Key takeaway for me, if the game is even vaguely optimised for PC correctly, you can get it running on Steam Deck. Gotham knights and Callisto Protocol are not fair comparisons given their pc problems. Overall great video and interesting to see how Steam Deck is hanging in there
Yeah...low quality PC versions are low quality on Steam Deck too, go figure. But e.g. Cyberpunk has great PC version and runs great on Deck, and still looks vastly better than both Callisto and Gotham.
In addition to that: Many games that suffer from compilation stutter, perform even better on Deck - since SteamOS fully utilises precompiled shader caches across the community, which even improve over time.
@@InvalidUser_ given Spider-Man: Remastered/Miles Morales has a problem with Mouse-like Camera action being disabled during combat (due to them treating it like Gyro Controls instead of treating it like a Mouse-Like camera action like in every SIAPI-supported game that supplies it. *that problem becomes more evident if using a Steam Controller* ) and button prompts being bugged if using Steam Controller or Nintendo Switch controller, i believe that.
Absolutely, even though it runs PC games, it is basically like its own console/platform, and I think deserves its own videos like this. When DF puts out a Steam Deck video it gets an instant watch from me.
Exactly, I love my Steam Deck and want to see more coverage of the device. Its a great handheld with a lot of power and is able to do a lot. Sales have also been completely insane and Valve has a hard time fulfilling orders and keeping up with demand. So there is an audience for it.
I have a steam deck and I'm constantly amazed at the performance I get. Currently playing sekiro at a capped 45fps at 13 watts so I get about 3.5 hours of battery. It can handle higher settings and fps but I want the battery life.
@@arbiter5100 it would lead to uneven frame times in a 60hz screen. But you can set the screen to 45hz. The effect is similar to VRR on consoles in the simplest terms. You have a silky smooth framerate with dramatically improved controller response time compared to 30 and no stutter.
It's worth tweaking the GPU Clock setting in the Quick Access menu, in some cases locking that to something high in GPU limited circumstances or low in CPU limited circumstances can net significantly more stable performance. (I've noticed this working particularly well in Cyberpunk with the clock set to 1500MHz.)
@@cunt5413 Yup, Decky loader is a must imo. Some games that aren't that demanding but might have a lot happening on screen, perfect example is Vampire Survivors, disabling SMT and having it set to 2 or 4 cores can double the FPS sometimes
@@geoffdb8118 Not really dude,i get more then 100 fps with rx6600xt on maxed settings 1080p,i have no idea what is your def of competent computer,but to put in perspective i have cpu 6 cores 12 threads,and a gpu that is meant for 1080p gaming,some titles do run good in 2k as well,but not the newest games,so there's that,steam deck is well not that strong it's portable device that is mean for lighter titles,not for all triple A games.
On elden ring. Tdp to 12w and gpu to 1300Mhz + lock it to 30 fps will result 40-45c temps, smooth experience and 3 hours+ battery time.. On stock but tinkering vram and swapfile size you can turn graphics to high and it still can do it 1080p when docked. Swift little beast I would say. With manually setting higher rpm on the fan you get more fps too.
Ive noticed that when I first play games I need to play them on medium lot, but as time goes by, shaders and updates get applied, I can run demanding games on high/ultra settings a lot of the time. There's definitely a ton of optimization happening behind the scenes
This is incredible stuff. I love how so many of these games downscale well - I play the deck exclusively in handheld so I’m not too stressed about visual fidelity compared to when I’m on my pc.
@@nikkoa.3639 Yes, but docked in a 1080p or higher display makes the 720p rendering resolution to look worse than in SteamDeck 800p screen, so as he plays only in the system's screen, he can't see the problems he would in a higher resolution screen
@@ltBanshiro Oh that's what he could've meant, I was under the assumption that he added "handheld" as to imply that there was a performance boost when docked.
For Witcher 3 I'd recommend the DX12 version (steam preloads the shaders so no stutters) plus you get FSR which lets you play at 40fps with medium-high settings
@@garethflook5706 Yeah, every few feet I got compilation stutter. Immediately uninstalled the game after that. If it's fixed, I might download it again.
@@chexmixkitty It works great now at least on my deck 40-50 fps smooth never hits 60 but no major stutters. It's on default settings full resolution. Totally playable and looks great for a mobile as well!
I mostly play older games at 40fps and emulators on the deck. Its fun to tweak the settings for maximum battery life but without compromising the image too much
I do love the analysis giving me proper settings to use on various hardware like the Steam Deck and even certain PC titles, per graphics card, etc. They've been a great help. Now I almost can't wait for Digital Foundry to talk more about Forspoken if only because it seems one of their favorite words is "Bespoke", so now they get to use the word "Forspoke".
Something that actually might be worth looking into for ya. there's a plug-in for decky loader. one that's specific for sharing people settings in game and the battery management configuration for SteamOS side.
Limiting GPU clocks to about 1400mhz can be a magic bullet for CPU limited games. Elden Ring in particular can take some shockingly low GPU clocks before negative returns set in.
I uhhh... I've been playing Elden Ring at 540p with 6w TDP with clocks locked at 600 MHz to save battey life and it's honestly been great. Medium settings with AO set to high because I didn't like the shimmering shadows.
I wish more people made videos of older games that look and play great on Steam Deck. I definitely find that older games, like, even, say... Fallout 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Games that were available on console, but now you can get the console form factor+portability, much better performance, way better visuals (that look fantastic at 720p due to what they were targeting at the time), etc.... I might actually just start doing it myself. I just find that older games (that are so good they'd make you buy again as remasters to play like this on console) is where it really shines and frankly, deserves more attention than all these new games even if it doesn't make as good of a headline or video title.
Metal Gear V runs great on the Steam Deck and I am pretty sure you can get a lot of battery life (I tend to get around 2 hours) if you set the settings correctly (I haven’t even touch them because I haven’t had the need to)
@@sabus1265 much rather play a game at 30 fps on pc than at a 60fps broken unreal game. But hey could always turn it down to 240 p if it’s unplayable at 30 fps,
It's remarkable how well the Steam Deck copes with newer games and it's doing better than a lot of us expected. With that in mind, I was under no illusion that once games really start to target the newer gen consoles, especially on the cpu and SSD front, that would cause problems for the Steam Deck, but honestly, we're two years in the new gen console cycle and these games are few and far between that push the Steam Deck to braking point and most games work well on it with the right settings and honestly, a big reason I like the Steam Deck is for lighter indie games, older games and emulators, it's nice that we can play newer demanding games but I rather play them on my desktop PC. As for the future, it's looking good for a Steam Deck 2, cpu and gpu performance should be a lot better by then, NVMe drive will likely be a standard by then and the software side with SteamOS and games support will likely be much better that it wouldn't surprise me if Valve doesn't want to release a Steam Deck 2 until the software side is mature enough that they can target a wider gaming audience and I suspect Valve could release a Steam Deck 2 shortly after Nintendo release a Switch 2 whiles also having a lot more units available for us, after all, the Steam Deck was a gamble for Valve, they didn't know how well the market would take to it, now that it's got a footing, they might go all out with a Steam Deck 2 with a lot more Decks available.
It isn't surprising to me its doing well - too many games for console and PC are still going to target much much older and slower hardware than the deck, as there are so many folks out there with the older console and the older gaming PC so the game devs kind of have to. No point targeting the 4090 performance or even the 2080 as a minimum when so many gamers are still running 10 series or comparable type performance more modern budget cards. The Deck does continually impresses me with just how well it runs most titles at its native resolution, and often 1080p with settings cranked way way up if you don't mind the low battery life. Only things I've found you can't get good playable performance out of it on the Deck are the games so shit they turn the best 500w+ gaming PC into a space heater and still play rather badly...
I have so many games on my backlog that I'm finally getting through, that by the time I've caught up with "next gen" gaming there will be a new Steam Deck or two lol
@@manuelfabris7541 GE-Proton7-43, launch option: DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command%, settingS: Medium preset. FSR-Quality. Download the cache before starting. solid 30fps with 1% lows of 26fps and 0.1% lows of 15fps. A friend suggested GE-Proton7-44 runs better, but it doesn't support DXVK_ASYNC. Have yet to test myself. If you instead use Proton-Experimental, set to DX11 mode instead of 12. Medium preset with a few set to low, FSR2-Performance and you can play at a locked 40.
@@Armataan man I wished this was showcase in the video, or valve put this on proton experimental or next? For few games that need special troubleshooting like the Witcher 3 next gen patch.
The steam deck has incredible performance for the price and certainly will last for a couple of years. Sometimes you just need to do a bit of tweaking to get the game to run well. I get a mostly solid 40fps in RDR2. In Assassin’s creed odyssey I get 45 -50 fps. I would recommend installing decky loader. Which can help you tweak your steam deck more by enabling large Linux pages and having the ability to tweak the cpu clock and the power to it. I also would recommend increasing the swap file size and changing dedicated vram for gpu to 4gb
Well spoken but like all computers biggest enemy is the test of time. But since you are a tweaker I challenge you to try and tweak the game Warhammer 40K dark tide because that game looks like a pile of dog crap on the Steamdeck in order to sort of play comfortably and no tweaking will save you it will be a suicide mission and you will not be able to hold 30 frames no matter what you do you will be going down the 20 to 15 in large-scale online combat which sucks the games that you have stated in your messenger old today's best games require more and I think that's digital Foundry point I refuse to play dark tide on the handheld because of the topic in this video it's too uncomfortable
Really want get it but I’m worried about it’s future proof seeing how new games are becoming even more demanding now and in a couple years steam deck 2 will also probably be announced :/
The fact that this portable device can run new pc games at playable framerates is already an amazing feat. Even if it can't run new games AAA in the future it still well worth its price since it can play so many older and current titles and it will still play indie games and less demanding games for years to come. Emulation is also a huge bonus. For $400 it's insane.
@wheresthe0x218 I mean it's only $400. I wouldn't count on it playing the highest demanding games after the next 2 years. Just use it for the now and enjoy it and then upgrade later.
