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.
Do they care to explain the pathetically underpowered, slow, and clunky Switch? We’ll wait.
that’s always been nintendo’s MO though. with the exception of the N64 and GameCube, their consoles have all been very modest spec-wise. but the games they put out are made specifically for that hardware, so it’s usually fine.
and actually, the switch is underclocked in its stock configuration. if you have adequate cooling for it you can basically double its clock speed with a softmod, which at least for totk removed basically all stuttering for me!
It seems like the writing is leaning on being negative.
“These 2 games don’t work, even with FSR”
Okay, legitimate issue.
“This game doesn’t without FSR”
That’s what FSR is for, and now you don’t want to use it. This isn’t an issue.
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 People still make Switch games and the damn thing was already outdated at launch and they even underclocked it for good measures.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.
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. :-)
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 🤔
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.
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
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.