I personally have a huge backlog of games I’m happily playing through on the deck. And, having been burnt a few times (Cyberpunk, No Mans Sky …), I very rarely buy new full priced games anyway (better to wait for a discount and some patches!)
But according to this rather clickbate article …
In the last month alone, we’ve seen three disappointing examples of games that are too demanding for the Deck. Star Wars Outlaws is unplayable on Low settings, even with FSR set to “Ultra Performance.” Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 can’t reach a steady 30fps at the lowest quality setting. And based on the demo, Final Fantasy 16 is unplayable without FSR and Frame Generation, and afflicted with stuttering and horrible frame pacing with those scaling features enabled.
OMG two games don’t work! How many others do? O yea that’s right, thousands…the library for the deck is magnitudes larger than pretty much every console out there…hell I’ll say it, every console released has smaller libraries than the deck.
Oh, go figure. I thought a Steam Deck was a handheld device running off of a battery. Yeah, if you’ve got a desktop computer with a high-wattage GPU you’d expect better performance on the latest AAA graphics, huh? Weird. Cannot possibly be worthwhile to own, I guess.
IMO that’s more of a problem with the industry not really caring to support lower specs, or generally not seeing the deck as a real console or platform to target. People still make Switch games and the damn thing was already outdated at launch and they even underclocked it for good measures.
At 800p you’ve got to start thinking, is most of the detail those games compute even actually visible the on screen? How many PCs does that make obsolete? If the deck can’t run it at 800p, even at 1080p you’re gonna need what, an RTX 2060 for the lowest settings on a PC?
Some of the example titles don’t even sound like they’re the kind of titles that are made to showcase what your 4090 can do, which logically you’d want as many people as possible to be able to play it.
It’s not even about the lower specs, it’s the optimization in general.
My PC is a little old, but still fine for most games up to medium settings.
But when I tried FF XVI, which is mentioned in the article, I couldn’t get anything close to acceptable performance with everything turned as low as possible and looking like shit.Too be fair. We all now what kind of a trainwreck the ffxiv source code probably is, thanks to the 1.0 -> 2.0 recode. Your point still stands tho
FFXIV runs alright in the deck.
XVI != XIV :)
I agree with you, handheld can never compete with a desktop when it comes to raw power. So, if companies don’t consider it as a platform to target for, you’ll always have problem with latest games. Maybe not at launch, but you can’t upgrade a handheld “console” every year or two.
That’s the good thing about consoles, you buy it, and you know (most of) the games that come to the platform will just run on it.
I don’t have a SteamDeck so not sure how it works, but maybe they should make a sub-store for SteamDeck, that only has games that are verified to run on it. They can still have an option to search and download game from full steam store, but it should come as a warning that these games aren’t specifically made / optimized for Deck.
Just thinking out loud. Don’t actually know what SteamDeck owners really want. :-)
That is how it sort of works the steam store displays the games the games that work with the deck. You can install other games but you get the a warning that either it has not been testet enough to make sure that it works, or that it is not recommend because that issues with the deck.
I think, that the steam deck is popular enough, so that it can be treated as a console, were you make special “ports” of your game, which has it default settings adjusted for that console (and maybe some other patches to make stuff work)
But maybe this is just wishful thinking 🤔
Just taking a look at Steam Deck Top 100 tells me 2025 won’t be a problem lmao
This. To make the claim in the title is to not get what steam deck is about.
I mostly use the Deck for indie games and emulation so a CPU/GPU upgrade isn’t something of interest for me. A larger, 16:9 screen or better ergonomics on the other hand…
Lol this is an article about how shit optimization has been for the last several AAA game releases. Even quite capable desktops often have performance issues with the mentioned games, because the PC ports weren’t optimized enough and/or tested on a wide enough range of hardware. It’s a real shame, many of them don’t even look significantly better than the last generation or two. It’s just graphical bloat as devs get lazier and lazier the beefier the GPUs get.
I agree, however I think the main cause is studios/publishers just deciding where to allocate the time. Devs are just the ones implementing these shitty decisions.
I don’t own a Steam Deck. I am a Linux gamer, and I appreciate that it exists.
Internally it’s basically a laptop using its AMD integrated graphics, yeah? No discrete GPU? Which makes it actually pretty impressive at what it does.
It has an APU but the graphics component is quite a bit more powerful than your average laptop.
Easy solution - I just wont be buying games the deck cant run.
Optimise your games for lower end hardware. Problem solved.
The steam deck was lower end hardware when it came out. It’s natural for it to lose support right about now.
The only thing cooler than a living miracle of portable computing is an undead miracle of portable computing that I’d still be playing games on come 2025 🧛
I do think it’s about time for a successor. But that didn’t mean the current Steam deck isn’t viable any more. There are still thousands of games it will happily play. And the others can probably be made to run with some TLC from the developers.
🤷 I’ve mostly used it for MAME anyway.
Yeah well my steam deck will survive 2025 unless I break it. It’s a proper nifty little machine, so glad I bought it. I’ve not done any gaming since i had a PS2 so there’s loads of games to catch up on. Recently finished bioshock, wow. I’ve got a long list of older games, but I’ve tried a couple of newer things. It plays doom 2016 just fine, same with deathloop and beam ng drive
They never pretended it was going to run literally everything. It’s a handheld.
The fact that there are still very few games it can’t run (excluding the publishers actively blocking Linux) is impressive, but it was always expected that some games would leave it behind.
Hell, the whole reason for “deck verified” is because their default assumption is that a game won’t work.
I don’t understand how Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky were the ones that “burned” you, they’re both great games? GOTY material even?
They both had a lot of issues at launch
Every game has issues at launch, that’s why they launch them
Both mentioned games are notorious for the scale of the issues at launch, and the resulting backlash. NMS for the lack of content and Cyberpunk for the huge amount of bugs.
It seems like the writing is leaning on being negative.
“These 2 have don’t work, even with FSR”
Okay, legitimate issue.
“This game doesn’t with without FSR”
That’s what FSR is for, and now you don’t want to use it. This isn’t an issue.
