this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Steam Deck

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Supposed Steam Deck killers are missing the point (www.notebookcheck.net)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, reminds me of the original Gameboy. Weak hardware, terrible screen, great battery life, awesome first-party support, stupidly robust. Sold a hundred million or so. Up against the Game Gear and Atari Lynx, which although basically miniature consoles, had an unquenchable hunger for batteries and crap games. Complete turkeys. All of Nintendo's other, very successful, handhelds continue the same idea; yes, a Switch is really underpowered compared to the newest Playstation, but that's not it's niche.

Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

You could have had a miniaturised nuclear reactor and I still don't think it would have kept up with the game gears appetite ๐Ÿ˜ great little device but missed the mark on intended use.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?

This is one area where the Steam Deck may have got it wrong. The Switch has games made specifically for its hardware, so to a certain extent, the specs don't matter. The Steam Deck though has already been reported to struggle with some games, even with the lowered resolution.

For a console that's only about 18 months old, that's a bit disappointing. I obviously wouldn't expect it to be able to play new AAA games forever, but I would have thought that it would have taken a bit longer before it started to struggle.

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are games that aren't appropriate for the hardware, 18 months old or not.

Some people struggle to grasp that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's my point. This is a quote from the Steam Deck website:

We partnered with AMD to create Steam Deck's custom APU, optimized for handheld gaming. It is a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 powerhouse, delivering more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.

If I read that and bought a Steam Deck, then found out that it can't run a new release smoothly, I wouldn't be very happy.

It's all well and good having a compatibility list for released games, but their marketing makes it sound like it can play anything.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

A fair point.

Not moving the goalposts but steam offers the playability index. So to know "which" AAA games at "what" performance is really varied.

I think it is a bunch of media speak that they wrote there and is a poor representation of what the hardware can honestly do.

As always, it pays to research purchases thoroughly.