Unfortunately I beg to disagree I want to sell my Steam deck it's not powerful enough even right now. Not for today's best games. The thing should be able to at least hold its liquid smooth 30 frames on higher settings in 720p the things I saw the game evil West do on the steam we're really haunting and disappointing after Googling what people said the put the graphics settings on I was thoroughly disappointed with the results and I will be getting a gaming laptop very soon for work. For unfortunately I work out of town at home I run an RTX 4090 and noooooooo even in 720p the steam deck stinks. With new games old games from PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 run like dreams are made if they don't crash which is another thing that I will not mention in this long long grammarless comment
FYI: You can definitely go for the FPS cap in the Deck’s Quick Action Menu nowadays: With the recent SteamOS 3.4 update, Valve introduced an “allow tearing” toggle, which disables the otherwise forced systemwide and triple buffered V-Sync. Means: Disable any in-game caps such as FPS limit or V-Sync (where the latter would be otherwise the optimal alternative), cap the FPS via Quick Action Menu, and toggle “allow tearing” on. Et voila! Bonus: Disabling V-Sync also helps with more headroom for the game engine’s render pipeline.
Gotta back this up, too. That option is extremely badly labeled as it doesn't really tell you the breadth of what it's doing. In 99% of cases where I have enabled the option on my Steam Deck, I get less input lag and still no tearing. It should just be called "Reduce Input Lag" and have a small tooltip below it that would simply say that it could rarely cause screen tearing in some games.
@@iurigrang Whereas the MangoHUD one lacks an enjoyable frame pacing due to its nature: It compares a couple of past frames and acts accordingly. You’ll notice that difference immediately.
This is actually false. Allow tearing only works if you don't have fps cap. "New option to allow Screen Tearing: at the cost of sometimes displaying partial frames, allows for lower average latency when VSync is disabled and the frame limiter is off."
@@DarkBowser64 Screen tearing mostly only occurs if the GPU renders more frames than the screen does anticipate - but since this is rarely the case on Steam Deck, they should re-label it, so you’re totally right! 😁
DF: you need to educate your new editors on shader cache, the guy is saying callisto protocol is maxing out the steam deck ("it is cpu limited as the performance counter hits 100% in parts") when in fact it's the game generating shader cache. Poor prep work on the editor's part
What you call ”advantage” here sounds like a big disadvantage tbh lol ”The screen is so small that I can’t see anything so graphics don’t matter as much”… Why would you want to play AAA games on a ”slightly-larger-than-a-phone” screen? Jesus
12:20 By lowering the 40-60 fps slider to something like 50 will have the other slider (the one that allowed you to select 30 fps) allow you to select 25 fps
I just hope developers continue to make games that are capable of playing on deck with medium to low settings and also run great on a powerful rig with max settings
Playing Witcher 3 and Elden Ring alot, runs fine. Recently beat Midnight Suns on the steam deck, just make sure to do the Vram fix and CryoUtilities fix. I like capping games at 40hz/40fps.
Oh nice, I'm the person who discovered the mangohud input latency workaround. Good to see its been picked up here! Here's hoping valve improve the built in cap at some point, it would make a huge difference.
@@guillermo9171 I've not, most of my testing was done before that was added. I've not really had the time to properly go through and test again, and honestly I was hoping it would have been fixed by now such that I wouldn't have to.
I can say that my experience with Gotham Knights was completely different. I ran it not on the lowest settings, they were low, but with some improvements, and yet I never experienced any seriously noticeable framedrops. There was short stuttering for couple seconds when moving from one part of the city to another, and there was some brief stuttering in fire-heavy open world sections (i've noticed it 2 or 3 times per my 22+ hour play). Also, it drained battery like crazy, so I got less then 2 hours of gameplay from one charge. But 99.5% of experience were smooth as butter even in the open world aread. Weird to see that your experience was different.
This is digital foundry, they always have some kind of issue with pc games in general. Issues that I never experience in the same games on my pc. Yea is weird 🤔
That's very interesting. It's possible they did this testing before a new branch of Proton went live and maybe that's why you're getting better performance now
@@ADreamingTraveler or he could be running cryo utilities or something similar. I use cryo and it's improved most games I play. In fact on older games I get a rock solid 40 fps. The exception is red Dead 2. For some reason water in that game dosent agree with cryo optimizations.
@@markcarpenter6020to be fair, it’s not really CryoUtilities that’s the issue. It’s setting the VRAM to 4gb in the bios that screws with Red Dead. That IS one of the preferred options in CryoUtilities but not a required one. You can use CryoUtilities in Red Dead, just put your VRAM back to 1gb.
I agree. I plan on getting a steamdeck to play older titles and games like hades or octopath traveler 2. If I'm going to play a new AAA game it will be on my lg oled with a 3080ti. I see this as the go to for when I want to game in bed or I'm too tired or lazy to set up the pc. Portable gaming is just so convenient and easy to get into for short play sessions.
The apu is something similar to a 1050ti. Now with the 7 inch screen you can get away with 800p or 720p resolutions because you still get food pixel density.
Finally someone talks about the issue with input latency when using the 30fps limit. I've been really frustrated with Elden Ring on the Deck, because even at the lowest settings and lowest available resolution, it doesn't run at a stable 40fps, but using the 30fps limit makes it more difficult to react to enemies in time. I did some frame counting and the 30 fps limit seems to add about 60ms of latency. Meanwhile streaming the game from my PC over the local network to my Steam Deck adds less than 10ms of latency compared to running it on the Deck uncapped.
@@xmaxdamage I recorded it and then counted the frames from pressing the button to the game responding. Streaming the game from my PC feels very close to playing it on the Deck uncapped, but when it's running on the Deck with the 30fps limit enabled, actions feel noticeably delayed.
Imagine if Deck had the same support for performance profiles they have for inputs. You just select a popular preset, then, possibly, get a list of settings to apply in game (or maybe even just sync the config file), and youre ready. But the Deck is very much for tinkerers anyway, so I guess its low on the list.
I think it would be downright impossible to do, unless game settings are in some plain text config file. But sure enough, it would be really nice feature.
I've seen a lot of comments saying that as the steam deck only has one spec, with a largr user base developers will start optimizing games for the deck and while that sounds amazing, I don't think it's very realistic. There's no way developers will create optimized special settings forjust the deck as it would require much more work, so the most I'd expect are hand picked options for the deck to run well enough, but nowhere near the optimization something like the switch got.
It's just a profile preset like "high", "medium", and "low" already have been for years. For example, Cyberpunk has a Steam Deck preset among the default ones.
Devs taking the time to release a validated SteamOS version of their games will put in some optimisation dev time as part of that process. The steam deck is the most likely target of their testing such a version after all.
Maybe I'm missing something but wouldn't it make a lot of sense for developers to start targeting 720p 30fps on Deck for the minimum requirements spec? Would translate well to equivalent desktop PC's too
Yet with everything upcoming shown none of those games are exactly "Next gen", a plague tale is definitely almost there but it also is a god damn blur mess even maxed out and sadly no settings to fix it. Also some games are totally fine at 30fps for me but others are beyond annoying not getting 60FPS for at least a good amount of the entire game or 60fps with good visuals, I hate blurry messes...
Protip, lock the deck to 45fps then adjust graphics settings per title to keep stable frame rate. Saves quite a bit on battery and still feels super smooth.
Remember when “current gen” portable hardware was little more than a glorified calculator? Think Game & Watch, Tiger Electronics Handhelds, even Konami made a few. It’s easy to forget that portability has always cost something. We’ve come so far that we lose sight of any sacrifice at all until we hit the limits. We forget the trade-offs necessary. For the longest time, portable gaming meant heavy compromise-static LCD screens with hand drawn art, then 4-color displays, always significant processor cut-downs from desktop/primary consoles, etc. While the Steam Deck may not show out on every modern title, it seems to me that it is carrying the baton further than any other portable device before it. Pushing the limits and making us re-examine what they really are. While the handheld space existed before the Deck, the Deck is changing the way we consider gaming, portability, and what it means to have to compromise (or not). Thank you for your continued great work, DF!
Love deck content. For these types of games I just stream to the deck using sunshine and moonlight from my gaming PC . That's a good option for people who have a deck and a gaming PC.
@@peter0882003 thanks for the tip. I haven't head of playnite but it looks like I can just make a shortcut to it in sunshine , launch from moonlight, and get my full PC library in one spot + emu. Great tip.
Really enjoyed this, be interesting to see how the situation continues to develop between OS updates and new games with new technical requirements challenges. Would love to see DF make similar videos with last gen PC hardware (i.e how the original RTX 2000 series of GPU’s handle modern Ray Traced titles etc)
I played through the Witcher at 40fps instead of 30. I highly recommend it, it's much more smooth this way. The biggest settings to get you to 40fps is to turn down the NPC count to the lowest setting and to turn down the grass/foliage setting to the lowest density, the game still looks great this way and performs much better, especially in Novigrad where it normally struggles the most.
Long Story Short; IT NEEDS AN UPGRADE! That 4 core 8 thread processor is NOT ENOUGH!(and I knew it wouldn't be enough, that's why I didn't bother purchasing it). We are in the era of the 8 core and anything less is really just a waste of time.
The Steam Deck's built in frame rate limiter introduces a lot of latency compared to using the in-game frame rate limiter in my experience, so if the game has a limiter I would use that over the Deck's. But it varies game by game so make sure you test.
You always get tearing if you don’t enable something like vsync (which is what I’m assuming the limiter did prior to 3.4)? So yea if you turn off the forced vsync, you’ll get tearing. Not like you wouldn’t get it otherwise.
@@damianabregba7476 in my experience allow tearing doesn't work if the frame limiter is on. You need allow tearing as well as unlimited fps if you want to see tearing which could be a bug.
Yeah you just need to play around with different settings, a lot of workarounds that don't make a ton of sense at first thought. Things like lowering the screen refresh rate 2-4 hz (from 60, So 58 or 56), then move the locked fps slider to be at half full refresh rate, locking it at 28 or 29. You can also try MangoHud set to 31 combined with the SteamOS 30fps limit. In less demanding games set screen to 45 Hz and set the fps cap to 45 as well. Decky Loader with Powertools is the way to best efficiency and performance though, depending if the game is bound more from the cpu side or gpu side you can tweak accordingly. Disable SMT / cores and then raise the core freq and set GPU clock to something like 1500 or more working within the power budget
High CPU utilisation can be due to high system ram and vram consumptions which require the CPU to work harder to compress the memory with zRAM as the memory between CPU and GPU is shared. So graphics budget can impact CPU performance in this case too.
