Refresh features include: OLED HDR 90 hz Better battery life (50wh vs 40wh) Cooler Lighter Even better performance, even though not advertised by Valve! (because of the better DDR memory 6400mt/s vs 55000mt/s) Bigger screen
Digital Foundry review:
Just watched the Digital Foundry review, unprompted by this post. Sounds like it’s a dramatically better screen, and marginally better in every other feature. Better battery, better performance, cooler temps, lighter weight, better storage…this might be the time to jump on the Steam Deck train.
Based on my experience of the current Deck I’d say it’s not for everyone, but for my use-case it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. If you’ve got a large backlog of PC games you’ve built up over the years, you’re OK with a little bit of tinkering to get some of them working, and you want to play them curled up on the sofa, then this is definitely the device for you!
Yeah man,jump right in. The waters even nicer than when it came out two years ago!
Way nicer from I’ve been told. I am fortunate that literally every game, including some obscure one from freaking 1998 just works. Some Reddit posts from years past hint it definitely had teething issues at first. Early adopter tax I guess.
Oh yeah, I got super excited when it was announced so I preordred the mid tier. Each month after its released it felt like it was getting better with the games I was playing. Considering my life w a newborn this system quickly eclipsed my gaming pc due to the sheer convenience.
The battery seems like better than a marginal improvement. Valve claims 30-50% longer battery life, but some early reviews are reporting better improvements than that (IGN reports that Cyberpunk went from 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours, same settings).
You might want to buy this one because there’s no way Valve releases a third one
Valve has already started talking to press outlets about their plans for a Steam Deck 2 in two to three years.
https://www.polygon.com/23951070/steam-deck-2-valve-interview
What the hell. Just a couple of months ago Valve was saying a new Steam Deck was unlikely for the foreseeable future, and I bought one based on that information.
They said a faster one was unlikely. This isn’t faster, so, they were the best kind of correct, unfortunately. Are you able to return yours, by chance?
Valve Deckard pls Valve Deckard pls Valve Deckard pls
Works this be any good for Sim City 3000, The Sims, or Civilization 3?
Depends. How techy are you? None of those games are officially supported on the Steam Deck, but Valve lets you dig around under the hood and install whatever you want. However, anything that isn’t on Steam and officially supported will require some work for you to get running. That said, you can play just about anything on the Deck if you’re willing to put in the time. The touchpads make the Deck very capable on traditionally kb/m games.
Ah I was wondering how mouse emulation worked
Can you play noon steam games at all, like is there a dev mode like how Chromebooks had?
There is a full desktop mode available, it runs Linux so any game that can be made to run on Linux will work.
Those games can be made to ruin on Linux
Then you should be good! As long as you’re prepared to do the work to make them run.
For what it is worth, I’ve had a few games that weren’t officially supported so I just turned on the Proton setting and it’s worked so far. Online multiplayer seems to be a sticking point though due to anti-cheat.
I’m not an online gamer, I just want to play the games I’ve been playing for 15 years
@EmergMemeHologram @vanderbilt looks like a good choice to me :)
It’s really mostly EAC and Co nowadays that are blockers. And this is not because there is no support per se. It has to be allowed though because this stuff does indeed detect that it’s not a “real Windows”.
Stupid launchers are also trouble sometimes. Looking at you EA!
Anyway, a good source to tell is still the protondb. What’s listed there usually works on the Steam Deck too. Or has workarounds explained.
