Next time I get my hands on it, I’ll give that a try!
Got my deck yesterday and I was expecting to spend a lot time configuring and tweaking but most things have just worked and instead I have found myself playing games. Wasn’t expecting that.
I normally buy these things to tinker and play around with - for example I was planning on spending days configuring some ultimate emulator setup and then never touch it again.
Instead I have just been bouncing around and playing a couple of hours of Bioshock 2, some new game that looks cool called Death Trash, Grim Dawn and Desk Job. All ran great with no changes needed except picking a community controller profile for Grim Dawn worked much better for me.
Also installed Borderlands 3 from the Epic store, which was much easier than I thought it would be. That game ran with some performance hiccups however I did no changes to the settings, it was probably set on high or something.
The graphics have been better than I was thinking they would be. Bioshock 2 for example looked fantastic and ran well, though granted that’s an older title. If I stopped and got my eye super close I could see things were made up of pixels but at the normal arm length I didn’t care. The exception to this is text. One frustrating game is FFXV which looks and plays great but has tiny, tiny text for no good reason.
The controller feels decent except for the shoulder bumpers and paddles. I can use them without pain but they don’t feel right, especially the bumpers. On any other controller my pointer fingers rest naturally on them but on the deck they rest on the trigger below and I have to bring them up to hit the bumper. Don’t like.
Still in the honeymoon phase obviously but valve spent a ton of time polishing the UI and even the desktop experience. I was expecting to already be knee deep in the command line but I haven’t had to touch it yet.
If anyone wants super easy way to transfer files to Deck, Warpinator and Winpinator is a must.
Yes, you can configure per game controls. Even in-game, the Steam button brings in the big screen overlay, where you can see battery level, configure controls per game and per Steam user. Steam Deck is properly recognized in Steam with all its buttons, trackpads, gyro motion etc.
If you hit Steam button when not running Steam, it acts like the XBox home button, bringing in XBox game bar shortcuts (assuming you run a user-mode driver for Steam controller)
Instant on and off and in-game resume works perfectly fine. Windows is far ahead of other desktop OS when it comes to sleep/resume mostly because of the long years MS and intel/AMD have spent on this part of OS/hardware since Surface and 2-in-1 PCs started coming out.
Per game power config is not present though in Steam. At least I haven’t figured out yet where it is. I am planning to install AMD Radeon driver panel, which should let me set per game target FPS and GPU features like Chill and GPU clock profile. Even without doing all that, the battery life is generally good, and the fan RPM, and heat dissipation all seem to be working properly. Steam Deck never gets too warm to touch or noisy either. The default cooling profile is quite adequate.
It’s actually quite remarkable how much functional Steam Deck is with the default Win11 installation, even before Steam is installed. With Steam, it’s heads and shoulders above SteamOs/Steam combination.
This does sound great - Valve have done a great job with SteamOS, but I have noticed a few crashes and glitches here and there that I don’t think would have happened in Windows. And it would be good to install Gamepass games locally… If you do start a thread, I’d love to know the details of what was involved, any special drivers or other software needed, etc.
Now I’m all confused about whether to install Windows again! Feels like a dual-boot would be the safest option.
Interested in seeing your guide to installing Win11. Just to get an idea of what’s involved before taking the plunge.
I was looking into it earlier and found a pretty good guide. More involved than I was expecting, but doesn’t sound too bad. (Oh, and dual-booting may not be a great option unless you have a higher storage model.)
This is a pretty thorough guide as well:
It’s delivery day today. For those of you who’ve added a micro-SD card, how well does Steam handle the secondary card as storage?
You format it, and then you can choose to install stuff on there. From the library it will only install on the drive that’s defined as default, won’t ask you where you want to install, I’ve read that from the store you can pick the drive.
You can change the files later though.
All great info, thank you greatly!
Well, clearly they are accelerating deliveries. I ordered at the end of June, and just got my option to buy a 512. I couldn’t resist, especially now that I have a train commute again.
Yeah I ordered June 22nd and just bought mine, much quicker than I thought it would be. 256gig one for me
It seems like all I do is play Noita on this thing- it’s perfect for that. Just one more run…
do you use the haptic pads for aiming and are they as reliable and accurate as a mouse?
I really like the gyro for fine-tuning aim, at least in the Aperture Desk Job demo thing.
Moving them sometimes wipes your saved games, so decide where you want it before you play it.