You guys should be more rigorous testing the performance. For example, in plague tale requiem, there are tons of moments later in the game when the steam deck can't even hold 25 fps. The first two chapters are not so demanding at all.
It's a shame a lot of game devs just don't optimise games. They really need to focus on performance more than visuals. AMD FSR is great but is not a substitute for optimisations. And speaking of visuals, I'd much rather see games have artistic styles instead of realistic ones. I hate uncanny valley. I can get much more immersed in cartoony looking games than realistic ones. The style has little to do with performance though, of course.
One interesting thing i discovered is 29 or 28 fps mode. It can help in some instances where power scaling is weird like in elden ring. Boosts battery life quite nicely
Are you setting that fps limit in launch options of said game? Or is there some other way you're capping it this way? I'm assuming the other way is to drop the screen refresh rate down 1-2 hz under 60, then move the locked fps slider to be at half full refresh rate, locking it at ~28 that way?
Yeah me as well. I used the CryoUtilities and the GPU memory leak. Tbh I personally haven't really noticed major performance improvements that much but it's tough to compare.
@@JonnyLin7 I've noticed my games are a lot smoother. I usually run at 40 fps for battery life and that 40is usually rock solid with cryo. Meaning I could easily go higher if I wanted.
To be honest, if the PC port is crap it mostly runs like it on any PC, including the SD. I've had mine for almost a year now and I'm still impressed by what this little handheld PC can do. Just look at something like Doom Eternal, that game is optimized AF and runs at the highest settings at a locked 60fps, it's a sight to behold actually.
I'm curious if the update Callisto Protocol came out with yesterday improves performance on Steam Deck at all. It's supposed to improve things on "all platforms" so maybe?
@@RARF29 Yh not sure where he’s getting the timeframe or cpu fix from but I’d assume the next patch will be a big one as it’s been a while since hotfix 2. All gpus are cpu limited even at 4k and only in a couple forest/village area do you ever get 99% utilisation with even the most powerful cpus.
If you play it on DX11 CPU is demand is low. It never had problem from day 1 but DX12 for some reason is more demanding in CPU, and RT is even more demanding on CPU
@@killermoon635 Yh but there’s no point playing without Rt since that’s the actual game changing feature. Most people alr had All the basic other stuff like quick signs and friendly hud with mods.
FYI, I know this is aimed more at out of the box settings but increasing UMA frame buffer and swapfile size, and swappiness via desktop mode sometimes squeezes out an extra bit of performance to hit 40-45 fps in more demanding games. Definitely helps with games like Witcher 3.
Although I get your thinking, I recon this video targets the less versed user that barely is able to input launch arguments. Even though I've been using KDE on Arch for months, I think the Desktop mode is rather clunky and buggy (literally de facto wrecked it just by opening partition management and getting it stuck in some weird state, but I know that utility as 'problematic' already). Also, after clean-installing onto a bigger SSD, I had some very weird glitches with the interface. Don't think my Deck is broken, I was rather careful with it, Valve just aren't as senior in developing an OS as they should be. Though I like inclusion such as Mangohud et al., been using those myself already.
@@whohan779 my post has nothing to do with running games via desktop mode. This is just changing the UMA setting in the bios and downloading an app called Cryoutilities which allows you to easily adjust the swapfiles and swappiness. It's a very simple mod and helps boost performance. You just have to do the initial setup for the app in desktop mode, you can play games as normal in game mode and the settings carry over. Sorry to hear about your deck though. I've had no issues and have had mine for almost a year.
I’ve found AAA gaming to be an awful experience on Deck. Horizon Zero Dawn, God Of War and Spider-Man run pretty bad tbh. I’m sticking to games pre 2017 tbh
It is amazing that these big PC titles play on a handheld at this price range. I think its important to keep in mind that this is not a machine aimed at top tier graphics titles although it's very cool that it can run them at 30fps with some dips (title depending). The deck is really a console per se, and developers who do PC, PS5 and XBSeries games can easily tweak the PC titles for a Steam Deck profile which could be separate from PC.. offering more subtle tweaking to settings to achieve a constant 30fps (or more) as if it was a console-ish target. I got mine to play recent to older titles that I wanted to revisit or missed, but it's very cool to know it can run current gen and PC titles - now all it needs is for developers to add steam deck as a "console" target and make sure these titles play at a consistent 30fps minimum.
Another way to tackle the FPS limiter input lag issue in some games that offer half-rate vsync option: 1. Set performance overlay FPS limiter to unlimited. 2. Enable "Allow tearing" setting. 3. In game: disable FPS cap if there's a setting for it, enable half-vsync. This way SteamOS' forced VSync is not engaged, so you don't get extra input lag on top of the game's VSync implementation. In most games I've tested half-rate VSync offers better frame pacing than either in-game FPS cap or mangohud FPS limiter, while also introducing less input lag compared to SteamOS FPS limiter.
Thank you for talking about the huge input lag with the built-in frame limiter. It's almost unusable and the lack of other options really hurts the otherwise excellent experience i'm having using the Steam Deck. For now i'm just avoiding playing anything that needs to be capped at 30 FPS.
the mangohud command works really well for many games actually. I played through entire spider-man PC remastered @ 30 fps and it was a fairly solid experience.
I also recommend the MangoHud trick showed in this video. It works for any fps, too. I just recently played through Black Mesa and it madr that game playable at 60fps (yes, even the 60fps vsync from Valve had too much input lag for me). Just keep in mind that sometimes it doesn't work at the exact fps (as in 30fps vsync + 30fps in MangoHud), you need to go 1 fps higher in MangoHud (30fps vsync + 31fps in MangoHud). I had to do this in Forza for example.
Yeah, I appreciated that too. 99% of the time input latency is completely ignored even for things like brand new controller reviews and it drives me kinda crazy. I know not everyone is as knowledgeable when it comes to tech, but it just seems unprofessional when even huge media outlets like IGN, Gamespot, etc completely ignore things like this all the time. (DF has been great drawing attention to stutter too)
What planet are you living on? The only game I played that had that problem was Crash Nsane Trilogy. You have to limit the framerate in the actual game settings for responsiveness.
Maybe I'm just stuck in 2017 but this latest batch of handhelds are just magic to me. The fact integrated graphics tucked away on some dinky 4 core processor can even touch these games is a marvel of technology.
A Phoenix Point apu seems like something Valve would get a lot of mileage out off, given RNDA 3's duel ALU set up benefits greatly from hand tweaked shaders to target synchronous execution of some instructions. And since Valve controls the hardware + platform, they can push the optimized shaders with ease.
They're not even comparable. That's like saying "I don't know why you'd bother with a laptop when you could just build a desktop", a Steam Deck is a full experience in the hand, a laptop and separate controller is not a compact setup.
For anyone watching this October 2024, the performance of some of these games are far better on Steam Deck then in this video. I was able to get a stable 50 FPS in most areas with Witcher using similar settings, but just setting XESS to "Ultra Quality".
Great video again by the folks at DF. I am impressed as much as the next guy to see the deck running current gen titles at all. However in my opinion, older games (8th gen and below) is what I'll be using the steam deck especially for emulation which it runs like a dream. It's an effective machine for all of us gamers to finish the backlog of games we wanted to play on our consoles and PCs. I even got project brutality working on it and it's like a dream come true for me. These are the type of things I thought the switch should be handling especially 7 gen games and older, but yeah it is what it is. Anyways, since Sony is off the handheld market, this is the best thing the brilliant people at Valve came up with and I'm happy to give Valve my money.
While I wouldn't scoff at 8 zen 4 cores, I think the power/silicon budget would be better spent on the GPU, espeecially on a 60Hz device. Six cores ought to be enough in most cases, and it would leave more power available to the GPU
he just showed you that the deck can play these "9th gen games" even the unoptomized messy versions of them (like gotham knights and callisto) really well. you're seeing a blurry image but in reality its more than enough for the small screen. anything the series S can handle the deck can handle with the exception of really poorly optimised games.
@@saricubra2867 Yeah PS3 emulation isn't great on the Deck overall, although some games run fantastic, usually the less demanding games in Playable status. This is why I also have my beast of a desktop for PS3 emulation as well as Xbox 360 emulation. It has an i9-12900K, and one from before May 2022, so I get AVX-512.
@@AllieRX I also have AVX512, it's an i7-12700K, 2021 batch. I predicted the Steam Deck struggle from the moment AMD decided to use Zen 2 instead of Zen 3.
I don't plan on running a majority of triple A, big budget titles on the go. The fact that the Steam Deck can even run these demanding games is more than impressive to me and I love my Steam Deck. There's a bunch of smaller games which work perfectly for it and I don't have to fire up my gaming PC to play... but if I do I can just continue where I left off and it's wonderful lol. For those expecting the Steam Deck to replace their gaming PC, either you don't play a huge host of demanding games to begin with or rarely do that much gaming in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it got all the tools to replace a gaming PC with the proper dock but expectations need to be tampered. And the biggest side note in my eyes is that it does more in terms of raw horsepower on release than the Switch on release playing triple A titles that released around its launch.
Another notable one is Mad Max. It runs incredibly well with no compromised Ultra setting with 60FPS on steam deck. I remember this game was one of the handful of games the supported triple monitors back in the day and it ran so well on PC.
The fun part about the Steam Deck is the Modularity, once those new chips come out, if enabled to be compatible, ohoho, upgrading is going to be the most satisfying process, just like anyone else I don't have much experience with opening up electronics, more than most yes, but its only because I have the mindset to want to learn all this stuff, the first thing I'm doing when my steam deck arrives tomorrow is upgrade the 64eMMC with a WD 2TB SSD, so it's gonna be a fun experience imo, I don't mind doing it myself as this is how we learn after all... and lots of youtube videos XD
Love these Steamdeck vids. I am also very happy playing older games on it - so far anything up to 2018 seems to run flawlessly at 60fps with high settings. Titanfall 2 and Infjnite Warfare, two of my fave FPS campaigns, play like butter on steamdeck and look amazing. I can run cyberpunk at 30fps too, which seems amazing to me. SD is easily my favorite piece of gaming hardware, and I look forward to many years with it.
Methinks Steam Deck V2 will come along eventually that makes THESE games work better, but then there's always something even more demanding on the horizon.
