Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I’m guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don’t mind medium details.
Yeah there isnt anything of the same size with significantly more power afaik. Gotta go with a laptop then if u need the power.
It’s new so reviews are just filtering out but it’s starting to look like SteamOS powered version of the Legion Go S (Z1 Extreme version) is a pretty great handheld that uses the latest AMD chipset with a sizable assist from Linux/proton efficiencies vs Windows to drive a 15-30% performance improvement which does make some more modern games more playable though it is significantly more expensive than the deck. I watched Retro Games Corps review of it yesterday. That said, if you’re okay waiting another couple years or so I bet there will be a Steam Deck 2 release but it seems like it mainly rests on AMD to deliver a significant (“generational”) leap with upcoming mobile APUs. Valve seems keen on not releasing a follow-up to the first deck until it is significantly better in every way and the chipsets available now just aren’t quite there yet it seems.
Efficiency is also a major problem i think. You can always just slap a higher power APU in there, but then you also have to cool that thing. And that means either a higher RPM fan or a larger device with a bigger radiator.
Not to mention battery life…
I actually have a laptop with RTX 3050, but it gets extremely noisy while playing games. I also prefer to play handheld. Currently I stream games to my tablet via the cloud or from my laptop.
It seems that most gaming laptops are noisy and expensive. The Steam Deck appears to be reasonably priced with decent performance.
If you remote play from the laptop that you have now the performance will be better than playing directly from the deck, but the noise can be in another room. And since the deck isn’t doing much compute, battery life should be great too. And you can stream at the Deck’s native resolution so your fps will be higher than your laptop’s display (assuming that is full hd)