exactly what the title says. I will note that my steam deck runs Windows 11. I bought it that way on purpose.
Take, for instance, super Mario maker 2. If I tweak and work with the settings on my windows 11 Alienware 17 r5 with a GeForce gtx 1070 (even overclocked), 16 GB of ram. Normally runs pretty much anything I throw at it. But I get maybe 5 to 15 frames per second in super Mario maker two which I’m using as a benchmark just on the first level in story mode, I can run Metroid dread at 25 to 32 frames per second, can’t even run TOTK. I’m using sin’s release of yuzu if that makes any difference/helps. only one that ever seem to work.
Anyway, I take those exact same files on the exact same flash drive, or put some on the internal SSD of the deck, I’ve tried both, and the steam deck runs it at 60 to 80 frames a second, other games get 120 to 200+ frames a second.
Why is this? Everything that logic stands for should say that the Alienware should run everything far better including the switch not just steam games. why is this?
Everything I can think of logically says that the Alienware which plays regular steam games FAR better should run the switch games better since it’s far more powerful or is there something I’m missing we’re not thinking about which plays regular steam games far better should run the switch games better since it’s far more powerful or is there something I’m missing in not aware of?
It might be helpful to note that when I run it on the steam deck I’m running not attached to a TV. I’ve even tried dropping the system wide resolution on the Alienware to 720 or 1080 like you do when you dick the deck to see if that helped the framerate but nope
Check the frequency and temperatures of your laptop cpu using tools like afterburner or hwinfo64.
Also try a CPU benchmarking tool like Cinebench to check if the score is normal for your hardware.
It could be that your laptop is running other pc games well because you are playing GPU bound games but Emulators are a lot more heavy on the CPU.
While your laptop is indeed 5 years old I don’t think it should be that slow compared to the steam deck cpu. At least that’s not what the data online suggest.
Maybe you are having a dust buildup or other cooling/throttling problem
The last tip is my guess as to what your problem is. Laptops are often set to throttle output to conserve power by default. Make sure you check out all the power settings. If I remember correctly there are a few places they show up so keep looking.
You are correct, i thought of it later but it’s the most probable reason.
Just a few weeks ago I saw some streamer discover that his $6000 pc had been slower than expected for months because he had energy savings enabled in the windows power options.
All energy saving options off. I never once thought the CPU would be the bottleneck because I’m sitting here exporting a build of some code, or of an animation or something that takes a while and has extraordinarily CPU intensive like using gcc to compile a MASSIVE project (C and C++ for this one) or for that matter, uploading an entire project to githubs website via git cli. when this thing is under heavy load it flies. It goes up to 4+ghz. and my archiving, unarchiving, compiling code into a program, etc are done super quick compared to others, and it’s been the best hardware of at least anyone I’ve been around or any I see in stores so I didn’t think it was that far behind in terms of power. Maybe instruction sets. It’s got an eGPU port so if I want I can connect a desktop card to it. I guess I don’t have a reference to the current bleeding edge hardware performance. I just knew it was still better than most. Anyway just explaining my logic.
I still think it was a good question. I think people put too much importance on having the most bleeding edge hardware they can get.