I dont know man, A Plague Tale: Requiem i feel like its super unoptimized, knowing how games work and all we have games that look better have 10 times more things and have a 100 times bigger map and still runs heaps better while looking better idk.
Disabling SMT helps with some CPU bound games.. Also setting VRAM to 4GB. I am suprised that some of these werent tried here. Well I cant tell VRAM setting honestly, but SMT was definitly enabled, you can see that by core count. CryoUtillities, 4GB VRAM, and SMT are some stuff and settings that if you have steam deck you should proably look at it.
Disabling SMT does not help in most cases specially if you have only 4 cores and running a modern games i3 10th gen was a lot faster than 9th and 8th gen in gaming because 10th gen has HT/SMT
disabling smt is not a general fix for poor CPU performance, it works on some emulators because they're translating code that was not built for a hyperthreading x86 plataform, but otherwise just harms it
disabling smt will only give you better performance in games you are not threaded limited. Games shown here are lacking more threads so disabling half will only make it worse..
@@igorrafael7429 I said disabling SMT will give you better performance in some games, case in point Gotham Knights, game that is opposite of being thread limited
Is anyone actually enjoying these AAA games on the Steamdeck and playing them to completion? I think it's just ruining the experience playing on a tiny mediocre IPS screen, mostly low settings at 30ish FPS (also terrible screen glare if playing outside home where you can control lighting). Kind of like watching pirated CAM movie instead of the real thing at IMAX. I just can't imagine experiencing Elden Ring, Ragnarok, TLoU2 on SD rather than my home setup. Yuck.
Heads up, many of the frame time issue can be solved by pinning the gpu to 1600ghz in the quick access menu. This is because the steam deck APU sometimes struggles to balance power between the cpu & gpu performance, by pinning the gpu stability is improved in games with gpu bottlenecks. Also with your Witcher 3 comparison, it is important to note that screen space reflections have a significant performance impact on the deck compared to other settings; I have been able to achieve a relatively stable 40fps/40hz on Witcher 3 with mid-high settings minus SSR.
I love the Steam Deck! I think it is an amazing device! I think all owners know that there are going to probably be games in the near future that just wont run good on it. But what it can do, its freaking awesome! Give it a year or two, and I imagine Valve will finally give us a Steam Deck 2 or 3 that gives much closer to console performance. I am very happy at the moment, but excited for the future!
Nah, games will be playable on Steam Deck, at least for this era. Xbox series S will guarantee graphic in game won't be that far since they need to run on that system. Ps5 exlusive game port to pc is exception though
Unfortunately, I have to say that the video is a bit too negative for me. Yes, the Steam deck is not as strong as a Series X/S or a PS5. But does it have to be? Or to put it another way, is that even possible in a handheld? Yes, of course, now everyone comes back with their AYANEOs and GPD WINs. Maybe these devices have 30-50 percent or even 100% more CPU/GPU. But then these devices will also quickly have problems with the runtime. What is always forgotten in my eyes is the support which is provided by VALVE. Be it hardware or software. I don't wish anyone that their device breaks down. If mine should ever be broken, I have more confidence in the support from VALVE than from the other manufacturers. In case of doubt I can even repair my Steam Deck myself. A very important point is also the standby. The Steam Deck hardly loses battery in standby. Have fun with the Windows handhelds. Which brings us to the software. VALVE has Linux very very well under control. On Windows, I don't feel like configuring all the different launchers and messing around with shader caches on such a small device. The Switch is not so successful because it has a lot of hardware power, but because the software was adapted to the hardware and good first parties were/are released. We probably won't see first parties from VALVE, but OS updates that further optimize. I strongly assume that development studios will also have the Steam deck on their minds for new releases. At least that is my hope. If not, I still have a huge calalogue of titles I can play. The Steam Deck is the best device for me since I got my first Gameboy from my parents.
@@ShadowMan64572 Generally, on console I'm a "60FPS or bust" kind of guy. The standardization of 60FPS w the XSX was exactly what I was waiting for since I built my first PC in 2011. Steam Deck can't do 60FPS very often (at least not without massive sacrifice) so 40FPS and a little less battery life is worth it to me.
The SD may not be ideal for new top tier games but I have a large backlog of older games that will run perfectly on it, not to mention emulated games and indie/less demanding games.
I do wish that developers could prioritize performance on low-end hardware more. I don't think there is really anything in the games mentioned that actually needs that much cpu power, but finding those inefficiencies can be a lot of work that won't be considered worth it if the game runs well enough on current consoles.
I love everything about the Steam Deck! As a new dad with almost little to no time playing games anymore, this is perfect for me! Even the battery life is more than enough for me (Im lucky if I even get 30 minutes of gaming time) However, I just dont have the extra cash (and time right now) right now to get one. Maybe Ill just wait for a sale after a year or so or the 2nd iteration.
Tbh sounds like one of the cheap chinese retro handhelds would be better for you, you can get one pre loaded with most roms all the way up to dreamcast for about $70. Older games are easier to play in 30 min chunks anyway. Check out the Miyoo Mini
What I find weird, they don't adjust the resolution lower than 720p. If you go to a 1024x640 or 960x600 resolution (20% to 25% decrease) and slide the Scaling Filter to "Integer" or "FSR". You can add quite some frames without sacrificing too much. You only have an extra border with integer mode. Playing HZD at 60 is quite easy this way. Or 40-ish, if you want to take battery length in account. my to go is 48, right in between. Often not that demanding for minimal loss. If you like to tinker, you can always adjust UMA and Cache to improve some things. You can easily squeeze some power out of it, without adjust hard to reach settings.
Very cool video thanks for sharing. I like to see how things can be optimised. However, I will still play games that don't run flawlessly, grew up loving ps1 and n64 so my tolerance for inconsistant framerates is pretty flexible. I will be playing the latest games on steam deck probably till 2033! LOL!
Shhhh, stop pissing on the lie-filled hype fest and convenient ignoring of the shoddy battery life or that acting like the Steam Deck only cost $400 when that is the starting price.
Key takeaway for me, if the game is even vaguely optimised for PC correctly, you can get it running on Steam Deck. Gotham knights and Callisto Protocol are not fair comparisons given their pc problems. Overall great video and interesting to see how Steam Deck is hanging in there
Yes. Sony games like gow, spiderman , hzd are really good on the deck
@@nathsabari97 sony did release the games on pc for the steam deck though
Yeah...low quality PC versions are low quality on Steam Deck too, go figure. But e.g. Cyberpunk has great PC version and runs great on Deck, and still looks vastly better than both Callisto and Gotham.
In addition to that: Many games that suffer from compilation stutter, perform even better on Deck - since SteamOS fully utilises precompiled shader caches across the community, which even improve over time.
@@InvalidUser_ given Spider-Man: Remastered/Miles Morales has a problem with Mouse-like Camera action being disabled during combat (due to them treating it like Gyro Controls instead of treating it like a Mouse-Like camera action like in every SIAPI-supported game that supplies it. *that problem becomes more evident if using a Steam Controller* ) and button prompts being bugged if using Steam Controller or Nintendo Switch controller, i believe that.
Really love when DF puts out content specific to the Deck.
I agree, It's an interesting console.
Absolutely, even though it runs PC games, it is basically like its own console/platform, and I think deserves its own videos like this. When DF puts out a Steam Deck video it gets an instant watch from me.
Exactly, I love my Steam Deck and want to see more coverage of the device. Its a great handheld with a lot of power and is able to do a lot. Sales have also been completely insane and Valve has a hard time fulfilling orders and keeping up with demand. So there is an audience for it.
so that u can justify ur purchase ?
@@crescentmoon256 sO tHaT yOu CaN jUsTiFy YoUr PuRcHaSe!?
I have a steam deck and I'm constantly amazed at the performance I get. Currently playing sekiro at a capped 45fps at 13 watts so I get about 3.5 hours of battery. It can handle higher settings and fps but I want the battery life.
About to be at elden Ring, stuck on the last boss elden Lord, and then I'll play sekiro
Why 45 fps? Won’t that lead to uneven frame times?
@@arbiter5100 it would lead to uneven frame times in a 60hz screen. But you can set the screen to 45hz. The effect is similar to VRR on consoles in the simplest terms. You have a silky smooth framerate with dramatically improved controller response time compared to 30 and no stutter.
I'm a simple man, I see someone else says they play Sekiro and they get a like
You can play while charging on this thing?
It's worth tweaking the GPU Clock setting in the Quick Access menu, in some cases locking that to something high in GPU limited circumstances or low in CPU limited circumstances can net significantly more stable performance. (I've noticed this working particularly well in Cyberpunk with the clock set to 1500MHz.)
@@cunt5413 Yup, Decky loader is a must imo. Some games that aren't that demanding but might have a lot happening on screen, perfect example is Vampire Survivors, disabling SMT and having it set to 2 or 4 cores can double the FPS sometimes
I also set it to 1600 MHz to get 10 more fps out of the evil within 2
@@donniedarko4497 evil within 2 is a nightmare peice of software even for a competent computer
@@geoffdb8118 Not really dude,i get more then 100 fps with rx6600xt on maxed settings 1080p,i have no idea what is your def of competent computer,but to put in perspective i have cpu 6 cores 12 threads,and a gpu that is meant for 1080p gaming,some titles do run good in 2k as well,but not the newest games,so there's that,steam deck is well not that strong it's portable device that is mean for lighter titles,not for all triple A games.
On elden ring. Tdp to 12w and gpu to 1300Mhz + lock it to 30 fps will result 40-45c temps, smooth experience and 3 hours+ battery time.. On stock but tinkering vram and swapfile size you can turn graphics to high and it still can do it 1080p when docked. Swift little beast I would say. With manually setting higher rpm on the fan you get more fps too.
Ive noticed that when I first play games I need to play them on medium lot, but as time goes by, shaders and updates get applied, I can run demanding games on high/ultra settings a lot of the time. There's definitely a ton of optimization happening behind the scenes
This is incredible stuff. I love how so many of these games downscale well - I play the deck exclusively in handheld so I’m not too stressed about visual fidelity compared to when I’m on my pc.
