1y ago

What’s next for the Steam Deck?

www.destructoid.com What’s next for the Steam Deck?

As improving tech hyper-accelerates the aging of all platforms, how is the Steam Deck holding up in the year 2023?

23 comments

Garbage articl. With the lightening speed of gaming hardware. No, it hasn't accelerated, if anything it's slowed down. My deck will be fine for years to come, I don't know anyone who is ready to drop theirs because it feels out of date
- Pretty much. I went from a Commodore Vic-20 to a Tandy 1000TX in around a decade. I'm decommissioning a desktop that was cheap 10 years ago. It gets the job done, and you can play Minecraft on it. A game I played first about 13 years ago. I just got around to (mostly) finishing Fallout: New Vegas, a game over ten years old.
  Even if the bleeding edge is improving, the quantitative improvement in the number of bits pushed through a graphic card is nothing like the qualitative change from CGA to EGA, or even to VGA. I remember around the time of SVGA and it's Amiga quality graphics (16 million colours!) thinking that even if processing power was improving, it would mostly go towards frame rates, on the fly rendering, and miniaturization.
  Add in the slowing down of Moore's Law, you have to ask what would a Steam Deck 2 do that the existing Steam Deck doesn't do? Marginally better screen resolution, marginally better battery life? I'm playing No Man's Sky with the frame rate locked to 30fps. A hypothetical SD 2 that let me get 60 or even 120 fps might be nice, but that covers nowhere near being able to play NMS anywhere on the go.
  Between the ROG Ally, the Legion, and Aya and GPD, I think there is lots of competition emerging in this form factor, but I think Steam is on the right track. Support the SD1 for a few years at least.
  
  Exactly. If they do I think the term "hardware refresh" is great. Not worth upgrading if you have one, but if you are getting one now, eh great you get some sleek new hardware. For us though - a few more pixels or a few more frames per second, probably not even really noticeable if they sat next to each other.

Not feeling a need to replace mine anytime soon. It's able to run more than enough stuff I haven't played yet to cover any time I might want to spend gaming away from home. And at home, I have my desktop.
- Also there is steam link if it isn't beefy en9ugh for a AAA title and your desktop is beefy enough
  
  It also works through the net, which some people don't know about. It used to be LAN only at first
- There're so many games I haven't played so it's easy to find games that perform well on the Deck. That'll still be the case for a long time, so I don't know I'll actually have to upgrade. But I'm also still fine with an RX 580.
- I agree, honestly. The way I have it configured, I can even run Starfield (although the way I initially had it, the graphics looked like something off of a PS2/3 or a 3DS, and now the loading screens actually give me plenty of time to read the loading screen tips).
  And the indie games (and also Elder Scrolls Online) that I normally play don’t even give me that much trouble.

"Consumers demand more and better graphics" Nah, we want optimization now thanks to the Deck. Games like Armored Core VI that are able to downscale fo. The Deck is REALLY nice while games like Remnant 2, which is an absolutely wonderful game, is completely unoptimized and only now can run on the deck ok after a big update for "Potato mode" graphics.
And yet some of the best AAA games of the past that can look better run at 60fps.
If anything, developers have gotten out of control with specs required to run their games. Jedi: Survivor is just ridiculous and more games seem to follow suit. Nintendo is obsessed with optimizing for lower end hardware, but imagine if they made a game squeezing out each and every ounce of what a game can be nowadays on newer hardware. We'd see some seriously amazing new optimization techniques as well as showing off the buffoonery that is the current specs situation. Hell, they already did it with Tears of the Kingdom anyways.
- The Deck is got roughly 1.4 TFLOPs of GPU compute. Optimization is not some magic word that can overcome hardware limitations. There comes a point where games indeed demand more. A mid-range RTX 3060 will offer around 11 TFLOPs of compute.
  
  If fsr and dlss are any indication, new technology has the capability of improving that performance for lower end hardware. The problem we're seeing now is that games are using dlss and fsr to "optimize" games instead of optimizing the game first then adding those technologies afterwards. I'm not saying every dev is doing this, but there are clear standouts where fsr and dlss are being used to pick up the slack for optimization, Starfield being the latest culprit.

Destructoid? I thought that site went under long ago.
- Nope, still chugging along. I've been pretty happy with them for game news over the years.
- I love them not because stories like this but because they are the only ones I know that publish games reviews almost on a daily basis, which is the only thing I want from a videogames news outlets.

Are there any games similar to Patch Quest? I think the ability to play the game in short bursts and get progress on it at any time is a good fit for the portability of the Steam Deck.
- I know absolutely nothing about Steam Deck, but it seems like games made for mobile gaming might have potential. COD Mobile comes to mind. That paired with better graphics, more power, and a controller-like interface, with cross-platform between the deck and mobile like Minecraft did with the bedrock edition seems like an idea...

"hyper-accelerates the aging of all plaforms" that's a funny way to spell "planned obsolescence" but you do you

A larger and better screen and overall better buttons is the only I need.

I don't have deck just yet, but I plan to get it. I much rather buy it over something like Rog ally, cause I really appreciate it is running linux and how it has contributed to Linux gaming overall.
And, Rog ally is way more expensive, and being able to play triple A games is not important for me, I have my PC for that. I want deck to play my small indie games.
- There's also the fact that the Rog Ally mainly gets higher performance by just dumping more electricity into the APU. It doesn't really help that much that the Ally can perform better if it has to give up it's portability to do so. The deck having such better power efficiency with low power games is more valuable to me than the Ally being able to drain it's battery super quick to place a poorly optimized game at mediocre quality.

23 comments