Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’
Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’
Deck Pro might be years away.
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It makes total sense. Just a bit of a bummer when looking at the reality of devs being awful/not caring about optimising their games. The Deck is just barely hanging on with this year's big titles.
Thankfully, there's plenty of older and/or more lightweight options out there.
I'm not sure the Steamdeck was created with the latest AAA games in mind.
BG3 co-op slows my PS5 to a crawl. People gotta be chilling with their expectations of what a £350 handheld can do.
To be fair, the Deck is underpriced for its power level. I unfortunately can't find the quote but if memory serves they were planning to achieve a 30fps target on the device for a few years, which obviously hasn't quite panned out. Given that this year has been notorious for badly optimized games, I would personally attribute the problems the device is having to that, rather than the Deck itself being too weak to keep up.
I'm not sure recent games are badly optimised. Just that they're now going for PS5 levels of power as a baseline, rather than PS4.
You can always cut back a bit on the GPU requirements for lower resolutions and removing raytracing, etc, but the CPU requirements can be pretty rigid.
This is likely to be where the SteamDeck falls short and gets less FPS than expected.
Many people are still playing with a PS4. And generally consoles last several years.
If we can move the optimisations more to the PC world that would be also nice to keep devices running in the longer term.
What I don't think is going to happen is a future steam deck running a native resolution at 1080p requiring much more GPU PWR.
Maybe they'll add 1080p or higher resolution screen and start using more the upscaling.
But running a future GPU bound game natively at 1080p will make any medium term upgrade more like a downgrade.
Mind if I ask something?
What is the origin of always wanting higher and higher definitions lately?
It comes to a point where it makes no objective difference between resolutions for the human eye.
And I've seen TVs advertised as being "sharper and brighter than real life". The only thing the image made for me was getting my eyes sore after staring at the screen for a few seconds.
I'm still from the time when the graphics on the cover were better than the actual graphics and that is something I don't miss but come on... when is enough enough?
The origin for me are the guys who generally demand that the SD should have higher resolution than 720p-800p (approximately).
I personally think the display PPI is good enough in the original Steam Deck. So I wouldn't raise the resolution a lot. Especially when some games struggle to keep 30 FPS.
Of course, the eye to display distance matters a lot for this and that's a bit more subjective.
It's easier to sell honestly. It's a concept most people understand at a base level at least so it's marketable.
I with you. With the exception of UI scaling and readability of some text, I have almost zero reason to want more than he resolution on the deck. Heck, it's not even the res. Trying to squint at mini maps, even if the Deck were 4K, wouldn't really solve the issue. It's a little screen and unless I'm going to do that weird competitive gamer thing where you put your nose on the screen there's no value in upping the resolution but still requiring that I resolve better than an arcminute to read it. My gaming PC is hooked to a 55" 4K HDR screen. I play in 1080 and, honestly, don't notice any gameplay difference at 4K when sitting on my couch less than 10' away. I don't know why I would even want FHD on a 7" screen at a comfortable 18" distance.
At first it made sense because it gave you more detail but I think 1080p or 1440p is the perfect resolution for consuming media from a monitor or television.
For VR headsets I think it makes more sense because you need more pixel density
I don't buy new screens but my work had a 4k in the break room and it gave me an uncanny valley type feeling.
That's probably the framerate smoothing rather than the resolution.
4K TVs ship with that on, because otherwise nobody could tell the difference, at least for TV and movies. HDR is nice, but the extra pixels aren't that noticeable.
For games, sure you can see the difference, although the prevalence of upscaling tech even on PC makes me wonder just how much extra detail you can really benefit from.
Don't play big titles on the Deck. That's not what it's good at. Play Fez or Tunic or something. There's a near infinite list of great games that are not technically demanding.