PC and Steam: Thread 02

[nonny]

My 2TB SSD drive arrived from Aliexpress yesterday so spent a few hours setting it all up last night.

I've now got it dual booting using Clover as the front end menu which is super simple to setup.

In windows 11 I've debloated it all and have it automatically logging in and sleeping correctly. Also have it booting straight into SteamOS deck UI (big picture) before explorer loads and it's running the cleaner switch-like UI.

Only thing not working in Windows is the Bluetooth/audio which is annoying but I've got a USB dongle for that until Valve sorts out releasing the drivers.

Short version almost perfect.

[huxley]

My 2TB SSD drive arrived from Aliexpress yesterday.

This makes me anxious, have you tested it with CrystalDiskInfo? Fingers crossed.

[nonny]

This makes me anxious, have you tested it with CrystalDiskInfo? Fingers crossed.

Yeah ran a few checks on it when I got it using an external caddy on my main PC. It all looks fine and healthy in the benchmarks.

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/handheld-gaming-pcs/so-looks-like-putins-ordered-the-russian-government-to-consider-the-issue-of-organising-domestic-versions-of-the-steam-deck-steamos-and-steam-itself-with-a-side-order-of-steam-machines/

[nonny]

My 2TB SSD drive arrived from Aliexpress yesterday so spent a few hours setting it all up last night.

I've now got it dual booting using Clover as the front end menu which is super simple to setup.

In windows 11 I've debloated it all and have it automatically logging in and sleeping correctly. Also have it booting straight into SteamOS deck UI (big picture) before explorer loads and it's running the cleaner switch-like UI.

Only thing not working in Windows is the Bluetooth/audio which is annoying but I've got a USB dongle for that until Valve sorts out releasing the drivers.

Short version almost perfect.

Well well, turns out I'm a happy idiot. If you hold down the menu button on steam deck in windows with steam deck tools installed you get a nice overlay menu where you change brightness, fps limit and TDP. Windows might now be my favoured OS for steam deck.

All this time and I never knew this.

Also just found the steam app lossless scaling, which adds frame gen to any PC game capable of running in windowed mode. Seems a bit hit and miss in terms of latency but when it works its great.

[Lebowski]

So got my Steam Deck OLED on the 28th and been messing with it constantly,

Amazing steam support one quick log in and my library is there with a tab for great on steam games, really nice intuitive menus and options with loads of customisation for your games, you get to take advantage of cheap game offers from steam and I've filled my library out with some pretty decent indie stuff like cult of the lamb and Balatro, and I'm able to play more demanding stuff like Cyberpunk and Death Stranding (which the switch would really struggle with), I got remote play set up on my PS5, cloud gaming on the xbox, as well as access to my Epic Games Library, and Amazon library of pc games. its like a swiss army knife for gaming with a bit of fiddling. This is backed up by an amazing community with guides for everything so it's super easy to get things set up. I finally finished Hogwarts Legacy on my PS5 via steam deck and put about 15 hours in to finish up the main quests, I had one crash out of all the time, so for a community bit of software It's pretty solid.


Around half my games didn't have steam deck verified status, despite this some games ran flawlessly whereas others required me to set up custom controller profiles, and edit these on the fly to get the game running well. Little things like clicking a text box and not getting the virtual keyboard pop up all the time is weird having to press steam and x to get a keyboard up is an interesting way to get access to the keyboard when ever you want, but why not have it pop up when you click on a text input box. Like a pc apps are prone to messing themselves up, the only major issue i had was I downloaded and added loads of games from epic via the Heroic launcher, they were running fine till the launcher updated itself, then everything stopped working. This required me to uninstall all the games I'd downloaded, delete Heroic launcher and start again.

I'm blown away by how powerful a system it is and i cant put it down at the moment i love that you can fiddle with it and add software thats non steam based and get it running in the native steam OS, though i have to admit that like with a PC you can spend just as much time fiddling and messing and not playing games on the system and for the first few days that's all i did

A few final thoughts on remote play PS5 Remote play requires a very specific set up and won't show if your two devices are not on the same network I have a mesh system for my Wi-Fi devices and a switch box for wired connections with my stock router in modem mode I had to switch my PS5 to the mesh to get it to work. PS5 remote play does not work well on Mesh devices, I had pauses and artefacts even though I'm on gig package with Virgin Media. To get remote play running well, I had to re-enable my Virgin Media Wi-Fi and use the Ethernet off the router to connect my PS5. So now I'm running a Wi-Fi network just for the steam deck, it means that I can't use the steam deck at the top of the house for remote play as the Wi-Fi is too weak. In contrast, the portal doesn't have to be on the same network to run remote play so you can remote play away from your house with that device you can't do that on a steam deck at present, the steam deck offers a lot more of a stable experience as a second screen though.

