martinist Posted July 8, 2022 Posted July 8, 2022 I'm on the cusp of snapping and buying a 3060 ti or a 3070. Might wait a month or so to see if they drop in price a little though.
Eddage Posted July 8, 2022 Posted July 8, 2022 2 hours ago, martinist said: I'm on the cusp of snapping and buying a 3060 ti or a 3070. Might wait a month or so to see if they drop in price a little though. I keep hearing that the 40 series is coming "soon", whatever that means Might be worth waiting for those to release as that would no doubt see the 30 series getting a price reduction. 1
Dcubed Posted July 10, 2022 Posted July 10, 2022 (edited) So I've been using my Steam Deck for a few days now and I wanted to give some initial thoughts... First off, I am enormously impressed with the native Steam OS experience. The UI is very slick, it honest to goodness feels like a console; it's fast, snappy, responsive and feels (mostly) really polished. It's not perfect though, I've had a few issues where sometimes the menu doesn't respond as expected (ignoring button presses, icons not being highlighted), but these are rare and usually fix themselves very quickly with a tap of the touch screen. The biggest issue though is in trying to buy games; I usually buy games on Steam using Paypal, but the Paypal pop-up page flat out does not work... meaning that I've had to buy games on the desktop and then download them onto Steam Deck after. Not ideal. The quick-settings tab is flat out amazing though, it's so dead simple and It Just Works. You can even store hardware performance profiles on a per-game basis! It's incredible! You can set TDP profiles per game and just completely forget about it! Brill! Setting brightness/volume settings works exactly as you'd expect, friends lists & text/voice chat work flawlessly, you could honestly fool me into thinking that this is a console and not a PC. The controls also work really well. I've had zero issues with controls with any of the games I've tested, all the X-input button icons show up as they should. The touchpad is also really nice, with a nice haptic sensor that gives a bit of feedback and with a trackball like feel to it. Games like Peggle play very very well with it! As far as compatibility goes, I've had no issues with stuttering, performance or full screen gameplay with games like Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (which is notorious for not playing nice with certain displays), and the framerate cap options work flawlessly with everything I've thrown at it. While I haven't tried every game I've owned yet (storage is a major issue, more on that later), I've been very impressed with the compatibility. I've only had one single game (Sonic CD) give me any compatibility issues thus far, and when you're playing? You honestly couldn't tell me that the games aren't running on Windows. Obviously, YMMV depending on your library, but thus far? Great stuff! I got my hands on a 3rd party dock yesterday and I've had the chance to try out Steam Deck on my TV as well. I'm very pleasantly surprised at how slick it all feels so far! Now, I know that there have been some teething issues with this, when the Steam Deck first came out there were all sorts of issues with the Docked experience; where a lot of them have now been addressed (such as now being able to force higher resolution settings to be available on external displays). Now, chucking the Steam Deck into a USB dock properly scales the Steam OS UI to the resolution of your display, and you can change the available resolution settings on a per-game basis within the Steam OS UI; so you can render games in 1080p/1440p/4k/whatever. Most importantly however, is the way that Steam OS handles bluetooth controllers. I've only tried out the Xbox One/Series controller so far, but it works nigh on flawlessly! You just turn it on and it automagically works. Best feature of all though? You can change the controller order within the Steam OS UI! This is a huge feature that makes it (almost) painless to swap between the Docked and Handheld experience, and greatly simplifies setting up multiplayer games! Of course, the Steam Deck can't turn off your controller for you when you're done using it, so you still have to turn off the controller itself; but that's a minor issue. Otherwise, the only other issue I have with the Docked experience is that games can't automatically switch resolutions like how Switch does... meaning that you have to set this manually