Hi all,
Just got my 512 OLED the other day, upgrading from my old LCD Steam Deck. (Incidentally, moving all my games and settings from old to new Steam Deck was no more complicated than swapping over the SD card and SSD; worked immediately with no tweaking). Of course, like most of you, I was immediately stunned by the beautiful black levels and vibrant colours. However, one amazing discovery happened by accident.
I don’t usually play modern AAA games on my Deck, using it instead for legacy Steam titles and emulation. One of my favourites to play is Unreal Tournament. I fired it up and played a few deathmatch rounds, and again marvelled at the colours and slightly improved sound. But then I started thinking: man this display is smooth. It doesn’t just feel more vibrant, but… smoother. Then I remembered: oh yeah, it’s a 90Hz display! So I loaded up GameScope and saw that, indeed, the game was running at a locked 90fps. And what’s more, it was running at very low thermals! (I mean, it is a 1999 game after all).
This was SUCH an upgrade. Fast-paced FPS games feel SO much better at these higher framerates. And what;s more, it was totally unexpected. I was aware that the new OLED was a 90Hz panel, of course, but I didn’t expect to run anything at 90fps. But this SO fits my use case: older, faster games.
Very, very satisfied with the upgrade!
Honestly, the latency improvements have been pretty night and day. I’m admittedly a bit of an fps snob, being a longtime PC gamer and all, but 30fps is legitimately playable now.
I still vastly prefer the smoothness of 60 fps or higher, don’t get me wrong, but at least it doesn’t feel like the controls are dragging through molasses anymore.
First game I booted up was Starfield because I couldn’t stand to play it before and ended up exploring and scanning an entire planet before I realized how much time had passed. Unfortunately there’s really nothing to be done about the traversal stutter when moving too quickly through environments, but otherwise when capped to 30fps it’s actually pretty enjoyable.
Hogwarts Legacy was exactly the same story as well. Before I never played it on deck because it just felt a little too off. Now, I might actually end up picking the game back up now that I can play it on the go.
Older titles like Fallout 4 are truly wonderful playing portably at 90fps. The recent Quake II redux that came out this year feels like it was made for the Deck now.
Honestly from my perspective the OLED Deck feels like a whole new console. I still wish it had the power of the Z1 Extreme but color me surprised, this ought to be enough to hold me off until Valve’s next iteration/spec bump can arrive in another year or two.