I think Valve has 3-5 until it gives it out to courier, not until it’s at the target. At least my package took exactly 5 days until I got **tracking number from GLS**. Then GLS took another 3 days delivering it for me, so 3-5 days Valve claimed was 8. (10 if you include weekend).

My friend ordered 4 minutes before me, and got it 3 days later (2 of which were another weekend).

FSR1 takes output image and uses AI to upscale it. As such it can be used from the system.

FSR2 is part of rendering pipeline of the game. It takes “movement vectors” that games provide to predict how pixels will look in the upscale, thus in general being more truthful to the expectation. This also means you can only get it from within the game.

FSR1 gives out watery paint look when used. FSR2 can introduce shimmering, especially in rapid movements. Ideally you should only use FSR with the quality preset on SD. Quality upscales from 480p to 720p, while performance uses 360p as base. The lower you go the less pixels it will have to figure out the final image and the worse it will look.

As this is called a guide I have some questions. Does your HDR look good? Do you tweak HDR settings at all?

For example when I enable HDR in Ori the whole screen gets darker, colors pop less. Some might say it looks more natural, but it also loses a lot of details. Almost all the leaves in the lower left corner are now just dark space, but with HDR off I can see each separate leaf in shadow. I thought HDR was all about bringing out more detail?

In Horizon when turned on the HDR also makes everything very dark by default. I’ve compared it to HDR on PS5 and it’s also dark, but the colors are much more lush, and it’s nowhere as dark. For example in the first interactive part of the game where Aloy is in a cave on SD she is basically black, while on PS5 she looks like someone standing in shadow. SD loses a lot of detail in shadowed area again. I tried adjusting sliders in HZD and by putting HDR brigthness on 60 and white point on 400 it was kind-of-close-to-PS5, but still looking noticeably worse. Note that my HDR TV is not top of the line, so I’d expect worse HDR on that.

Try lies of p with just your tongue!

Some more:
HDR works:

• Star Ocean Divine Force
• Monster Hunter World
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Like a Dragon Gaiden: The man who erased his name

By works I define “turns on and colours are changed, and HDR mode of the screen turns on”. The results might vary though. For example SO:DF is very bleak and washed out. Highlights max out at 400 nits if I enable HDR overaly. The game has no ingame HDR settings, so it’s pretty awful.

I’m not 14, but it still depends on what you play. Playing games from bed, couch, toilet, garden - it’s fun.

I saw that you’re looking for used LCD, check out valve refurbished prices too. Any used price you pay should be lower than that IMHO. The prices right now tanked for LCD models, so if you’re on budget there was never better moment to get LCD model.

Now, if you play online multiplayer games mostly you might be disappointed - especially if the anticheat doesn’t work on linux.

Indies? 100% instant buy.

Newest AAA games? Those might not run and/or look well enough to play them on SD, when you can get them looking beautifully on decent gaming pc. You can stream to your steam deck, which is still pretty good experience, but some people hate streaming too much.

Older AAA games? Up to PS4 era everything should run pretty decently on SD, with pretty decent look and visuals. That’s a point where you probably won’t feel that you’re sacrificing too much. There are exceptions, for example Uncharted 4, while in theory PS4 game, for me didn’t look good enough on SD with fluid settings. But something like Horizon Zero Dawn, for example, worked fine.

You can use page called protondb and amother steamdeckhq to look up how well games work on Steam Deck before you even buy. There are also dozens of videos showing off games on youtube. Just note, that some games might run a little better now than on reports/youtube, since recent steamOS update improved some stuff on software side.

Overall, you also should be able to resell this used SD with not much value loss (if any) if you don’t like it, since you’re going to buy it pretty cheap anyway. So the risk is low anyway.

Start with Aperture Desk Job, after that any indie will work. Stardew Valley can keep you occupied for dozens of hundreds of hours and should handle downloads in the background.

Yep, there was a bit of stutter at the first stage when things were compiling, I guess, but past that it was very smooth.

Yeah, that’s surprising that people can argue whenever it works for months, but no one wants to actually put in the work to check. I guess it’s too small of a topic for DF. Maybe now when OLED will be out their cover it more, as their resident handheld gamers hated the old screen :D

I liked that Cryo would sometimes make a vids for certain games to check which settings from his tools should be used, and how, to get most out of the game. Even Cryo doesn’t believe this is silver bullet that “fixes” steam deck.

Even if it’s a waste of time/storage it’s minimal. Setting it up takes less than a minute, and it takes up nearly no space. You used up more time to write your questions than installing it would.

Now, the placebo guy really hates Cryo and will go everywhere and hate on it. I don’t understand why. Might be his full time job. He should just make a youtube video with performance comparisons to show off how it doesn’t work.

Meanwhile Cryo when publishing his tools showed performance comparisons before and after. He even showed that the tools had negative performance effect in some games. So I don’t think it’s placebo, when you can have repeatable changes in performance.

That said even the ones shown by Cryo were very minimal. Some people come over here and tell us that unstable 20FPS games work with stable 40FPS with Cryo. You are NOT getting this kind of boost from Cryo. Usually the gains, if any, will be very minor, very often limited to better 1% lows, lower stutters. But even before CryoUtils there would be people reporting new AAA games running at 1440p60 on SD on high, when reality was it barely worked in 720p with FSR2 on medium/high mix.

So, better question would be “I have issues with how game X plays on SD. Will Cryo help or make it even worse?”