within the game if you don't want to supersample down to 720p in Handheld mode. This is to be expected of course, but it's not a major issue. The games themselves look and run great. Have been able to run Devil May Cry 5 at max settings at 1080p on my TV with no issues so far. Very impressive stuff; but then again, I'm not running (or interested) in games like Cyberpunk that'll give this thing more of a workout. It's been able to run everything that I've thrown at it though with (almost) no issues thus far; and all my games happily run off of the SD card with no issues whatsoever The bigger issues with Steam Deck are those that are more fundamental and ones that you probably already knew going in... Storage. Damned storage. The long and short of it is that PC games are much larger than Switch games go on average. I only have a 256GB SD card in my Steam Deck currently (it's what I had lying around spare), but it really doesn't go very far. You will burn through SD card storage much more quickly than you will with Switch, and since the games are much larger too? Re-downloading games is that much more of a pain. One major issue that I wasn't expecting though is that Steam OS doesn't seem to recognise any USB external storage. The USB-C dock I got has a built-in SD card reader, so I tried that out? No dice. And USB harddrives/flash drives? Nothing. Steam OS just doesn't recognise it at all. This means that (as things stand), your only storage options with the native Steam OS experience is to use SD cards (via the handheld itself) or to upgrade the internal SSD; that's it. Now, I'm sure that external storage would work just fine with the desktop Linux experience? But I am not interested in using that for playing games at all, so that is no good for me (maybe I can use it for cold-storage? Dunno... will have to test that out, could be a better option than redownloading games maybe?). The other major issue lies in the desktop experience... it's Linux. I don't like Linux, have never liked Linux, and I still don't like Linux. Unfortunately, as things stand, there is currently no native support for dual booting Windows; you have to overwrite Steam OS with Windows and only have one OS booting at a time (there is currently a hacky workaround that autoboots into Windows and then gives you an option to boot into Steam OS from there, which is how the current "dual booting" works). Apparantly, Valve are currently working on a true dual-booting solution, but it's not available right now. So far? I'm very impressed with Steam Deck as a game playing device! It's almost like having a Switch PC! But if you're trying to get it to do more than just play Steam games? I think you'll be pretty disappointed. Everything involving the intended Steam OS experience is great so far though Edited July 10, 2022 by Dcubed 2
ArtMediocre Posted July 11, 2022 Posted July 11, 2022 On 7/8/2022 at 8:20 PM, Eddage said: I keep hearing that the 40 series is coming "soon", whatever that means Might be worth waiting for those to release as that would no doubt see the 30 series getting a price reduction. That usually means this fall. But there's also rumors of them postponing the launch because of the terrible 30-series demand, so now might be as good time as any to snag up a good card for a decent price @martinist. I would definitly recommend you go for a 3070 though, to have a card that'll last you a longer while. 1
martinist Posted July 13, 2022 Posted July 13, 2022 On 11/07/2022 at 10:15 AM, ArtMediocre said: That usually means this fall. But there's also rumors of them postponing the launch because of the terrible 30-series demand, so now might be as good time as any to snag up a good card for a decent price @martinist. I would definitly recommend you go for a 3070 though, to have a card that'll last you a longer while. I snapped and bought a 3070. Almost £600, gonna blow out my bank account but i'm replacing a 1060 with it so it's going to be quite an upgrade. 1
ArtMediocre Posted July 13, 2022 Posted July 13, 2022 Congrats! You're going to see quite a big bump in preformance, that's for sure I went from a 1070 to a 3080 my self, and it's such a beast!
martinist Posted July 14, 2022 Posted July 14, 2022 This thing is bigger than I thought it would be. Covers almost the entire length of my case. Also are the Nvidia drivers downloading really slow for anyone else? I'm hovering between 250 and 300kbps. They usually get done in a minute or so. Wierd.
