Steam Deck

Well, at least you sold it. Funny how things happen.

Obviously as you might guess I'm a big supporter and fan of the Steam Deck and would recomnend it to anyone. As for version. The only difference between the 256GB and 512GB models, other then the storage size, is the antiflare glass on the screen. For the price different I don't think it's worth it. I run most of my games from an SD card abyway with no issues. They load fast and you can put a 1TB card in too.

The only negative with the Steam Deck is its size. It won't easily fit in a pocket and not quite small enough for some quick gaming on the bus. But it comes with a very good protective carry case and is light enough and small enough to be portable for gaming away from home.

But now I would say the Steam Deck's big advantage over any other Windows game compatible handheld is Steam OS and the huge support it's receiving from Valve. They are rekeasing multiple OS updates every month, and fixing software issues, improving hardware control functionality in the updates, constantly improving the OS UI, and most importantly they are cobstantly updating the Proton compatibility layer to give more and more compatibility.

Obviously there are games that still don't work because it isn't running native Windows. But then the Steam library is massive. I think it was at 57,000 games last time I checked. And for my item library I've got a large library of over 2,700 games and over 500 of them are fully verified as fully compatible on the Deck.

But you can also get GOG and Epic game sites working. And even EA have just fixed some issues to get their games on Steam working properly because of a new version of their new game store changing.

And of course you have some great emulation support with a very easy to use all in one installer package that has just had a major version 2 upgrade.

You shouldn't be disappointed if you did buy one.
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Originally Posted by Harrison:
But now I would say the Steam Deck's big advantage over any other Windows game compatible handheld is Steam OS and the huge support it's receiving from Valve.

That was the guy's main problem, he wanted full support of Windows, that's why he didn't like the deck so much.

I won't get one now as I pre-ordered the Loki Max.
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If gaming only then as a handheld I would say the Steam Deck is the best you can get at the moment. You can obviously wipe Steam OS and install Windows 11 on it and Valve fully support this with drivers available. But performance in games is worse then using Steam OS because Windows has more overheads.

For game compatibility I've yet to run a game that hasn't worked. Even all games I've tried that have a yellow ! for Deck compatibility have all worked perfectly. That's normally just flagged because you need to enter some text using the i screen keyboard, which isn't an issue.
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Handheld for me means emulation, advantage in Windows is that you have every possible emulator available, restricted on the Odin due to Android. Loki Max comes with Windows. Just copy your LaunchBox settings over instead of starting from scratch like I did on the Odin, exporting every platform to Android and setting it up with different emulators. I mean AetherSX2 for PS2 is great, but if I can have PCSX2, there’s no doubt.
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I agree Windows can't really be beaten for emulation. But Linux emulators have come a long way, probably thanks to other Linux based systems such as from Anbernic.

EmuDeck v2 provides all I need for handheld emulation at the moment.
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Emulators have indeed become better and better whatever the system. And the deck is a fantastic handheld to run emulation on, plus the other obvious stuff. I would have set it up and put aside probably, that’s why I’m even glad I sold the OneX instead of exchanging, although I was already looking forward to it

The Loki Max is gonna be amazing, plus I absolutely love the form factor, as it’s gonna be “same” like the Odin

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I agree with the form factor. The Ayn range has just the right case size and design to make it the perfect portable.
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I decided to test out Quake 2 on the Steam Deck this morning. It said it was compatible, but with some interface issues.

It loaded up fine but was playing at 320x240 in a small square in the middle of the screen, which I thought was funny. Navigating the menu system was a bit fiddly, having to use the left stick to move through menus, the right pad to left mouse click to select, and the Steam menu key to go back up a menu. But playing around with video settings it runs well changing from software rendering to OpenGL, and at 1024x768 full screen, which isn't far off the Steam Deck native resolution. And is the highest resolution you could play the game on release of you had a Voodoo 2 card. And with these settings it looks exactly as it did with Glade3D on Voodoo 2. So I'm happy with that.

The controls needed a lot of fiddling to get every control I needed working in a way that made the game playable. Mapping controls using the games custom controls settings worked fine, although it doesn't recognise all Steam Deck controls. But eventually I managed to map forward, backwards and striving to the left stick, and free look to the right. With fire buttons on the triggers, weapon toggle on the D Pad, and other controls such as jump and crouch to the buttons. This is near to how newer games preconfigured controls on the Steam Deck.

After party testing it I did look in the game controller setup screen that the Steam Deck has got each game within the actual Steam OS game page. This can override and map in game controls to the Steam Deck controls of a game is hardwired to a layout. I didn't need to change much here but noticed I could turn on gyro controls. This worked well in FPS on the deck as the right thing sensor detects when you have your finger on the stick and then you can move the Deck add-ons to move and aim using gyro in game. Makes aiming really accurate. I haven't tested it it actually works in the game yet though.

As for the game itself, it runs at a solid 60fps. I would be worried if it didn't for a game over 20 years old, but it looks good with the settings I have, and moved and plays well. Obviously Quake 2 looks primitive by today's standards, but compared to games of that era on other systems PC FPS tend to hold up ok, other than the low poly count. There are more to improve textures and models, but that wasn't my rain to play it. Wanted to run through that game as it originally looked.

Combat and moving around were fine once I had experimented with the control setup. It's amazing how you instantly remember level maps and baddy locations. I was only playing in easy though to get the game. It the gyro setting does work for aiming I can ramp up the difficulty.

Next games I might test are the Jedi Knight games, or maybe go back to Dark Forces. Also planning on trying Return to Castle Wolfenstein too.
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Interesting development. HDR is coming to Steam Deck.

No the handheld's screen cannot do HDR. That would be impressive if true. But when docked it will be able to output to an HDR capable screen.

The issue until now has been no support for HDR in Linux. But Redhat have been developing support and Valve have been taking notice and starting to build this support into Steam OS. The fact work by Redhat only started last year in 2022 shows just how invested Valve are in Steam Deck and Steam OS development.

This will mean Steam OS will have direct HDR and Raytracing support built in, so when docked you can utiluse this on the Deck, but in theory installing the OS on more powerful PC hardware should benefit more from this too.
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