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Steam Deck - What games suprised you on the deck.

PhaseJump

Banned
I didn't understand why people love airfryers until I bought one.

The easy cancer flavored french fries? The wasted countertop space? The bullshit it takes to clean them? I'm still trying to understand why I bought one.

An electric griddle though, those fucking things existed as an afterthought that nobody was ever preaching and jerking themselves off about. Yet it can fry 6 eggs, and give you pancakes or bacon in no time at all. The best Prime day impulse buy I've ever made. When I drop dead of a heart attack, I will be buried with it.

mLoJga.gif
 

Apocryphon

Member
The easy cancer flavored french fries? The wasted countertop space? The bullshit it takes to clean them? I'm still trying to understand why I bought one.

An electric griddle though, those fucking things existed as an afterthought that nobody was ever preaching and jerking themselves off about. Yet it can fry 6 eggs, and give you pancakes or bacon in no time at all. The best Prime day impulse buy I've ever made. When I drop dead of a heart attack, I will be buried with it.

mLoJga.gif
Well you're definitely an American 🤣
 

Apocryphon

Member
Hm, maybe. I dunno....I guess I am a traditionalist. I play the Switch connected to a TV. Rarely will you find me using it in portable mode lol.
This fair. Handheld gaming isn't for everybody. But for those that do have affinity for it, the Steam Deck is wonderful.
 

SScorpio

Member
Hm, maybe. I dunno....I guess I am a traditionalist. I play the Switch connected to a TV. Rarely will you find me using it in portable mode lol.
Portable gaming isn't for everyone. But the Steam Deck is exciting showing excellent progress into creating a console like environment for PC gaming.

If Valve can release a Steam Controller 2 with all of the controls on the Deck, then the dream of PC set top gaming for any genre draw ever closer. The original Steam Controller was decent, but the Deck was a huge improvement.
 
That makes me feel a lot better that there probably isn’t a problem with my Deck. Very odd though that the frequency and TDP are what is causing the issue. Im going to chart all the different combinations of GPU frequency and TDP as I play to see if there is a pattern. At least I’ll find out how hard I can push the Deck before it becomes unstable.
I thought I would post an update on what I’ve found. After playing with the TDP and GPU clock settings, eventually the Deck returned to its normal state of crashing very soon after loading a save game in Horizon. I played around with some BIOS settings, but no luck there. I did run into a APU graphics driver reset procedure online that seems to have worked (at least right now it has). So far I can play with the APU TDP and GPU clocked unlocked with no problems. I’ll have to play for a while and how long it can go or if the issue is actually fixed.

To perform the APU graphics reset:
1. Turn off the Deck
2. Hold Vol- and Quick Access (…)
3. While holding those buttons, hold down the power button
4. Wait for a power chirp or two, then release the power button
5. The Deck should take a while to boot
6. Release Vol- and Quick Access (…) once the Steam Deck logo appears

Hopefully this helps someone else if they are having trouble.
 
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I didn't understand why people love airfryers until I bought one.
After receiving an air fryer I still don't understand their attraction.

However I am loving the Steam Deck. Having been a console only player for a long time this is a nice way to get into the Steam library. I travel a ton for work so having some airplane entertainment that isn't some shitty movie is great.


Speaking of which, can I play media on SteamOS?
 

Apocryphon

Member
After receiving an air fryer I still don't understand their attraction.

However I am loving the Steam Deck. Having been a console only player for a long time this is a nice way to get into the Steam library. I travel a ton for work so having some airplane entertainment that isn't some shitty movie is great.


Speaking of which, can I play media on SteamOS?
In desktop mode yes. There are a number of media players you can install.

Also, make sure you check out sites like G2A for cheap Steam keys. Just make sure they say that they're a key and not an account. I have been using the place for years and they provide a quick activation link to Steam. Prices are generally much better than the Steam store and you can activate games like Prey (2006) that have been delisted from the Steam store itself. They get added to your library as normal and download and play fine.
 
I just downloaded and played through the tutorial of Horizon Zero Dawn. I was surprised by how horrible it looked. I went through the options and tried increasing the graphic fidelity but nothing helped.

Having never played the PS version I am not sure if it's just the game or some setting I am missing on the Deck. Specifically the hair and grass are crazy bad looking, beyond fuzzy.
 

Ogbert

Member
Anyone try Cult of the Lamb? Thinking about picking it up because there’s absolutely nothing else to play
Thoroughly recommended.

Have put about seven hours into it already. Very polished. Town management lite, combined with rogue lite dungeons. Perfectly paced. Great visuals and music.

By all accounts it takes about 20 hours to beat. Not especially challenging but very well done.

Runs perfectly on the deck. Occasional dips sub 60 but nothing to worry about.
 

BennyBlanco

aka IMurRIVAL69
Thoroughly recommended.

Have put about seven hours into it already. Very polished. Town management lite, combined with rogue lite dungeons. Perfectly paced. Great visuals and music.

By all accounts it takes about 20 hours to beat. Not especially challenging but very well done.

Runs perfectly on the deck. Occasional dips sub 60 but nothing to worry about.

alright you talked me into it. thanks bro.
 

Griffon

Member
I keep cancelling and changing my mind on model. Originally had the 64gb then went to 512gb and now back to 64gb. Lol. I will get it when I get it.
I say go 512, the internal memory is much better (and more reliable long term) than any SD card you could add on top of it.

I have 256+1TB SD, but 512+512 would've been better now that I think about it. And the etched screen would've been cool to have.
 
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Apocryphon

Member
I say go 512, the internal memory is much better (and more reliable long term) than any SD card you could add on top of it.