Handheld and Docked offers the same performance
@@nikkoa.3639 Yes, but docked in a 1080p or higher display makes the 720p rendering resolution to look worse than in SteamDeck 800p screen, so as he plays only in the system's screen, he can't see the problems he would in a higher resolution screen
@@ltBanshiro Oh that's what he could've meant, I was under the assumption that he added "handheld" as to imply that there was a performance boost when docked.
@Nikko A. no no
@@ltBanshiro same issue with the switch. Lots of games look better in handheld than docked. Because of the downscaling and 720p.
For Witcher 3 I'd recommend the DX12 version (steam preloads the shaders so no stutters) plus you get FSR which lets you play at 40fps with medium-high settings
Have they finally fixed DX12 for the witcher 3, because not too long ago it was running like crap with DX12
@@garethflook5706 Yeah, every few feet I got compilation stutter. Immediately uninstalled the game after that. If it's fixed, I might download it again.
@@chexmixkitty It works great now at least on my deck 40-50 fps smooth never hits 60 but no major stutters. It's on default settings full resolution. Totally playable and looks great for a mobile as well!
Don't do this. The performance impact from DX12 and FSR 2 means you're upscaling when there would be no need to in DX11.
agreed ive got 300 hours in witcher 3 on my deck its the way ive played it and its amazing need for speed unbound does better than they said too
Deck is good as a backlog and indie machine, except for the science there's no point in trying to run demanding AAA moviegames on the thing.
I mostly play older games at 40fps and emulators on the deck. Its fun to tweak the settings for maximum battery life but without compromising the image too much
I do love the analysis giving me proper settings to use on various hardware like the Steam Deck and even certain PC titles, per graphics card, etc. They've been a great help.
Now I almost can't wait for Digital Foundry to talk more about Forspoken if only because it seems one of their favorite words is "Bespoke", so now they get to use the word "Forspoke".
"Bespoken"
Something that actually might be worth looking into for ya.
there's a plug-in for decky loader.
one that's specific for sharing people settings in game and the battery management configuration for SteamOS side.
I’d love these kind of videos every once in a while, could be helpful to do many people that are curious about wanting certain games on the deck
Limiting GPU clocks to about 1400mhz can be a magic bullet for CPU limited games. Elden Ring in particular can take some shockingly low GPU clocks before negative returns set in.
Works for rpcs3 too, sly 4 performance became much more stable
That's very interesting. If you don't mind, can you share your settings for Elden Ring?
I wish they'd also try out things like CryoByte33's performance boost fixes.
I uhhh... I've been playing Elden Ring at 540p with 6w TDP with clocks locked at 600 MHz to save battey life and it's honestly been great.
Medium settings with AO set to high because I didn't like the shimmering shadows.
Why is Elden Ring so optimised out of the box, you can play that on your TV default settings like a dream
Steam Deck has so much potential I can't wait for their next revision. Hopefully they can take the feedback and smooth out some edges here and there
I wish more people made videos of older games that look and play great on Steam Deck. I definitely find that older games, like, even, say... Fallout 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Games that were available on console, but now you can get the console form factor+portability, much better performance, way better visuals (that look fantastic at 720p due to what they were targeting at the time), etc....
I might actually just start doing it myself. I just find that older games (that are so good they'd make you buy again as remasters to play like this on console) is where it really shines and frankly, deserves more attention than all these new games even if it doesn't make as good of a headline or video title.
Yeah, it's a great backlog killer 💪💪
Metal Gear V runs great on the Steam Deck and I am pretty sure you can get a lot of battery life (I tend to get around 2 hours) if you set the settings correctly (I haven’t even touch them because I haven’t had the need to)
that a handheld pc can run those games at around 30 fps for a minimum of 400$ thats still damn impressive
Any games can run at 30fps if you make it potato enough just check out modern vintage gamer
30fps is unplayable if you are a PC gamer
@@sabus1265 much rather play a game at 30 fps on pc than at a 60fps broken unreal game.
But hey could always turn it down to 240 p if it’s unplayable at 30 fps,
@@sabus1265 have you ever played turn based games?
@@sabus1265 30fps is pretty standard on most handheld games. especially on the competitor Switch
It's remarkable how well the Steam Deck copes with newer games and it's doing better than a lot of us expected.
With that in mind, I was under no illusion that once games really start to target the newer gen consoles, especially on the cpu and SSD front, that would cause problems for the Steam Deck, but honestly, we're two years in the new gen console cycle and these games are few and far between that push the Steam Deck to braking point and most games work well on it with the right settings and honestly, a big reason I like the Steam Deck is for lighter indie games, older games and emulators, it's nice that we can play newer demanding games but I rather play them on my desktop PC.
As for the future, it's looking good for a Steam Deck 2, cpu and gpu performance should be a lot better by then, NVMe drive will likely be a standard by then and the software side with SteamOS and games support will likely be much better that it wouldn't surprise me if Valve doesn't want to release a Steam Deck 2 until the software side is mature enough that they can target a wider gaming audience and I suspect Valve could release a Steam Deck 2 shortly after Nintendo release a Switch 2 whiles also having a lot more units available for us, after all, the Steam Deck was a gamble for Valve, they didn't know how well the market would take to it, now that it's got a footing, they might go all out with a Steam Deck 2 with a lot more Decks available.
It isn't surprising to me its doing well - too many games for console and PC are still going to target much much older and slower hardware than the deck, as there are so many folks out there with the older console and the older gaming PC so the game devs kind of have to. No point targeting the 4090 performance or even the 2080 as a minimum when so many gamers are still running 10 series or comparable type performance more modern budget cards.
The Deck does continually impresses me with just how well it runs most titles at its native resolution, and often 1080p with settings cranked way way up if you don't mind the low battery life. Only things I've found you can't get good playable performance out of it on the Deck are the games so shit they turn the best 500w+ gaming PC into a space heater and still play rather badly...
I have so many games on my backlog that I'm finally getting through, that by the time I've caught up with "next gen" gaming there will be a new Steam Deck or two lol
You can get the Callisto protocol to run at 30fps stable if you enable the use of other versions of proton.
which version man?
@@manuelfabris7541 trust him
@@manuelfabris7541 GE-Proton7-43, launch option: DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command%, settingS: Medium preset. FSR-Quality. Download the cache before starting. solid 30fps with 1% lows of 26fps and 0.1% lows of 15fps.
A friend suggested GE-Proton7-44 runs better, but it doesn't support DXVK_ASYNC. Have yet to test myself.
If you instead use Proton-Experimental, set to DX11 mode instead of 12. Medium preset with a few set to low, FSR2-Performance and you can play at a locked 40.
@@Armataan super interesting
@@Armataan man I wished this was showcase in the video, or valve put this on proton experimental or next? For few games that need special troubleshooting like the Witcher 3 next gen patch.
The steam deck has incredible performance for the price and certainly will last for a couple of years. Sometimes you just need to do a bit of tweaking to get the game to run well. I get a mostly solid 40fps in RDR2. In Assassin’s creed odyssey I get 45 -50 fps. I would recommend installing decky loader. Which can help you tweak your steam deck more by enabling large Linux pages and having the ability to tweak the cpu clock and the power to it. I also would recommend increasing the swap file size and changing dedicated vram for gpu to 4gb
Well spoken but like all computers biggest enemy is the test of time. But since you are a tweaker I challenge you to try and tweak the game Warhammer 40K dark tide because that game looks like a pile of dog crap on the Steamdeck in order to sort of play comfortably and no tweaking will save you it will be a suicide mission and you will not be able to hold 30 frames no matter what you do you will be going down the 20 to 15 in large-scale online combat which sucks the games that you have stated in your messenger old today's best games require more and I think that's digital Foundry point I refuse to play dark tide on the handheld because of the topic in this video it's too uncomfortable
Really want get it but I’m worried about it’s future proof seeing how new games are becoming even more demanding now and in a couple years steam deck 2 will also probably be announced :/
The fact that this portable device can run new pc games at playable framerates is already an amazing feat. Even if it can't run new games AAA in the future it still well worth its price since it can play so many older and current titles and it will still play indie games and less demanding games for years to come. Emulation is also a huge bonus. For $400 it's insane.
@wheresthe0x218 I mean it's only $400. I wouldn't count on it playing the highest demanding games after the next 2 years. Just use it for the now and enjoy it and then upgrade later.
Unfortunately I beg to disagree I want to sell my Steam deck it's not powerful enough even right now. Not for today's best games. The thing should be able to at least hold its liquid smooth 30 frames on higher settings in 720p the things I saw the game evil West do on the steam we're really haunting and disappointing after Googling what people said the put the graphics settings on I was thoroughly disappointed with the results and I will be getting a gaming laptop very soon for work. For unfortunately I work out of town at home I run an RTX 4090 and noooooooo even in 720p the steam deck stinks. With new games old games from PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 run like dreams are made if they don't crash which is another thing that I will not mention in this long long grammarless comment
FYI: You can definitely go for the FPS cap in the Deck’s Quick Action Menu nowadays: With the recent SteamOS 3.4 update, Valve introduced an “allow tearing” toggle, which disables the otherwise forced systemwide and triple buffered V-Sync. Means: Disable any in-game caps such as FPS limit or V-Sync (where the latter would be otherwise the optimal alternative), cap the FPS via Quick Action Menu, and toggle “allow tearing” on. Et voila! Bonus: Disabling V-Sync also helps with more headroom for the game engine’s render pipeline.
even with allow tearing, the built in limiter is much less responsive than the mangohud one
Gotta back this up, too. That option is extremely badly labeled as it doesn't really tell you the breadth of what it's doing.
In 99% of cases where I have enabled the option on my Steam Deck, I get less input lag and still no tearing. It should just be called "Reduce Input Lag" and have a small tooltip below it that would simply say that it could rarely cause screen tearing in some games.
@@iurigrang Whereas the MangoHUD one lacks an enjoyable frame pacing due to its nature: It compares a couple of past frames and acts accordingly. You’ll notice that difference immediately.
This is actually false. Allow tearing only works if you don't have fps cap.
"New option to allow Screen Tearing: at the cost of sometimes displaying partial frames, allows for lower average latency when VSync is disabled and the frame limiter is off."
