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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

  4. 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.

  • Crest_Of_Hylia@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The difference in display quality between the LCD Deck and the OLED deck is far larger than between the ROG Ally LCD and OLED deck. The old LCD on the Deck really was not a good panel and it had poor color accuracy and a low gamut making games look dull. The Ally has a high refresh rate 120hz panel with pretty good response times and better contrast than the original LCD deck. Sure it’s no OLED but the gap isn’t as large between them.

    Now which you should get is really subjective. Both have their merits and downsides. The Deck OLED has much better battery life while the Ally has access to more games and other windows based software. Deck is set up for gaming first and foremost so you launch automatically into Steam Big Picture, Ally does not and launches into Asus’s Armory crate software. Ally can however be customized to launch into whatever program you want at boot up like Steam big picture.

    Playing games via other launchers is much easier on Ally so if you own games from Ubisoft, EA, Epic, or other stores, you’ll have an easier time. Sometimes updates to these launchers will break games in Steam OS and it sucks.

    Multiplayer games, or games with Anti cheat all just work on Ally while on Steam deck it can be a hit or miss whether it works. Some games just won’t launch on steamOS either, however thankfully we do have tools to help with this. ProtonDB is an excellent community run site that tells you whether a game works or not. You can pretty much ignore Steam’s playability rating as whether a game is “Great on Deck” or “Unsupported” really means nothing as many “unsupported” games work fine.