Hey everyone! I’m in a bit of a gaming handheld dilemma and would love some real-talk advice. I’ve got a Switch OLED, but I’m eyeing the Steam Deck, Ally, and Legion Go. Money’s not an issue, and I’m all about anime games like Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, FighterZ, Kakarot, and Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Seriest. Plus, I want to dip into bigger AAA titles like Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Hogwarts Legacy, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc.
One thing bugging me is that some of these are not compatible on the Steam Deck. Is there any workaround to this? Also, I’m a bit lost on TDP and heard the Steam Deck goes up to 15 watts, but still performs better than the Ally and the Legion Go, but anything above this TDP the other two do better. What’s the real deal with that? Will the OLED screen make a big difference in display quality compared to the other handheld’s normal resolution which is 1080p or higher?
I also plan to dive into some emulation with Wii, PS3, and PS2 games. How do these handhelds handle that?
Would really appreciate your insights, thanks a bunch for helping me figure this out!
Regarding your question about compatibility - obviously, it’s on a per game basis. But for the most part, considering the general basis of half of those games (Anime games, originally intended for consoles, made by Japanese studios), the most likely incompatibility issue is video playback.
A lot of companies love using proprietary video codecs to get file sizes smaller for saving optical disk space, or to encrypt copyrighted media to protect IP (like, uh, Anime franchises). Valve can’t provide you with that codec, because it’s privately owned and will probably involve either paying loyalties or breaking some copyright law.
Other people can, however - ProtonGE replaces the thing that interprets Windows games on Linux (which is what’s happening on the Steam Deck), which is maintained by someone else (GloriousEggroll, hence the name - actually an engineer at Red Hat, a version of Linux that caters to enterprise). It’s the same as what Valve provides, but also includes access to all those codecs to get video working.
As always, just check your games via ProtonDB to see if you have to do anything special with incompatible games to get them running.