@@DarkBowser64 Screen tearing mostly only occurs if the GPU renders more frames than the screen does anticipate - but since this is rarely the case on Steam Deck, they should re-label it, so you’re totally right! 😁
DF: you need to educate your new editors on shader cache, the guy is saying callisto protocol is maxing out the steam deck ("it is cpu limited as the performance counter hits 100% in parts") when in fact it's the game generating shader cache. Poor prep work on the editor's part
One big advantage of playing on a small screen is you won't really notice any graphical loss not playing on the highest graphical settings.
What you call ”advantage” here sounds like a big disadvantage tbh lol ”The screen is so small that I can’t see anything so graphics don’t matter as much”… Why would you want to play AAA games on a ”slightly-larger-than-a-phone” screen? Jesus
@@alenko4763 because playing games on the toilet is a win-win for everyone?
12:20 By lowering the 40-60 fps slider to something like 50 will have the other slider (the one that allowed you to select 30 fps) allow you to select 25 fps
50hz/25fps? PAL Flashbacks 😵
@@gerboog are you from Glasgow?
@@paulwilson1555 lol... Europe is more than just UK, me boy.
I just hope developers continue to make games that are capable of playing on deck with medium to low settings and also run great on a powerful rig with max settings
Really enjoying the “How does it run on Steam Deck” coverage, thanks for all you do, looking forward to more content!!
Playing Witcher 3 and Elden Ring alot, runs fine. Recently beat Midnight Suns on the steam deck, just make sure to do the Vram fix and CryoUtilities fix. I like capping games at 40hz/40fps.
Oh nice, I'm the person who discovered the mangohud input latency workaround. Good to see its been picked up here!
Here's hoping valve improve the built in cap at some point, it would make a huge difference.
Have you tried the mangohud fps cap while "allow tearing" is on? For some reason it seems to tank my frame rate to like 10fps.
@@guillermo9171 I've not, most of my testing was done before that was added. I've not really had the time to properly go through and test again, and honestly I was hoping it would have been fixed by now such that I wouldn't have to.
I can say that my experience with Gotham Knights was completely different. I ran it not on the lowest settings, they were low, but with some improvements, and yet I never experienced any seriously noticeable framedrops. There was short stuttering for couple seconds when moving from one part of the city to another, and there was some brief stuttering in fire-heavy open world sections (i've noticed it 2 or 3 times per my 22+ hour play). Also, it drained battery like crazy, so I got less then 2 hours of gameplay from one charge. But 99.5% of experience were smooth as butter even in the open world aread. Weird to see that your experience was different.
This is digital foundry, they always have some kind of issue with pc games in general. Issues that I never experience in the same games on my pc. Yea is weird 🤔
That's very interesting. It's possible they did this testing before a new branch of Proton went live and maybe that's why you're getting better performance now
@@ADreamingTraveler or he could be running cryo utilities or something similar. I use cryo and it's improved most games I play. In fact on older games I get a rock solid 40 fps. The exception is red Dead 2. For some reason water in that game dosent agree with cryo optimizations.
@@markcarpenter6020to be fair, it’s not really CryoUtilities that’s the issue. It’s setting the VRAM to 4gb in the bios that screws with Red Dead. That IS one of the preferred options in CryoUtilities but not a required one. You can use CryoUtilities in Red Dead, just put your VRAM back to 1gb.
@@dewinter1411 that's true but it is irritating to switch that back and forth.
Maybe its because I grew up playing 16 bit games on Commodore 64...but the Steam Deck graphics still blow me away lol
This is to be expected. With handheld systems there will be compromises. I mainly use my steam deck to player old gen games and its been enjoyable.
I agree. I plan on getting a steamdeck to play older titles and games like hades or octopath traveler 2. If I'm going to play a new AAA game it will be on my lg oled with a 3080ti. I see this as the go to for when I want to game in bed or I'm too tired or lazy to set up the pc. Portable gaming is just so convenient and easy to get into for short play sessions.
The apu is something similar to a 1050ti. Now with the 7 inch screen you can get away with 800p or 720p resolutions because you still get food pixel density.
Finally someone talks about the issue with input latency when using the 30fps limit.
I've been really frustrated with Elden Ring on the Deck, because even at the lowest settings and lowest available resolution, it doesn't run at a stable 40fps, but using the 30fps limit makes it more difficult to react to enemies in time.
I did some frame counting and the 30 fps limit seems to add about 60ms of latency. Meanwhile streaming the game from my PC over the local network to my Steam Deck adds less than 10ms of latency compared to running it on the Deck uncapped.
how can you even detect 10 ms? that's like hd screen lag
@@xmaxdamage I recorded it and then counted the frames from pressing the button to the game responding.
Streaming the game from my PC feels very close to playing it on the Deck uncapped, but when it's running on the Deck with the 30fps limit enabled, actions feel noticeably delayed.
Whoa! What's with the glitch on Elena's hair (8:43)? Never seen that before on either PS4, PS5 or Steam Deck ...
I was looking for this comment wanted to see if anyone else caught that
Imagine if Deck had the same support for performance profiles they have for inputs. You just select a popular preset, then, possibly, get a list of settings to apply in game (or maybe even just sync the config file), and youre ready. But the Deck is very much for tinkerers anyway, so I guess its low on the list.
I would love this as a feature.
I think it would be downright impossible to do, unless game settings are in some plain text config file. But sure enough, it would be really nice feature.
Gaming at 720p is really not something I'd want to do, regardless of form factor, in 2023.
I've seen a lot of comments saying that as the steam deck only has one spec, with a largr user base developers will start optimizing games for the deck and while that sounds amazing, I don't think it's very realistic.
There's no way developers will create optimized special settings forjust the deck as it would require much more work, so the most I'd expect are hand picked options for the deck to run well enough, but nowhere near the optimization something like the switch got.
One can dream still....
It's just a profile preset like "high", "medium", and "low" already have been for years. For example, Cyberpunk has a Steam Deck preset among the default ones.
Devs taking the time to release a validated SteamOS version of their games will put in some optimisation dev time as part of that process. The steam deck is the most likely target of their testing such a version after all.
Maybe I'm missing something but wouldn't it make a lot of sense for developers to start targeting 720p 30fps on Deck for the minimum requirements spec? Would translate well to equivalent desktop PC's too
Yet with everything upcoming shown none of those games are exactly "Next gen", a plague tale is definitely almost there but it also is a god damn blur mess even maxed out and sadly no settings to fix it.
Also some games are totally fine at 30fps for me but others are beyond annoying not getting 60FPS for at least a good amount of the entire game or 60fps with good visuals, I hate blurry messes...
Protip, lock the deck to 45fps then adjust graphics settings per title to keep stable frame rate. Saves quite a bit on battery and still feels super smooth.
Remember when “current gen” portable hardware was little more than a glorified calculator? Think Game & Watch, Tiger Electronics Handhelds, even Konami made a few. It’s easy to forget that portability has always cost something. We’ve come so far that we lose sight of any sacrifice at all until we hit the limits. We forget the trade-offs necessary. For the longest time, portable gaming meant heavy compromise-static LCD screens with hand drawn art, then 4-color displays, always significant processor cut-downs from desktop/primary consoles, etc. While the Steam Deck may not show out on every modern title, it seems to me that it is carrying the baton further than any other portable device before it. Pushing the limits and making us re-examine what they really are. While the handheld space existed before the Deck, the Deck is changing the way we consider gaming, portability, and what it means to have to compromise (or not). Thank you for your continued great work, DF!
I don’t have a steam deck, a Xbox, a ps5 or a life
I don’t know why I’m here, learned a lot tho
Love deck content. For these types of games I just stream to the deck using sunshine and moonlight from my gaming PC . That's a good option for people who have a deck and a gaming PC.
I use playnite and moonlight. Let's you play any game store like gamepass/epic etc. It's a great way to save battery too.
@@peter0882003 thanks for the tip. I haven't head of playnite but it looks like I can just make a shortcut to it in sunshine , launch from moonlight, and get my full PC library in one spot + emu. Great tip.
@@ChrisSonPEI Glad you found a solution that works for you. The streaming is so good I doubt I'll ever need to upgrade my Deck😁
Really enjoyed this, be interesting to see how the situation continues to develop between OS updates and new games with new technical requirements challenges. Would love to see DF make similar videos with last gen PC hardware (i.e how the original RTX 2000 series of GPU’s handle modern Ray Traced titles etc)
I think this is a pointless topic, the RTX 2000 series couldn't really handle the original launch ray tracing games and the new ones only got heavyer
I played through the Witcher at 40fps instead of 30. I highly recommend it, it's much more smooth this way. The biggest settings to get you to 40fps is to turn down the NPC count to the lowest setting and to turn down the grass/foliage setting to the lowest density, the game still looks great this way and performs much better, especially in Novigrad where it normally struggles the most.
Long Story Short; IT NEEDS AN UPGRADE! That 4 core 8 thread processor is NOT ENOUGH!(and I knew it wouldn't be enough, that's why I didn't bother purchasing it). We are in the era of the 8 core and anything less is really just a waste of time.
The Steam Deck's built in frame rate limiter introduces a lot of latency compared to using the in-game frame rate limiter in my experience, so if the game has a limiter I would use that over the Deck's. But it varies game by game so make sure you test.
Not anymore since they introduced ,,allow tearing option". That should eliminate that difference but i haven't seen actual tests of that
@@damianabregba7476 Yeah but then . .tearing. Not sure that counts :)
You always get tearing if you don’t enable something like vsync (which is what I’m assuming the limiter did prior to 3.4)? So yea if you turn off the forced vsync, you’ll get tearing. Not like you wouldn’t get it otherwise.
@@damianabregba7476 in my experience allow tearing doesn't work if the frame limiter is on. You need allow tearing as well as unlimited fps if you want to see tearing which could be a bug.
Yeah you just need to play around with different settings, a lot of workarounds that don't make a ton of sense at first thought. Things like lowering the screen refresh rate 2-4 hz (from 60, So 58 or 56), then move the locked fps slider to be at half full refresh rate, locking it at 28 or 29. You can also try MangoHud set to 31 combined with the SteamOS 30fps limit. In less demanding games set screen to 45 Hz and set the fps cap to 45 as well. Decky Loader with Powertools is the way to best efficiency and performance though, depending if the game is bound more from the cpu side or gpu side you can tweak accordingly. Disable SMT / cores and then raise the core freq and set GPU clock to something like 1500 or more working within the power budget
High CPU utilisation can be due to high system ram and vram consumptions which require the CPU to work harder to compress the memory with zRAM as the memory between CPU and GPU is shared. So graphics budget can impact CPU performance in this case too.
