In regards to Proton:

In my experience, messing with the proton version is only necessary for brand new games. Often Times switching to Experimental already did the trick in case a game wasn’t launching properly. Once a newer proton build for the regular version releases, that can be changed back and games will run… usually.

Alright, long story short:

FSR2.x works different than FSR1, it requires game-engine level information (motion vectors and stuff) to not only up-scale to target resolution but also reconstruct detail and apply sharpening whereas FSR1 doesn’t and was just a tad better upscaling algorithm.

To be able to use FSR 2.x, it needs to be natively supported by the game for that game-engine level information.

Typically FSR 2.x, like DLSS, is split into different Quality levels. Each will result in the original rendered frame to be at a lower resolution than the target resolution to be then scaled back up to the target resolution and sharpened:

• Quality - 67% (1280 x 720 -> 1920 x 1080)
• Balanced - 59% (1129 x 635 -> 1920 x 1080)
• Performance - 50% (960 x 540 -> 1920 x 1080)
• Ultra Performance - 33% (640 x 360 -> 1920 x 1080)

Source (AMD)

So why do you see less utilization then?

There’s two things at play here

1. Upscaling and Reconstruction are cheaper than rendering a native frame but still a tad more expensive than simply rendering at a lower target resolution (cheaper/expensive in terms of calculation time spent)
2. Less required performance for image rendering can lead to a shift towards more draw calls required by the GPU for more utilization and in turn result in a CPU bottleneck if the CPU can’t keep up with the now less strained GPU.

Bonus: If you lock your framerate, target FPS is reached but GPU utilization is low and yet there’s no stutter: You GPU can easily handle what’s being thrown at it and doesn’t need to go the extra mile to keep up.

Starfield, or other Bethesda type Games, are really “YMMV”.

Colleague of mine still plays it, while i dropped it after some 50’ish hours and having played the crimson raiders arc. At first i had a lot of fun exploring planets for that tasty EXP and getting a Build going.

Now i can Streamroll pretty much everything (Solo build, so no companions) and am fairly high level. Too high level (47 i think?) that Side-Quests with their 100 EXP Reward simply aren’t worth doing when i can get that per enemy on the level 70+ worlds easily without much of a fight.

(Been playing on PC though, for me it ain’t worth it to force myself to play it on Deck but i would’ve if i didn’t have any other means).

The other thing that eventually sets in: You keep repeating the same-ish loop of Exploration which can get old really fast if there’s long streches without any combat or worthwhile lore advancement. Once you begin to see repeats of certain locations and figure out that permanent upgrade magazines usually only spawn in unique locations (which you can see from orbit view after scanning)…

It’s just not worth it anymore at some point.

Well, let’s see If the first Users to report burn in are those that fiddle around with sliders without understanding how OLED works.

At least 2x the current chip Performance but would prefer x3 or x4 even.

I couldn’t care less if everything else remained the same, because i think it’s a rock solid device.

I absolutely would not want a screen with a higher resolution, as it’d kill performance and look like a blurry mess if you were to target lower resolutions (e.G. 720p on a 1080p display).

And since we’re talking a new chip:

FSR3 compatibility is an absolute must along with OS-Wide AFMF support (think FSR 1.0 on Deck).

Now that’s a device that would be solid for a very long time to come.

Nah, i’m good.

It’s a Mid-Gen Refresh, and i’m glad that people that didn’t get an SD yet now have the better offer on the table.

But overall, it’s performance increase is negligible over the current. You’d still end up tuning Frame-Limits for every game and wether it’s 40 or 44 fps doesn’t make any difference (to me) at this point.

Once you go up in Res (think Docked, 1080p render target) their pretty much nil.

No reason to upgrade at all unless you fancy OLED THAT much. Which i, personally, don’t.

Once we see FSR with AI Upscaling support that addresses temporal instability issues as well as full support for frame generation, i doubt we’ll see another deck.

With current gen Games challenging even the most potent computers, we’ve got a long way to go for Handheld to reach that level. Even never chips of the ROG Ally and others, probably, wouldn’t provide a noteworthy enough increase in performance for certain current gen titles.

I’m certain Valve will be capable to provide a very good Deck 2, now we’ll have to wait and see how the chips develop to keep up with the raising demand in power.