[nonny]

Are you using Chiaki for PS5 remote play? I heard it supports HDR now but I no longer have a PS5 to test it out.

For the Xbox side of things you can now grab XBPlay direct on the Steam store. It costs £5 but it gives a nice interface for remote and cloud play in the one app.

You can also tweak the video quality as well which makes the overall clarity look better. Well worth the £5 if you use Xbox on the deck a lot, plus that payment lets you also use the Android/Windows versions unlocked as well.

As for Wifi, is your mesh 6E? I heard there's a few bugs with the 6Ghz wifi on the OLED and I saw Cryobyte mentioned a fix for it which might improve stability.

As you say, the community is awesome for this device. It really is the swiss army knife.

Edit: https://youtu.be/M8eVsNnrFbw?si=_ayqnJl-qWeQxwEi

[nonny]

Just on Heroic... one thing to try is don't uninstall the games, switch to desktop and open each one from there once and usually they start working again in game mode.

At least that's worked for me in the past but I've only ever had 3/4 titles installed at any time from Epic.

[Lebowski]

Are you using Chiaki for PS5 remote play? I heard it supports HDR now but I no longer have a PS5 to test it out.

For the Xbox side of things you can now grab XBPlay direct on the Steam store. It costs £5 but it gives a nice interface for remote and cloud play in the one app.

You can also tweak the video quality as well which makes the overall clarity look better. Well worth the £5 if you use Xbox on the deck a lot, plus that payment lets you also use the Android/Windows versions unlocked as well.

As for Wifi, is your mesh 6E? I heard there's a few bugs with the 6Ghz wifi on the OLED and I saw Cryobyte mentioned a fix for it which might improve stability.

As you say, the community is awesome for this device. It really is the swiss army knife.

Edit: https://youtu.be/M8eVsNnrFbw?si=_ayqnJl-qWeQxwEi

Yeah Chiaki4deck it's pretty easy to get running they are continually improving it as well a lot of the guides now are out of date as you used to have to go into konsole and put code in to get things working but all the set up is in the app now. it looks amazing on the OLED the HDR is lovely and you can tinker with the settings till it's running perfectly on your network. I don't know why anyone would pick up a portal over this, all over Reddit and YouTube are videos of people having the micro pauses issue or connection drops. Sony really need to get the thing fixed, I'm not sure if they can though as its internals are the same as a cheap android tablet, which is evident by how slow the boot up and connection on the portal is whereas the Deck connects in seconds.

[Neon Ignition]

[Neon Ignition]

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-board-partners-expect-geforce-rtx-5090-and-rtx-5080-to-launch-in-fourth-quarter

RTX5080 and 5090 possibly back on the 2024 plate

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel/cpu-i...-unreal-engine
Intel 13th and 14th Gen CPUs reportedly having issues with Unreal

[MartyG]

An event called the "Triple-I Initiative"



I suppose it's a play on AAA for indie, but indie becoming more like AAA doesn't instil me with confidence. Anyway, there were quite a few indie games showcased in the presentation.

[fuse]

Went to use my Steam Deck yesterday and it was out of charge. Fair enough. Stuck it on its dock, then later on I came back and downloaded a few games and the usual load of game updates. There was an update for the dock which I applied, but the update for the system software threw up an error saying I should try again. I did this, about 5 times, and had the same result each time. Fine, be like that. Powered it off, stuck it back on the dock, and today I find it's pretty much bricked itself. I get a black screen with a host of "error" messages displaying in vert orientation, which eventually takes me into a purely text-based menu, where each of the 5 options fails to varying degrees and boots me back to the same menu.

Would just add that I've done absolutely nothing untoward with it - no installing anything weird/wonderful, just games directly from the Steam Store.

Have just raised a ticket with Steam Support, so we shall see how they handle it, but if I ever needed more convincing that this is still very much a full PC experience in a different shaped box, this is it.

[Lebowski]

It's reminded me quite a few times in the two weeks of owning it that it's a pc in a different form factor, even games from Steam have no guarantee that they will work well, as I've found out a few times now with some games require a bit of tinkering just like they do on my big PC. I spent an age installing EmuDeck last night for it to just error out which was pretty annoying, and I've still not reinstalled my heroic launcher either, after it stopped working with the last update.

that's just pc gaming though you expect stuff to go wrong overcoming the errors and getting stuff working is all part of the fun