Waiting for the next gen of Steam Deck. I really want to have an OLED screen and generally a newer hardware inside. But what a beast even on gen 1!
The “brrrrrt” at 3:35 caught me of guard. I know it’s not suppose to be this funny, but. :)
You guys should be more rigorous testing the performance. For example, in
plague tale requiem, there are tons of moments later in the game when the steam deck can't even hold 25 fps. The first two chapters are not so demanding at all.
The fact that the Deck can run these games at all is amazing.
The problem is that games these days focus more on graphics than if people can actually play them. Settings should have more power in this
It's a shame a lot of game devs just don't optimise games. They really need to focus on performance more than visuals. AMD FSR is great but is not a substitute for optimisations.
And speaking of visuals, I'd much rather see games have artistic styles instead of realistic ones. I hate uncanny valley. I can get much more immersed in cartoony looking games than realistic ones. The style has little to do with performance though, of course.
Meanwhile in Nintendo Switch: "What's Tessellation?"
One interesting thing i discovered is 29 or 28 fps mode. It can help in some instances where power scaling is weird like in elden ring. Boosts battery life quite nicely
Are you setting that fps limit in launch options of said game? Or is there some other way you're capping it this way? I'm assuming the other way is to drop the screen refresh rate down 1-2 hz under 60, then move the locked fps slider to be at half full refresh rate, locking it at ~28 that way?
@@tac0pwnage the latter is correct
I’d be curious to see the same tests after using the CryoUtilities and gpu memory tweak.
Yeah me as well. I used the CryoUtilities and the GPU memory leak. Tbh I personally haven't really noticed major performance improvements that much but it's tough to compare.
@@JonnyLin7 I've noticed my games are a lot smoother. I usually run at 40 fps for battery life and that 40is usually rock solid with cryo. Meaning I could easily go higher if I wanted.
To be honest, if the PC port is crap it mostly runs like it on any PC, including the SD. I've had mine for almost a year now and I'm still impressed by what this little handheld PC can do. Just look at something like Doom Eternal, that game is optimized AF and runs at the highest settings at a locked 60fps, it's a sight to behold actually.
I'm curious if the update Callisto Protocol came out with yesterday improves performance on Steam Deck at all. It's supposed to improve things on "all platforms" so maybe?
6:27 it’s funny to see that buildings in the background looks almost the same as in 20 years old NFS Underground.
witcher 3 is supposed to get patched in a week or so hopefully it fixes the cpu demand
who said that? the devs have been silent for a while when it comes to witcher 3 updates.
@@RARF29 Yh not sure where he’s getting the timeframe or cpu fix from but I’d assume the next patch will be a big one as it’s been a while since hotfix 2. All gpus are cpu limited even at 4k and only in a couple forest/village area do you ever get 99% utilisation with even the most powerful cpus.
If you play it on DX11 CPU is demand is low. It never had problem from day 1 but DX12 for some reason is more demanding in CPU, and RT is even more demanding on CPU
@@killermoon635 Yh but there’s no point playing without Rt since that’s the actual game changing feature. Most people alr had All the basic other stuff like quick signs and friendly hud with mods.
FYI, I know this is aimed more at out of the box settings but increasing UMA frame buffer and swapfile size, and swappiness via desktop mode sometimes squeezes out an extra bit of performance to hit 40-45 fps in more demanding games. Definitely helps with games like Witcher 3.
Although I get your thinking, I recon this video targets the less versed user that barely is able to input launch arguments.
Even though I've been using KDE on Arch for months, I think the Desktop mode is rather clunky and buggy (literally de facto wrecked it just by opening partition management and getting it stuck in some weird state, but I know that utility as 'problematic' already).
Also, after clean-installing onto a bigger SSD, I had some very weird glitches with the interface. Don't think my Deck is broken, I was rather careful with it, Valve just aren't as senior in developing an OS as they should be. Though I like inclusion such as Mangohud et al., been using those myself already.
@@whohan779 my post has nothing to do with running games via desktop mode. This is just changing the UMA setting in the bios and downloading an app called Cryoutilities which allows you to easily adjust the swapfiles and swappiness. It's a very simple mod and helps boost performance. You just have to do the initial setup for the app in desktop mode, you can play games as normal in game mode and the settings carry over.
Sorry to hear about your deck though. I've had no issues and have had mine for almost a year.
Can we slow down on the upgraded steam deck talk. I just got this thing 😩
Sweet spot is 1025x576 resolution, image still looks sharp with FSR enabled.
I’ve found AAA gaming to be an awful experience on Deck. Horizon Zero Dawn, God Of War and Spider-Man run pretty bad tbh. I’m sticking to games pre 2017 tbh
Komisch bei allen anderen laufen genau diese Games super
@@michaelgutwald I don’t speak that language sorry
@@sonnieslim5973 Strangely, with everyone else, exactly these games run great
@@michaelgutwald zero dawn definitely doesn’t.
It is amazing that these big PC titles play on a handheld at this price range. I think its important to keep in mind that this is not a machine aimed at top tier graphics titles although it's very cool that it can run them at 30fps with some dips (title depending). The deck is really a console per se, and developers who do PC, PS5 and XBSeries games can easily tweak the PC titles for a Steam Deck profile which could be separate from PC.. offering more subtle tweaking to settings to achieve a constant 30fps (or more) as if it was a console-ish target. I got mine to play recent to older titles that I wanted to revisit or missed, but it's very cool to know it can run current gen and PC titles - now all it needs is for developers to add steam deck as a "console" target and make sure these titles play at a consistent 30fps minimum.
Thanks again DF, you guys just keep delivering the goods 👌🏻
Another way to tackle the FPS limiter input lag issue in some games that offer half-rate vsync option:
1. Set performance overlay FPS limiter to unlimited.
2. Enable "Allow tearing" setting.
3. In game: disable FPS cap if there's a setting for it, enable half-vsync.
This way SteamOS' forced VSync is not engaged, so you don't get extra input lag on top of the game's VSync implementation. In most games I've tested half-rate VSync offers better frame pacing than either in-game FPS cap or mangohud FPS limiter, while also introducing less input lag compared to SteamOS FPS limiter.
Thank you for talking about the huge input lag with the built-in frame limiter. It's almost unusable and the lack of other options really hurts the otherwise excellent experience i'm having using the Steam Deck.
For now i'm just avoiding playing anything that needs to be capped at 30 FPS.
the mangohud command works really well for many games actually. I played through entire spider-man PC remastered @ 30 fps and it was a fairly solid experience.
I also recommend the MangoHud trick showed in this video. It works for any fps, too. I just recently played through Black Mesa and it madr that game playable at 60fps (yes, even the 60fps vsync from Valve had too much input lag for me). Just keep in mind that sometimes it doesn't work at the exact fps (as in 30fps vsync + 30fps in MangoHud), you need to go 1 fps higher in MangoHud (30fps vsync + 31fps in MangoHud). I had to do this in Forza for example.
Yeah, I appreciated that too.
99% of the time input latency is completely ignored even for things like brand new controller reviews and it drives me kinda crazy. I know not everyone is as knowledgeable when it comes to tech, but it just seems unprofessional when even huge media outlets like IGN, Gamespot, etc completely ignore things like this all the time.
(DF has been great drawing attention to stutter too)
What planet are you living on? The only game I played that had that problem was Crash Nsane Trilogy. You have to limit the framerate in the actual game settings for responsiveness.
Maybe I'm just stuck in 2017 but this latest batch of handhelds are just magic to me. The fact integrated graphics tucked away on some dinky 4 core processor can even touch these games is a marvel of technology.
I mean honestly growing up with a gba/psp/ds era. I'm still even impressed we get 360/ps3 like experiences on the go with the switch/Vita.
Below 30 fps in a crappy nfs game, steam deck‘s quadcore cpu is a disgrace
A Phoenix Point apu seems like something Valve would get a lot of mileage out off, given RNDA 3's duel ALU set up benefits greatly from hand tweaked shaders to target synchronous execution of some instructions. And since Valve controls the hardware + platform, they can push the optimized shaders with ease.
i wonder how much vcache would help. like a cutdown 7800x3d with rdna3. That would also make it an emulation MONSTER. Steam can take my money then.
Honestly don't see why people wouldn't just play on a laptop. Xbox Series controller and your good with most mid range laptops.
They're not even comparable. That's like saying "I don't know why you'd bother with a laptop when you could just build a desktop", a Steam Deck is a full experience in the hand, a laptop and separate controller is not a compact setup.
@@AthanImmortal -Lap, couch, hand- not a big difference. Probably not going to slip the deck in your pocket and take it out with you.
most people play deck on the couch or in bed
For anyone watching this October 2024, the performance of some of these games are far better on Steam Deck then in this video. I was able to get a stable 50 FPS in most areas with Witcher using similar settings, but just setting XESS to "Ultra Quality".
Great video again by the folks at DF. I am impressed as much as the next guy to see the deck running current gen titles at all. However in my opinion, older games (8th gen and below) is what I'll be using the steam deck especially for emulation which it runs like a dream. It's an effective machine for all of us gamers to finish the backlog of games we wanted to play on our consoles and PCs. I even got project brutality working on it and it's like a dream come true for me. These are the type of things I thought the switch should be handling especially 7 gen games and older, but yeah it is what it is. Anyways, since Sony is off the handheld market, this is the best thing the brilliant people at Valve came up with and I'm happy to give Valve my money.
While I wouldn't scoff at 8 zen 4 cores, I think the power/silicon budget would be better spent on the GPU, espeecially on a 60Hz device. Six cores ought to be enough in most cases, and it would leave more power available to the GPU
Steam Deck is great for 7th gen and most 8th gen games and below on-the-go as well as emulators. But 9th gen is a bit too demanding for the handheld.
The 9th gen will be way too powerful, (at best I expect that gen to handle RT at 60fps)
he just showed you that the deck can play these "9th gen games" even the unoptomized messy versions of them (like gotham knights and callisto) really well. you're seeing a blurry image but in reality its more than enough for the small screen. anything the series S can handle the deck can handle with the exception of really poorly optimised games.
