Supposed Steam Deck killers are missing the point
There are plenty of supposed Steam Deck killers available in the portable gaming space, from the Asus ROG Ally to the Lenovo Legion Go and all the Ayaneo and ONEXPLAYER devices in between. But none of them have managed to outright slay the dragon that is the mighty Steam Deck yet.
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I think the biggest single factor they point out is the software side of things, in combination with the other factors such as hardware/price. Although the Deck ain’t beefy, it’s got enough juice to do a lot at a battery rate that isn’t terribly abysmal, especially for lighter indie titles and emulation.
The other factor here is outside support and adoption. There are tons of options for third party customization, such as skins, buttons, pads, cases, etc. Not saying these don’t exist for the competition, just not at the same scale. Kind of like finding support for a niche android phone versus an iPhone.
The Deck runs Starfield. It shouldn’t be able to yet here I am, zipping around space on the thing. Running Linux and how crazy effective Proton is, plus having trackpads to play Crusader Kings 3, it is hard to beat given it only cost a few hundred €s.
Yeah, it doesn't run well enough that I'd suggest it to anyone like that, but if you know what you're getting into and are willing to make sacrifices to play handheld, you can.
Cities are pretty bad though.
Depends on the city but the sheer fact it runs and you can jump between desktop and handheld at your leisure is a dream come true.
Given the recent discoveries of how unoptimised the game is, with incorrect usages of DX12 and lack of batched calls, should Bethesda fix those, we might see increased frames on Deck.
Relevant Proton pull request to hopefully work around this in the mean time.
I haven't even installed it on my desktop yet. I prefer handheld anyways and most of my playtime so far has been at work and throwing the deck in my bag on a camping trip. Combine a busy week with a campsite reserved for the weekend, then NFL opening week and I haven't went too crazy with it yet. I'm at about 7 hours.
But as choppy and low res as New Atlantis is, I can do what I need to there and get back to killing shit elsewhere. 20-25 and smeared isn't good, but it's not as painful is it could be. If there are fixes that can clean it up, that would be good, though.
I'm really enjoying what the game is. There are a lot of complaints that are comparing it to things it never claimed or tried to be, but as a broad Bethesda RPG with genuine choices on how you want to play, I like the design and I like how they marry the design with the setting. I've only followed the UC story line so far, and I think it does a good job of using advanced technology to explore various ethical ideas. I'm still pretty early there, but that's trademark sci fi genre. It's not just a space skin.
Ultimately i think its just a game of optimizing CPU. Thr steam decksnweakest component reletively speaking, is the cpu, given its zen+ based and not amy of the newer generations. Starfield, reletive to other AAA games, is fairly CPU heavy. Given its likely going to take the same mod direction as fallout or skyrim, itll eventually be fixed and there will likely be some veey basic modpack that optimizes specifically for the deck.