Happenstance Posted July 14, 2022 Posted July 14, 2022 15 minutes ago, martinist said: This thing is bigger than I thought it would be. Covers almost the entire length of my case. Also are the Nvidia drivers downloading really slow for anyone else? I'm hovering between 250 and 300kbps. They usually get done in a minute or so. Wierd. You may have mentioned this before so sorry if you have and I'm just being lazy not looking past the most recent page but what's the spec of the rest of your computer?
martinist Posted July 14, 2022 Posted July 14, 2022 2 minutes ago, Happenstance said: You may have mentioned this before so sorry if you have and I'm just being lazy not looking past the most recent page but what's the spec of the rest of your computer? 1
Happenstance Posted July 14, 2022 Posted July 14, 2022 Ah very similar to mine then, only real difference is I have the 3060ti. 1
Julius Posted July 20, 2022 Posted July 20, 2022 (edited) PC features trailer for Spider-Man Remastered: Looks pretty damn great! Required specs from the PS Blog: Edited July 20, 2022 by Julius 1
Dcubed Posted July 20, 2022 Posted July 20, 2022 A GTX 950 can't even match PS4 settings? This is gonna be one real shitty PC port, isn't it?
Julius Posted July 20, 2022 Posted July 20, 2022 (edited) 37 minutes ago, Dcubed said: A GTX 950 can't even match PS4 settings? This is gonna be one real shitty PC port, isn't it? I'm not much of a PC player, but isn't picking apart the requirements for Minimum settings absolutely sidestepping the question of the port's quality? God of War had a GPU requirement of a GTX 960 for the same Minimum settings of 720p @ 30fps, but by all accounts that I've read and heard, it's a great way to play the game, and has been since launch. Ditto for the job that's been done fixing other PlayStation ports on PC (which weren't necessarily as well received at launch). More importantly, to address your first question: Remastered is the PS5 remaster of the game, with the bells and whistles that should entail (higher quality assets, etc.). It's not a PS4 game, so it's not missing out on matching PS4 settings, it's running a PS5 game on lower settings. This is not at all to speak to the quality of the port, mind you, because I don't think we really have an idea on that yet, but again, PlayStation have definitely been getting better the more of these they've churned out. God of War on PC had pretty widely known involvement from SSM, though, and I have no idea how much Insomniac is involved with the port of Spider-Man, so On the upside, there's only 3 weeks or so until it releases, so we won't need to wait long to find out Edited July 20, 2022 by Julius 1 1
Julius Posted July 25, 2022 Posted July 25, 2022 Well, my Steam Deck reservation expired on Thursday. Checked the website last Monday at 14:00 with a nebulous 'Q3 - July to September' message still being in place. A few days went by, and I honestly forgot to check the site again due to being overwhelmed at work at the moment and some personal stuff going on, but no emails, no in-app notifications, and nothing - surely I've got nothing to worry about, right? Thursday evening rolls around, I finish eating dinner, check the site...and my pre-order reservation has expired. Absolutely gutted, I didn't even bother looking into it deeper - I decided I'd try to message Steam Support on Friday morning, but I wasn't sure if there was much they could do. Friday morning I dig deeper. Now, I use Outlook for my emails, and every single email I've ever received from Steam - purchases including my initial Steam Deck reservation - all landed in my 'Focused' inbox. The kicker here? The purchase email landed in my 'Other' inbox on Monday evening, after I had checked that day. I then proceed to check the Steam app, and only purchase notifications are working - the message I received from Steam which I could see on my desktop/in desktop mode wasn't available to view here. I check the time my purchase email expired, and it was at 19:03 on Thursday...and then I check my log-in history on Steam, and see that I checked the site at 19:14. 11 minutes later! I whip up a quick message to Steam Support explaining and with a bunch of screenshots, but don't expect much in the ways of a response, so I've probably missed out - I sent them this message at 09:30 on Friday. They responded to me by 10:00, giving me the chance to buy it again. Steam Support is godlike!! And now, here I am, waiting probably another week or so for my Steam Deck to show up, but I'm getting really excited to check out the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and revisit the original Star Wars Battlefront II, as well as check out some PC classics I've never got around to playing before. I've poked my nose around at the emulation scene on Steam Deck at the moment and it looks great, I'm not one for emulation in most cases but might consider it at some point in the future for games impossible to find/buy at a reasonable price (ahem, GameCube games), games not released over here (like the Suikogaiden games), and games which would mean I need to dig out an old console and buy cables to play them because they weren't released over here for some silly reason like the rest of its series (ahem, Suikoden V, if I can get it working), but I likely won't crack on with that until I pick myself up an SD card (which I'll be in no real rush to do). @Dcubed would you recommend the dock you're using for your Deck? I'm trying to figure out which ones are worth looking into while we wait for the official one, but it sounds like you're getting on with it pretty well 1
