Steam Deck: Thread 01

[nonny]

nonny
There's no way I could be bothered going through the hassle of opening up a Deck again or setting up dual booting so I wondered, which do you think is the preferable device set up given you've had both?

Steam Deck with Upgraded SSD and Dual Boot
or
Steam Deck OLED unmodded

I would go with the OLED all the way. I am personally waiting for 2TB SSD to drop in price (currently around £160) and for Valve to officially support dual boot before I venture down that path again. It works and the controller support on Windows is now decent, but patch updates to windows can break the front-end menu system for dual-boot and it's a pain to fix it.

As for the OLED. It is a glorious machine and I think if you don't have any steam deck already then just ignore the LCD model and go for the OLED... regardless of SSD size. It runs quieter. It is noticeably lighter to hold and the battery life is some 30-50% longer depending on the use case.

Plus 1TB SSD are dropping in price all the time and is what I would consider the entry-size for dual booting in future so you can always go for the 512GB OLED model now and wait for better support later.

Also... XB Play is now a paid app through the steam store (£4.99) if you want a super-simple method of setting up cloud/remote play for Xbox and if you're a PS5 user Chiaki now supports full HDR for remote play there.

Short version: Go OLED.

XBPlay on Steam (steampowered.com)​

[Neon Ignition]

Assuming it arrives and is in good order etc I may have managed to snag a 512GB Steam Deck OLED for £170 so the temptation has been whether to sell off the existing model and keep the new one. It's nice knowing the Deck is 'fully open' for whatever I need but in reality it doesn't get a huge amount of hours so I usually end up using the Steam Library anyway

[nonny]

How the hell did you get an OLED model for that much? That is an absolute bargain

[Ouenben]

Assuming it arrives and is in good order etc I may have managed to snag a 512GB Steam Deck OLED for £170

How?? First the PSVR2 for £50 and now this. Tell us!

[Lebowski]

He's this forum's Dell Boy, or he knows a man and a dog

[nonny]

I would assume it is stolen at that price...

In other news I noticed a few days back Halo Infinite multiplayer now works really well on the Steam Deck after the season 05 updates. On the OLED it even runs in full HDR and looks pretty amazing as a result.

The best settings I've found are to set everything to low preset and reduce the resolution scale to 95% with a target low/high framerate of 60fps. That way the game pretty much locks to 60fps throughout.

It's so much better than I remember it the last time I tried it out and I've actually been fairing pretty well in the big team battle modes. Just have to get my setup right on the controller now and use the back buttons for some things.

[Neon Ignition]

To be fair, I'm still waiting for it to arrive so I may yet get bamboozled It's in the post but looks like a next week job.

The PSVR2 was sheer blind luck, I think it's been the better part of 20 years since I last snagged a bargain via ebay

The Steam Deck OLED - Well... I discovered the wonderous world of Vinted this week

[wakka]

So you've managed a Steam Deck OLED and PSVR2 for £220?! That's, what, an 80% discount

Gotta hand it to you. That is some serious bargain hunting.

[Neon Ignition]

The danger is it's creating a compulsion, I've spent so much time scanning the site now
Yesterday I saw a Switch OLED for £110 - ENOUGH THOUGH

[nonny]

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/leak-msi-claw-handheld-to-use-intel-apu/

A new challenger enters the ring...

[nonny]

Small tip to anyone using the Steam Deck (particularly the oled) for Xbox remote play.

I've purchased XB Play on the steam store for £5 to give it a run against Greenlight, which is a free app obtained from github.

Both do exactly the same thing but XB play attracts a fee and has multiple bells and whistles.

What I've found is most of those extra features are a bit useless. There's an onscreen touch pad, game mods, mic support and the ability to tweak the video stream bandwidth.

Some of that tweaking video is also supported in Greenlight so it almost feels unnecessary.

What is worth the £5 fee though is the clarity boost feature. There is support for FSR and FSS but neither of these are of use on the decks 800p screen... the main thing I have found does make a difference is the sharpener options.

In particular the High Pass Filter (HPF) option makes a huge difference to the detail on the OLED screen. You can do an onscreen side by side comparison in the app and even on a basic remote play stream it adds a tonne of detail where it is generally blurry and washed out.

What seems to be happening in XB play which is different to Greenlight is it looks like it's streaming at 1080p60 and not 720p60, then downsampling the video to the deck screen.

Whatever is going on having that high pass filter makes the picture quality miles better and makes that £5 cost will worth it.

I should note the app is also available on Android/iOS so if you pay £5 to unlock it appears that is for all platforms where you can use it.

Not bad.

[hudson]

Just wanted to pop in and talk about how my Steam Deck now has a new life as my desktop PC. I got a lovely keyboard and mouse for it at xmas time. It now sit on my desk in it's dock, I just wiggle the mouse and we are go. Mostly I use it for a bit of web browsing, YouTubing and the like, but I also have it running games such as Lethal Company, Monster Hunter Rise, Street Fighter 6, Counter-Strike 2, Euro/American Truck Driver etc etc. It's just great.

I originally bought the device as I had long time fell off the PC master race wagon due to starting a family, so consoles were just quick and easy. When the Steam Deck was announce at such a decent price, I thought I could get back into Steam library and discover some PC only games. The first being Vampire Survivors!

So yeah, this is where I'm at. I have a gateway to games on numerous platforms. Gamerz unit3!

[Lebowski]

Vampire Survivors! is on xbox Game pass and the Switch store, it launched on xbox not long after the pc version came out of early access,

October 2022 pc,
December 2022 Xbox

I'm super tempted to pick up a steam deck this year for some remote play and to get back into PC indie stuff, With the Playstation portal being such a let-down it kind of makes a massive amount more sense to get a steamdeck vs the one-trick pony that is the portal. It's nice that they're so readily available now too compared to the **** show that is most modern tech availability.

[hudson]

Yeah I finished it on all those formats Such a great chill out game.

[nonny]

Just wanted to pop in and talk about how my Steam Deck now has a new life as my desktop PC. I got a lovely keyboard and mouse for it at xmas time. It now sit on my desk in it's dock, I just wiggle the mouse and we are go. Mostly I use it for a bit of web browsing, YouTubing and the like, but I also have it running games such as Lethal Company, Monster Hunter Rise, Street Fighter 6, Counter-Strike 2, Euro/American Truck Driver etc etc. It's just great.

I originally bought the device as I had long time fell off the PC master race wagon due to starting a family, so consoles were just quick and easy. When the Steam Deck was announce at such a decent price, I thought I could get back into Steam library and discover some PC only games. The first being Vampire Survivors!

So yeah, this is where I'm at. I have a gateway to games on numerous platforms. Gamerz unit3!

This is pretty much the same as me. I have a small NUC PC which I run as a plex server but it doesn't have any gaming chops at all so the Steam Deck has basically become my gaming PC... though I use it a lot in handheld mode and occasionally hook it up in the dock to play on a monitor.