Steam Deck struggles on PS3. You need Alder Lake for ideal perfomance (also an AVX512 batch).
@@saricubra2867 Yeah PS3 emulation isn't great on the Deck overall, although some games run fantastic, usually the less demanding games in Playable status.
This is why I also have my beast of a desktop for PS3 emulation as well as Xbox 360 emulation. It has an i9-12900K, and one from before May 2022, so I get AVX-512.
@@AllieRX I also have AVX512, it's an i7-12700K, 2021 batch.
I predicted the Steam Deck struggle from the moment AMD decided to use Zen 2 instead of Zen 3.
I don't plan on running a majority of triple A, big budget titles on the go. The fact that the Steam Deck can even run these demanding games is more than impressive to me and I love my Steam Deck. There's a bunch of smaller games which work perfectly for it and I don't have to fire up my gaming PC to play... but if I do I can just continue where I left off and it's wonderful lol. For those expecting the Steam Deck to replace their gaming PC, either you don't play a huge host of demanding games to begin with or rarely do that much gaming in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it got all the tools to replace a gaming PC with the proper dock but expectations need to be tampered.
And the biggest side note in my eyes is that it does more in terms of raw horsepower on release than the Switch on release playing triple A titles that released around its launch.
I mean...unoptimized games will make the most powerful rigs seem alot less weaker, doom eternal on the deck runs at 800p 60 on high to ultra settings
Heck they somehow got that game to run on the Switch.
Another notable one is Mad Max. It runs incredibly well with no compromised Ultra setting with 60FPS on steam deck. I remember this game was one of the handful of games the supported triple monitors back in the day and it ran so well on PC.
The fun part about the Steam Deck is the Modularity, once those new chips come out, if enabled to be compatible, ohoho, upgrading is going to be the most satisfying process, just like anyone else I don't have much experience with opening up electronics, more than most yes, but its only because I have the mindset to want to learn all this stuff, the first thing I'm doing when my steam deck arrives tomorrow is upgrade the 64eMMC with a WD 2TB SSD, so it's gonna be a fun experience imo, I don't mind doing it myself as this is how we learn after all... and lots of youtube videos XD
Have you tested these games with a non stock steamdeck? Such as increased pagefile and powertools?
1152 X 720 with full screen enabled and FSR has worked wonders for me.
Love these Steamdeck vids.
I am also very happy playing older games on it - so far anything up to 2018 seems to run flawlessly at 60fps with high settings. Titanfall 2 and Infjnite Warfare, two of my fave FPS campaigns, play like butter on steamdeck and look amazing. I can run cyberpunk at 30fps too, which seems amazing to me.
SD is easily my favorite piece of gaming hardware, and I look forward to many years with it.
🥰🥰
I’m with you on infinite warfare campaign it’s sooooo good
Methinks Steam Deck V2 will come along eventually that makes THESE games work better, but then there's always something even more demanding on the horizon.
i wonder how a cutdown 5800x3d type apu would perform. I'm waiting until steamdeck 2, but I'm hopeful given the current performance.
I dont know man, A Plague Tale: Requiem i feel like its super unoptimized, knowing how games work and all we have games that look better have 10 times more things and have a 100 times bigger map and still runs heaps better while looking better idk.
Not just that game sorry, I meant all the games in this list, maybe exept the witcher and uncharted 4
Which games look better ??!
@@killermoon635 red dead redemption 2, horizen zero dawn, days gone, ressident evil village, marvel spiderman, etc
Disabling SMT helps with some CPU bound games.. Also setting VRAM to 4GB. I am suprised that some of these werent tried here. Well I cant tell VRAM setting honestly, but SMT was definitly enabled, you can see that by core count.
CryoUtillities, 4GB VRAM, and SMT are some stuff and settings that if you have steam deck you should proably look at it.
Disabling SMT does not help in most cases specially if you have only 4 cores and running a modern games
i3 10th gen was a lot faster than 9th and 8th gen in gaming because 10th gen has HT/SMT
disabling smt is not a general fix for poor CPU performance, it works on some emulators because they're translating code that was not built for a hyperthreading x86 plataform, but otherwise just harms it
disabling smt will only give you better performance in games you are not threaded limited. Games shown here are lacking more threads so disabling half will only make it worse..
@@killermoon635 I did not say it will help in most cases, I sad in some, one of those cases is Gotham Knights, game he tested here.
@@igorrafael7429 I said disabling SMT will give you better performance in some games, case in point Gotham Knights, game that is opposite of being thread limited
Phoenix point APU at 15w would be incredible.
Allowing the CPU to clock up to say 4.5Ghz would make a massive difference for CPU limited games.
Is anyone actually enjoying these AAA games on the Steamdeck and playing them to completion? I think it's just ruining the experience playing on a tiny mediocre IPS screen, mostly low settings at 30ish FPS (also terrible screen glare if playing outside home where you can control lighting). Kind of like watching pirated CAM movie instead of the real thing at IMAX. I just can't imagine experiencing Elden Ring, Ragnarok, TLoU2 on SD rather than my home setup. Yuck.
Probier es aus dann verstehst du es!
Heads up, many of the frame time issue can be solved by pinning the gpu to 1600ghz in the quick access menu. This is because the steam deck APU sometimes struggles to balance power between the cpu & gpu performance, by pinning the gpu stability is improved in games with gpu bottlenecks. Also with your Witcher 3 comparison, it is important to note that screen space reflections have a significant performance impact on the deck compared to other settings; I have been able to achieve a relatively stable 40fps/40hz on Witcher 3 with mid-high settings minus SSR.
I love the Steam Deck! I think it is an amazing device! I think all owners know that there are going to probably be games in the near future that just wont run good on it. But what it can do, its freaking awesome! Give it a year or two, and I imagine Valve will finally give us a Steam Deck 2 or 3 that gives much closer to console performance. I am very happy at the moment, but excited for the future!
Nah, games will be playable on Steam Deck, at least for this era. Xbox series S will guarantee graphic in game won't be that far since they need to run on that system. Ps5 exlusive game port to pc is exception though
guess what, if a game runs bad on pc it will also run bad on steam deck. Both callisto protocol and gotham knights run poorly on pc.
Cheers and much respects to all the DF team from the Steam Deck community!
Unfortunately, I have to say that the video is a bit too negative for me. Yes, the Steam deck is not as strong as a Series X/S or a PS5. But does it have to be? Or to put it another way, is that even possible in a handheld? Yes, of course, now everyone comes back with their AYANEOs and GPD WINs. Maybe these devices have 30-50 percent or even 100% more CPU/GPU. But then these devices will also quickly have problems with the runtime. What is always forgotten in my eyes is the support which is provided by VALVE. Be it hardware or software. I don't wish anyone that their device breaks down. If mine should ever be broken, I have more confidence in the support from VALVE than from the other manufacturers. In case of doubt I can even repair my Steam Deck myself. A very important point is also the standby. The Steam Deck hardly loses battery in standby. Have fun with the Windows handhelds. Which brings us to the software. VALVE has Linux very very well under control. On Windows, I don't feel like configuring all the different launchers and messing around with shader caches on such a small device. The Switch is not so successful because it has a lot of hardware power, but because the software was adapted to the hardware and good first parties were/are released. We probably won't see first parties from VALVE, but OS updates that further optimize. I strongly assume that development studios will also have the Steam deck on their minds for new releases. At least that is my hope. If not, I still have a huge calalogue of titles I can play. The Steam Deck is the best device for me since I got my first Gameboy from my parents.
I want to see Digital Foundry target 40FPS on Steam Deck and use 30FPS as a fallback.
Same. To be honest, most pc’s and even the Nintendo switch, should target a stable 40fps at 1080p
But with the low battery life, I don't see how you'd want to target 40fps unless it's a first person shooter or something.
@@ShadowMan64572 Generally, on console I'm a "60FPS or bust" kind of guy. The standardization of 60FPS w the XSX was exactly what I was waiting for since I built my first PC in 2011. Steam Deck can't do 60FPS very often (at least not without massive sacrifice) so 40FPS and a little less battery life is worth it to me.
The SD may not be ideal for new top tier games but I have a large backlog of older games that will run perfectly on it, not to mention emulated games and indie/less demanding games.
So many videos lately... Many thanks to the digital foundry team.
I do wish that developers could prioritize performance on low-end hardware more. I don't think there is really anything in the games mentioned that actually needs that much cpu power, but finding those inefficiencies can be a lot of work that won't be considered worth it if the game runs well enough on current consoles.
I love everything about the Steam Deck! As a new dad with almost little to no time playing games anymore, this is perfect for me! Even the battery life is more than enough for me (Im lucky if I even get 30 minutes of gaming time) However, I just dont have the extra cash (and time right now) right now to get one. Maybe Ill just wait for a sale after a year or so or the 2nd iteration.
Tbh sounds like one of the cheap chinese retro handhelds would be better for you, you can get one pre loaded with most roms all the way up to dreamcast for about $70. Older games are easier to play in 30 min chunks anyway. Check out the Miyoo Mini
What I find weird, they don't adjust the resolution lower than 720p. If you go to a 1024x640 or 960x600 resolution (20% to 25% decrease) and slide the Scaling Filter to "Integer" or "FSR". You can add quite some frames without sacrificing too much. You only have an extra border with integer mode.
Playing HZD at 60 is quite easy this way. Or 40-ish, if you want to take battery length in account. my to go is 48, right in between. Often not that demanding for minimal loss.
If you like to tinker, you can always adjust UMA and Cache to improve some things.
You can easily squeeze some power out of it, without adjust hard to reach settings.
Very cool video thanks for sharing. I like to see how things can be optimised. However, I will still play games that don't run flawlessly, grew up loving ps1 and n64 so my tolerance for inconsistant framerates is pretty flexible. I will be playing the latest games on steam deck probably till 2033! LOL!
For sure! If the frame pacing is better than many N64 games, it's good enough for me!
Love the steam deck videos! Keep em coming 👍
The flickering in A Plague Tale that he never mentioned even though it's very obvious is from the shadows momentarily going completely black.
Shhhh, stop pissing on the lie-filled hype fest and convenient ignoring of the shoddy battery life or that acting like the Steam Deck only cost $400 when that is the starting price.
Always knew that the steam deck would get outdated very soon and here is the example... by 2025 it won't even manage to run any game