Have used my Pc daily before I got my deck. Haven’t started a game sind (been only a few weeks though). It really does replace a lot of parts.
But I’ll probably stay with my pc for a few games like modded minecraft that are just way easier to set up, plus anything multiplayer where I’m on discord with friends (we use cameras and have a chill evening, I wouldn’t want to be the only one on voice only).
I don’t care that people are criticizing the Deck. Nothing should be above that. But I just don’t care for twenty posts a day where an individual user has a stuck pixel. I’d rather see one thread for that, where maybe we get some numbers on how many Decks actually have that problem. A poll would work great. But instead we get twenty posts all saying the same thing.
I’m here to ask and read questions and discussions. Maybe see some cool mods, get some recommendations. But for weeks now it has been “Limited is still available”, “My Deck hasn’t shipped yet”, “Here’s a picture of my Deck just out of the box, looking pretty much exactly like yours did” and “This pixel is dead”.
These things are important to the person posting, but after the first few it really dilutes the actual interesting discussions here.
Yes its great for Emulation but I would honestly say wait a few months to try that stuff, try out your old steam games, try some new ones, try your battle net, gog and epic games out,etc… and then later start to tinker with some emulators if you are interested.
Everything else I can agree with, but hard disagree here! Setting up emulation was super duper easy for the most part for me. It was basically the first thing I did after installing my Steam library. It was a quick and painless process to get 90% of my roms running. Only the newer emulators made a bit of trouble, but anything up to DS works fine. And those that made trouble had solutions posted on this sub.
Why am I saying you should do this as quickly as you want? Because it doesn’t just show you what desktop mode can do, but also works offline perfectly. I’ve had a few bad surprises with games not starting if I had no connection (looking at you, EA!), but with emulators you know you always have something to fall back on. I wouldn’t say you have to install all your roms at once, but having one nostalgic game like Pokemon or Mario to spend time with if nothing else works, that’s quite nice.
It’s also a great tutorial to get the most out of your deck. I learned how to properly use desktop mode. I learned how to incorporate programs into Steam to run from gaming mode. I learned how to install plugins to replace a few broken title art frames that didn’t load properly. I learned how to change button layouts. It showed me that most questions/problems of mine have already been addressed in this subreddit. Now I can use all that to get the most out of other games.
If you’re interested in emulation, don’t wait to try it. Go tinker with your new toy and customize it to your liking!
I save my games at the very least. I know a few that come back from sleep no problem (especially on emulation), so those I mostly leave open. The others depend how long I’m putting the deck down for. If longer than an hour, I may want to play something else anyway, and so I turn the game of first. If just for a few minutes, I’ll just put it to sleep and risk having to restart the game.
I haven’t had any issues yet, but I’m a pretty new user and don’t have a lot of hours. I could imagine online games being a problem, but everything singleplayer has worked so far.
Thanks, I’ll take a closer look at them! I’m a bit sceptical as they don’t show exactly how the power is split between the two ports but rather what combined power they can give. But maybe it’s just split according to the power needs of whatever is plugged in and the order doesn’t matter.
I don’t worry about black friday. I’m in Germany, we didn’t have this until a few years ago, and even now everything I looked at before / during has been the same price but marketed as a reduced price. Even stuff I bought last year either hat the same discount year-round or a coupon you could click to give the same savings. It’s a marketing tool that will save you exactly 0€ on Amazon here.
Either way, if I find the Europlug equivalents, I might go for one of those!
Thank you! I still can only go as low as 40 refresh rate and set the fps to full/half/quarter of the rate, so 35 fps is still impossible to reach. It’s either 40-60 fps at full or 20-30 fps at half or 10-15 at quarter fps, so the same limits as before apply.
It seems I misremember being able to do this with the old settings, and it’s just a physical limitation of the screen. But I feel much better about it now, knowing it’s not something that was possible before but isn’t now.
It’s comfortable thanks to the form factor. With a lot of controllers, they can be a little too small for my liking. Thanks to the SD size, I can grip it without having my hands all scrunched up.
But they weight isn’t small. I definitely don’t play it like I did my Nintendo DS back in the days, in bed held above my head. That seems deadly if the SD falls! But most other positions work great, as long as your arms are supported.
Big plus is the size and form, a minus is the weight.
That’s what one my favourite aspects: When idling it uses like 3-5 W. And in most games I use around 12W, give or take. That’s soooo little for what I’m doing! My alternative is a speced out pc that I use with two monitors, that probably draws closer to 40W idle and 200-400W on a heavy load? Never measured it, ignorance is bliss as they say.
I love that my little Deck can do everything I want with sooo little power! One of my favourite features and one of the reasons I keep the performance indicators on, just so I can see how little power I’m using and be happy.
Just a rough calculation: Say my pc takes on average 120W (with a hefty margin of error depending on the task). And my deck takes 10W roughly. For me in Germany, electricity costs around 35ct/kWh right now (RIP, I know). That means I save 110W or 3.85 ct per hour of gaming. Meaning, because I got the refurbished 512GB model for around 380€, the Deck will have paid for itself once it replaces 9870 hours of Pc usage! That’s more than my entire Steam games time combined since like 2012 or so… It’s around 8h usage for 3 years straight. So probably not happening, but still a nice thing to have!
I think most people here have PCs that are pretty overspeced for what they play. Of course you don’t have to tweak settings on a 32GB RAM station with an RTX 3090. But anyone who plays with something older (my gf on a GTX 970 for example) doesn’t open a game and get 90fps on high settings. Hell, RE4 has minimum requirements above my gfs computer. Just a year ago, that was actually my pc and working around the 8 GB of DDR3 RAM just to not stutter in Satisfactory was a daily experience.
