable PS3. time will tell.

[Uzi]

4 minutes ago, Myshkin said:

this dude seems to think the specs allow for playable PS3. time will tell.

 

It prob to a limited degree can because some games run much easier than others - will depend on the software and games that are more taxing will likely struggle

[Siri]

Indeed, RPCS3 is just too much of a massive variable to state 'Yeah, PS3 games work great'. The emulator itself is still in its infancy (well, in comparison to emulation considered mature - Saturn is just about there, and I remember trying that shit out for the first time on a Pentium 4), and some games just eat shit even with the best desktop computer money can buy. 

The Aya Neo can be used as a good yardstick for 'comparable or ever so slightly better' performance on the Steam Deck, when it comes to emulation - Some PS3 games work great, other PS3 games... well, Bring The Pain until further optimisations are made. And that's fine.

[mushashi]

The Phawx (who has been in the UMPC scene for years since the original GPD Win) has a useful video showing how well RPCS3 runs on the latest and greatest available Intel and AMD low Wattage mobile options using Windows at around 30 Watts (higher actual total system power draw, so battery life would be around 1 hour on the Deck assuming it can cope with that level of power draw) and the CPUs in these machines is comparable or better than what is in the Deck (CPU being the most important factor for emulators). I don't think the days of mobile PS3 emulation are quite here just yet, unless your untroubled by ropey unstable performance: