I’m a surgeon and was talking to one of the nurse practitioners in our clinic about what I’ll be doing while I’m on call if things are slow, and I tell her I’ll just play on my Steam Deck. I pull it out, press the power button and within 2 seconds Titanfall 2 was running fluently on it. She was like, “wait, how did it just start playing so fast?”.
That blazing fast pause/resume -now even faster on the OLED, is the one reason I simply cannot have a non-Steam OS handheld.
Careful pulling it out without consent
wait, wait. is fast resume and sleep not a thing on ally, go and so on?
It only works on Linux. On the Ally you get the normal slow-ass Windows sleep.
TIL. I didn’t even think this wouldn’t exist in other handhelds
Sleep has always been a flaky on Windows. When it works it’s just as quick as the SD. However games have a habit of breaking it.
Most Ally owners use hibernate instead. It works much better, but takes a little longer to resume. One big advantage of hibernate is it uses no power when off as the device shuts down. Sleep will deplete the battery over a few days.
Even on the Deck it’s caused a few games to freak out on me. It’s a neat feature, but I wish it was as reliable as something like the Switch.
No sir. Your best shot on a Windows device is to manually change the settings so pressing the power button hibernates the device. It takes long, and then takes a good 20 seconds to wake up, that is if it works and doesn’t crash the game, as opposed to instant on/off on the Deck and picking up right where you left off.
This isn’t really true. I’ve been playing Sea of Stars on my windows partition on the steam deck. It starts and stops just as well as if I were running it through the SteamOS partition.
Mind posting a video of doing a few times in rapid succession? I am curious to see it for myself.
I uhh… Don’t really see the point of doing that? In what real-world scenario would you ever rapidly sleep/wake the device?
But here’s a video of me sleeping and waking it again. At 0:03 I push the button for sleep, at 0:08 I push the button for wake.
My curiosity comes not from whether or not Windows can suspends as quickly as Steam so much, but rather if it can do so quickly and consistently.
My particular use case involves being able to reliably kill the game with a single button push and have it quickly start back up again without loss of data or the game having continued to run in the meantime. For instance, the thing that wowed me about Steam OS was that I could suspend in the middle of a cut scene and not worry about pausing things or the like, and the game would restart in the middle of the cut scene with no issues. I have never had the game crash, or a save become corrupted. I have never had my character die due to time having elapsed during the time it took for the system to hibernate or get back to the game.
From what I have heard, while Windows can suspend, it is not with the same level of consistency between games, nor with the same level of certainty that the game will not crash when you get back into it. So, that is why I asked to see the suspend feature multiple times in the same shot. It’s about consistency.
But I will not bother you for more. This was a simple curiosity. I have no real reason to install Windows, so regardless of it working or not, I won’t be doing it. I was just momentarily curious.