And the Deck is a lot closer to a low end pc than to an RTX gamestation, so tweaking may be needed to get everything working properly, it’s normal. It should be reflected in the badge, but as long as you can get it working, I’m fine with it having a good badge.
There are people in the West who don’t believe in intellectual property. Hell, this subreddit is full of people who emulate older games and technically disregard intellectual property, me included. There are big companies training AI models on data they don’t own, working in a grey area regarding intellectual property. And I bet if South Korea didn’t prosecute for theft like that (you’re right that it is theft, not arguing that btw), then Samsung would do the same. It’s just good for business to take every advantage they can, up to and including theft if permitted.
While it’s theft, there are so many shady things done by companies, from unfair competition all the way to use of slavery (in countries like China, yes, but also paid for by Western companies sadly), that I just plain don’t care that much about intellectual property rights. Maybe I should…
BOE being Chinese is mentioned twice in this article, Samsung being Korean is not mentioned at all. In an article below it, BOE and Samsung are mentioned again, and once again, Samsung has no country mentioned while BOE has China. In the same paragraph, another company is mentioned explicitly as from China. They obviously only mention it for Chinese firms.
Or are you saying that the article doesn’t take a clear stance against BOE and for Samsung? Because in that case I’d have to assume it’s you who didn’t read it…
An article would be helpful if you want me to read what you’re reading. Because when I search for samsung oled stolen by chinese I get articles about this exact lawsuit as well as a leak for curved OLED tech. Nothing that would be relevant for small 800p OLED displays that don’t bend or fold or curve or anything like that.
Funny how the article phrases it as orders being stolen from Samsung as if they have the sole right to supply screens to Valve. And repeatedly mentioning that BOE is Chinese but never mentioning that Samsung is Korean, why does only one of them matter? It’s not like either of them is based in the US where the lawsuit is actually happening.
I have to admit that I’m still pretty new to the Deck, but I haven’t seen a single game I had to tweak a lot before getting it running. Admittedly, I’m not playing the newest games right now, but even stuff like The Outer Worlds and Fallout 4 run great right out the box for me. I’m so happy with the Deck and how easy it is to use out of the box while also being extremely easy to mod and change. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but you can really see that Valve cared about what they were making.
I thoroughly enjoy Baba Is You. Not because it’s improved by the controls, but because it’s a game I like to pick up for one or two levels and then put away again. Ideal for short breaks, and I just don’t play like that on my Pc.
I also quite enjoy replaying the old Lego Harry Potter games (1-4 & 5-7). Bit of nostalgia for me.
And Stardew Valley is a favourite around here for a reason.
I’m also considering picking up Cyberpunk 2077, Monster Hunter World, Hogwarts Legacy, or Marvels Spiderman Remastered. Not sure though as I’m already spending quite a bit on peripherals for my Deck, and it’s quickly becoming a very expensive hobby to maintain! And if you’re into Emulation: That whole side is awesome too. If you haven’t, check out Renegade Platinum, it’s by far my favourite Pokemon hack that remains true to the original game while also substantially improving upon it. Having a fast forward button while being on a handheld is a godsend for Pokemon too! Before that I played on a modded 2DS and while that was great too, the lack of speedup could be pretty annoying when grinding. If you’re more oldschool, Emerald Elite Redux is a hard but great romhack too!
Definitely that it provides me with the chance to do whatever I want. I have a few okd tablets and phones lying around. I can’t use the iPad anymore because no apps support the ios and I can’t update it any further. I was able to find a use for the Android table as a second monitor, but that is pretty iffy and might not work for long. Wanted to use my old phone to leave a small Python script running for a few days. Couldn’t even get Python to work because I’d need an app for that and no app supports that ios.
With the Deck, I am not stopped from updating my firmware just because the hardware may get old some day. I can run whatever program I want, including older versions. I’m not forced to use the newest version of some fucking app just to run Python. Valve gives me the hardware, a good OS and allows me to do whatever else I want. It’s freedom to use my stuff that I paid for in a way I want. No other consoles allow that.
They translated it into all languages afaik, same here in Germany. No idea why they’d advertise it here but my guess is that they just built one new page layout and it was easier to include the disclaimer in all countries outside CA/US than to build a new layout for people outside that
Ordered a refurbished about 3 hours after the drop, didn’t ship yet. But I also didn’t expect it to. Not sure where you are, but here in Germany the drop was around 19:00 or so. So if we take out nights, it was two business days. One for processing the order, one for packaging it I suppose, as it does show as packaged. I expect it to ship on Monday or Tuesday.
Steam does say it takes 1-2 weeks to arrive, and after sending it’ll probably be 1-3 days before I get it (if shipped with normal carriers inside the EU), so most of the wait is probably on Valves end.
More battery life. I don’t care if it becomes thicker or heavier or something else. We had portable consoles that we could play from breakfast till dinner back then, and now it’s 2h on a good day? Fuck that, give me 4h minimum please!
I know external batteries exist but that’s like providing an 8GB SSD and using a 1TB SD card, it works but it’s not the same. (Though I’ll still use a power bank as well regardless seeing as I want to keep my phone and earbuds topped up anyway)
I’m probably ~ 3-4 years behind the cycle. I’m thinking about buying Cyberpunk in the next sale, but not sure yet.
It’s great. Every game has thorough rating so I know what I’m getting into. They have walkthroughs if get stuck. They are mostly bug free after enough updates. They drop to 50% in sales. There’s a well established modding scene that can fix anything else that annoys you. And thanks to advancing hardware, you can play them even on current mid range pcs.
What are the drawbacks? You gotta wait a bit. If it’s online your friend may want to play it earlier. Still, embrace the wait and grace period!