I have 256+1TB SD, but 512+512 would've been better now that I think about it. And the etched screen would've been cool to have.
I don't disagree. The 512 screen isn't quite as sharp and doesn't go quite as bright though, but the trade off is more and marginally faster internal storage and better viewability in daylight. I went 256 too with a 1TB card and I'm certainly happy with it. I'll upgrade the SSD eventually to a 1 or 2TB 2230 and then wait for the (hopefully) 2nd gen model with and OLED screen .
 

jaysius

Banned
The easy cancer flavored french fries? The wasted countertop space? The bullshit it takes to clean them? I'm still trying to understand why I bought one.

An electric griddle though, those fucking things existed as an afterthought that nobody was ever preaching and jerking themselves off about. Yet it can fry 6 eggs, and give you pancakes or bacon in no time at all. The best Prime day impulse buy I've ever made. When I drop dead of a heart attack, I will be buried with it.

mLoJga.gif
You’ve just been doing it wrong my g/f has a toaster oven with many modes, like convection it also has an air fry mode, and that thing is incredible, it’s nothing like those awful dedicated air frying machines, got it at Crappy Tire. The thing is awesome. Once you have egg rolls air fried you’ll never go back. Also smiles and tater tots, basically any potato based food is awesome on air fry mode, also reheating dirty bird(Mary Browns) on air fry is amazing.

Link.
 
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Soapbox Killer

Grand Nagus
After playing Days Gone for a few I am shocked at how great that game looks on the Deck. Make me question the need I thought for a 1080p screen at this point. If only it was HDR.
 

Thaedolus

Member
Hm, maybe. I dunno....I guess I am a traditionalist. I play the Switch connected to a TV. Rarely will you find me using it in portable mode lol.
I very rarely use my Switch in portable mode but the Deck I find myself wanting to bring everywhere…and at first I was all gung ho about getting a dock for it too, then I realized cloud saves negate the need for one. I can have my desktop power hooked up to my TV, all I have to do it exit the game I’m playing on the deck then load it on my PC. It’s not quite the ease of sliding in the Switch to its dock, but it’s close enough. With games like Persona, it’s been perfect to have to knock out 20 minutes of play here and there when I get some free time…

I dunno, I feel like I’ve slowed down with the gaming in recent years due to time and convenience and this device has kind of reinvigorated it
 
I just downloaded and played through the tutorial of Horizon Zero Dawn. I was surprised by how horrible it looked. I went through the options and tried increasing the graphic fidelity but nothing helped.

Having never played the PS version I am not sure if it's just the game or some setting I am missing on the Deck. Specifically the hair and grass are crazy bad looking, beyond fuzzy.
Turn off FSR in the display settings. Set your display to 60hz and set 30hz limit. Then set these settings:
Textures: medium
Model quality: medium
Anisotropic filter: high
Shadows: low
Reflections: low
Clouds: low
Anti-aliasing: camera-based
Motion blur: on
Ambient occlusion: low

That should sharpen everything up and make it look really close to the PS4 settings while holding 30fps easy.
 

Soapbox Killer

Grand Nagus
Turn off FSR in the display settings. Set your display to 60hz and set 30hz limit. Then set these settings:
Textures: medium
Model quality: medium
Anisotropic filter: high
Shadows: low
Reflections: low
Clouds: low
Anti-aliasing: camera-based
Motion blur: on
Ambient occlusion: low

That should sharpen everything up and make it look really close to the PS4 settings while holding 30fps easy.
I this for just Horizon or PS4 games on Deck in general? Does God of War also have this type of preferred settings?
 
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I this for just Horizon or PS4 games on Deck in general? Does God of War also have this type of preferred settings?
Just for Horizon. I don’t have God of War for PC so I bet the settings options aren’t even the same. However, medium or original are the names Sony uses for settings used for PS4, so you can go up or down from there depending on the hardware you’re running on.

My philosophy for making a game look the best on the DECK has a few rules, and it’s how I came up with this list of settings.

1. Don’t lower textures, and you can even raise them in most cases. The Steam Deck has a decent amount of RAM so utilizing high res textures is only really effecting RAM bandwidth.

2. Use at least 4x anisotropic filtering. This will drastically reduce the blurring effect of running a game at lower resolution. I highly suggest raising this as much as possible.

3. Use at least the lowest setting for all special rendering effects. Keeping these on at even the low setting will preserve the “look” of a game. In Horizon’s case, the ambient occlusion and reflections were left at low and not off.

4. Use motion blur and lower your target frame rate to 30hz. Try 40hz for something that feels like 60hz without all the stutter. Most games can achieve a stable 40hz with tweaking.

5. FSR 1 and 2 don’t look very good to my eye. Too much blur (1.0) or motion breakup (2.0), so turn those off. Most games can handle 1280x800 at 30/40hz without it.

6. Use some kind of AA, even if it’s a very basic kind. Normally it’s pretty cheap and on a small/low res screen will clean up the image and reduce line crawling and specular aliasing artifacts.

7. Use medium or higher model settings. GPUs are really good at goemtery processing, this normally doesn’t effect much. Don’t confuse this with draw distance settings, which can drastically take a hit on performance.

And that’s my general thoughts on optimizing a game for the Steam Deck. Most graphically intensive games will take well to this approach while keeping the game looking like the full desktop version. The lower resolution will hide a ton of the lower quality settings, but turning them off normally makes the game look to flat and bland. I just got Spider-Man last night, so I’ll be playing with those settings tonight. God of War will be in my near future I’m sure…
 

JCK75

Member
I've been blown away by it since the moment it arrived... Spider-man however really kind of blew me away because it was the first time certain features were enabled out of box that caught my attention..
I love just putting my thumb on the thumbstick and having that activare the gyro controls.. so smooth.
 
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