Comment on Supposed Steam Deck killers are missing the point
Nefyedardu@kbin.social 9 months agoIt's the principle of "do one thing and do it well". There's nothing wrong with running games in a desktop but there are limitless ways of customizing a PC and it's impossible for developers to account for everything. It would be nice if you could just write some code and have it work flawlessly for everyone's setup but that's not how it goes. For the use case of the Steam Deck where you are dealing with a low-TDP gaming device it makes more sense to have something like gamescope which can just cut out all non-gaming processes entirely. Maximize performance and battery life with a nice interface to boot. And at the very least it makes troubleshooting super easy when stuff does go wrong because there's very few external things to factor in.
ExLisper@linux.community 9 months ago
I totally agree, consoles a better for simply running games because the entire UI/UX is designed to run games. But it doesn’t really make them less finicky. There are still separate build with separate bugs. Cyberpunk was buggy on PS5, right? And with PC you’re free to upgrade to whatever specs you need. With consoles developers have to try to adapt their games to fixed, sometimes years old specs and the results can be not great (like with Zelda).
moody@lemmings.world 9 months ago
The point is that a PC has a million possible configurations that can affect performance. A pared-down environment, like gamescope, cuts down on most of the software-side issues that a PC deals with.
Yes, just installing a game on Windows and running it is pretty simple, but these days lots of games have anti-cheats which can be triggered by other software running (or even just installed) on the computer. Windows on its own has a ton of overhead due to all the background and telemetry processes always running.
A console forgoes a lot of that background stuff, and limits the hardware compatibility issues by being a fixed environment. Your game only needs to run on one specific combination of hardware for each console it’s released on. In that sense, it is a lot less finicky than running it on a PC.