Dcubed Posted July 25, 2022 Posted July 25, 2022 (edited) Congrats @Julius! That's awesome that they sorted that for you I'm currently using this dock, alongside this 100w charger. So far, no issues with either; works as you'd expect. Edited July 25, 2022 by Dcubed 1
Julius Posted July 25, 2022 Posted July 25, 2022 7 minutes ago, Dcubed said: Congrats @Julius! That's awesome that they sorted that for you I've never had to deal with Steam Support before but from what I've read since it seems like they're top tier. I may have cheekily mentioned this would be my first real step into the Steam ecosystem too just to give them a little nudge Maybe it's just poor experiences with Nintendo's (my brother just spent two months going back and forth with them, and through multiple Switch units, to get his sorted through warranty) and PlayStation's supports, but I was expecting them to take much longer to respond, let alone actually giving me another chance to pick it up. Again: godlike. I like to think Gabe smiled down on me Friday morning 10 minutes ago, Dcubed said: I'm currently using this dock, alongside this 100w charger. So far, no issues with either; works as you'd expect. Awesome, cheers for linking those! Will definitely take a look as playing the Deck on the TV is a huuuuuuuuuge part of me wanting to pick one up
euroninfan Posted July 25, 2022 Posted July 25, 2022 @Julius do you play fortnite or and similar battle royal game on your steam deck, can you make out the distance when shooting at someone.
Julius Posted July 26, 2022 Posted July 26, 2022 4 hours ago, euroninfan said: @Julius do you play fortnite or and similar battle royal game on your steam deck, can you make out the distance when shooting at someone. It hasn't arrived yet and I don't play Fortnite, but it seems to run great on the Steak Deck from what I can see on YouTube (though it does require additional setup, as you need to use the Epic Games Store to download Fortnite on PC these days!):
Julius Posted July 28, 2022 Posted July 28, 2022 Steam Deck has arrived in one piece Man, I wonder what I'll buy for it first... 3 1
Julius Posted July 28, 2022 Posted July 28, 2022 Vita means life Remote Play on Steam Deck is life Took around 15 minutes to set up through Chiaki with this guide on YouTube, and the results are really nice. I'll probably reserve it for slower or 2D games (though my short test with Astro's Playroom was surprisingly smooth), it'll definitely save me a penny or two moving forwards not needing to buy certain games again/multiple times if I just plan on playing them at home, and I feel could be really great for shorter grinding sessions in JRPGs. I've also hooked up my black Dualsense (as you can see!), love that the UI automatically updates to show the X and O rather than A and B when using it, and had a bit of a play around with Battlefront II, very much looking forward to playing through that campaign again. Also got my Logitech MX stuff hooked up too, so now I'm just going through my list downloading stuff and having a bit of a play around with Steam as someone who isn't really ingrained into the ecosystem, and it's great. The default controller options I got for Battlefront II weren't responsive, so I just went into the store and downloaded someone else's controller configuration, and it was all sorted. This should be a fun summer 1 1
Julius Posted July 29, 2022 Posted July 29, 2022 Steam with the Oprah energy: everyone with an outstanding Steam Deck reservation will be able to get theirs by the end of the year. Awesome stuff
Julius Posted August 19, 2022 Posted August 19, 2022 (edited) Kena: Bridge of Spirits is coming to Steam and the Epic Game Store on 27th September 2022: The new Anniversary Update (also coming to PS4 and PS5) which includes New Game+ and new abilities, will also be dropping the same day. Edited August 19, 2022 by Julius
Happenstance Posted August 21, 2022 Posted August 21, 2022 Thinking about grabbing Soul Hackers 2 next week to play on Steam Deck. Never played the first one but from what I hear this is more of a soft reboot than a sequel anyway.
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