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Comment on How good is the Steam Deck really? (Not a gamer)

KoboldCoterie@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The only things I’ve found that just straight up don’t work on the deck are things with draconian anti-cheat (which don’t work on Linux in general, not just the deck), and very old titles that have weirdly restrictive resolutions or control schemes or whathaveyou. Some games require some tweaking (mostly around controls, occasionally changing the Proton version, which is very to do within Steam), but generally that’s been minor. The things that don’t work well are typically things you wouldn’t expect to work anyway.

It’s a fantastic piece of hardware for gaming. Looks great, feels great. It’s a bit large (won’t fit in a pocket, obviously), but that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who would reasonably want a handheld gaming PC. It’s not a phone or a Gameboy.

I was without a desktop PC for a week or so due to a hardware failure, and was able to do everything I needed to do on the Steam Deck (with a USB mouse/keyboard, plugged into a monitor via a dock). So it’s a great piece of hardware even for that.

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transientpunk@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

and very old titles that have weirdly restrictive resolutions or control schemes or whathaveyou.

This is correct, but as an addendum, for a lot of very old games (that don’t fall into that previous category), it’s usually easier to get them working under Linux than it is under Windows. Go figure.

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CMahaff@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ll just add that another, albeit smaller, category of games that don’t work are really new, demanding titles. There’s not a lot of them for now, but naturally the deck wasn’t the most powerful device to begin with and over time less titles will work well.

Starfield was pointed out to me as an example of one that can’t run on the deck for performance reasons (not that Bethesda is known for their optimization) and BG3 was only barely playable at the lowest settings in the more demanding areas of the game (i.e. Act 3).

That said, for its price point, and considering most games are using the proton compatibility later, I was actually very impressed with its performance.

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