Hello steam deck community! Well to start I know first and foremost that this question a has been beaten to death, but I have scoured the internet but can’t seem to find the specific answer for some of my niche questions.
To start, I have a 256gb LCD steam deck and I absolutely love it. Recently with the OLED model it has been making me contemplate an upgrade and because I love my deck but at times I really wish I could run games at a higher FPS and have better visuals. I have a solid pc gaming rig, but I mainly use my deck when my wife gets home from work for some couch gaming while we watch Netflix, and the occasional gaming away from home. So my questions are as follows:
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I have an iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard that I bought prior to the deck, so I don’t want to buy a different external monitor/keyboard. I really enjoy playing Guild Wars 2, and even with the community layouts it’s frustrating for me to play on the deck, so I use steam link on the deck to my iPad for the use of bigger screen + mouse and keyboard. Will a steam deck OLED or ROG Ally give increased performance streaming onto my IPad Pro? And if so is one better than the other.
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I mainly play AAA titles, so I am aware that gives the ROG Ally the advantage, but I am afraid that losing my trackpads and extra 2 buttons on the back will make me have buyers remorse if/when the time comes that I really need them. For anyone that has made the jump from steam deck to the ally, was this truly an issue for you or have you even been effected by the loss of those features.
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I have seen on occasion people have mentioned that their ally after a BIOS update has crashed and have had to completely reinstall windows, for somebody that has both devices, is this a common issue?
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For those that own the OLED. Was it fairly significant performance upgrade for you from your LCD models, or was it negligible?
Looking forward to hearing your replies! Sorry for the long read.
The other day I sold my Ally after getting my hands on the OLED deck. I think I can only answer your bios question though. I had my Ally from launch and through each bios update up to the most recent 334 I never had an issue or problem that warranted reinstalling Windows or rolling back the bios version. Speaking purely from my experience, I still don’t understand users who claim navigation of Windows 11 is so horrendous without track pads. Using the touch screen or the analog sticks along with the right bumper and right trigger as your mouse buttons it felt fluid and very easy to use, but YMMV. Overall it comes down to battery life for me, but I mostly play indie and smaller games on a handheld so I wasn’t the target audience for the Ally to begin with. Good luck on your purchase and search, regardless of what direction you go, most importantly have fun!
This is super helpful. I’m glad to hear you didn’t struggle with the updates and you found it fairly easy to navigate with the lack of track pads. I think we are just about the opposite on what we use the devices for and it helps make the decision, I am predominantly a windows PC gamer and as hard as I’ve tried I’ve never been an indie game fan. I mainly use my steam deck now to try and progress whatever game I’m playing when I’m away from the pc, but I’m mainly plugged in. Thank you for the reply!