Steam Deck

I am now a Steam Deck owner, wow its such a slick piece of kit, way bigger than I thought too.

Waiting for a 1TB SSD and usb adaptor now so just playing Halls of Torment for now but wow its perfect, way better than Vampire Survivors imo.

Once I get the parts it will be Tears of the Kingdom and a few other Switch games then Baldurs Gate 3, Control, Emudeck and a load of others Ive been hoarding forever.

How the hell is it downloading at 250 mb/s over wifi and why can't my gaming laptop do that?

€339 for a refurbished 64GB SD direct from Valve.

Just received mine too today, won't be able to play with it until Thursday 😞 any tips?

Do you have decky installed? It alerts for updates sometimes. I was also getting alerts to tell me that the steam sale was on. Both of those alerts were also visual when not in a game but I don't know if that's the case when playing a game.

If you're just going to be playing games from your steam collection, everything is all simple enough. Before installing a game from your collection, check it against protondb for compatibility. Steam has a compatibility grade of its own but it loads of games that work just fine aren't marked as Verified and other Verified games like God of War run but by sacrificing visuals and frames. Protondb will just give you a better idea of what will work.

If you're on the go, traveling or something, lots of games don't need to run at 60fps. You can change the refresh rate to 40 for games that don't have a lot of fast movement on the screen. You need the refresh rate to be 60 for something like Hades, Ori or a first person shooter but 40 is smooth enough for a game like Alan Wake or Skyrim.

Steam can perform FSR on more demanding games. To take advantage of it, set the game resolution to something lower than 1280x800 and use fullscreen windowed/borderless in the ingame settings. It'll upscale the game quite nicely in more demanding games although it'll only go so far.

Play Aperture Desk Job. It's a free game from Valve that takes you through the Deck's controls and is a bit of a laugh. It'll be in the store. Speaking of controls, get to know the Controller Settings. It lets you configure keyboard/mouse mappings per game. For example, you can have the trackpad act as a mouse or have the gyro control get triggered by aiming down sights. You can download controller profiles if you don't want to map them yourself but it doesn't take much to set up the standard keyboard and mouse mappings.

A dock isn't necessary but you'll get more out of the deck with one. You can get one for under 40 quid. I'm docked right now with a mouse and keyboard plugged in using the desktop mode. Speaking of desktop mode, it's a full OS. If you're not familiar with linux, don't worry about it. It's intuitive enough. You use the trackpads or sticks for mouse and by default, the trigger buttons for clicking. One useful tip for dialog boxes that are more than 800 pixels in height is to hold alt and grab anywhere on the window and move it up or down. There was some emulator that had settings that spilled under the screen so you need to hold alt to click the OK button.

If you're emulating games, anything up to the Switch/PS3/XBOX360 can work, depending on the game. I found PS2 and Wii generation games and earlier stuff to work perfectly. Some people recommend using emudeck but if you've used emulators before, just install them from the Software Center and configure and add them to Steam in desktop mode if you want to play them in Steam OS mode.

It's worth installing decky and its plugin, powertools. It lets you switch off virtual threads which can help performance in older games that don't need more than 4 threads. You can also increase the dedicated vram in bios and also increase the pagefile/swapfile using cryoutilities but that's not really needed unless you're pushing the deck to ts limits. I only bothered with these to emulate Tears of the Kingdom but even at that, only the swapfile increase and reducing the threads to 4 was necessary. You don't need to bother with this though unless you're trying to play something heavy.

Anyway, have fun with the deck. It's a great device for its price point and while there's a lot that you can do with it, you can get a lot out of it by just using it as a handheld games console too.

Not 100% sure but I think it makes noise when game updates start or finish downloading, even cloud syncs I think make some noise. So it could just be cloud syncs as you play. I have heard them but not take any notice as to what was happening.

Yes, hit the steam button and go into settings then under display ( I think) turn off the auto scaling or automatic resolution settings and it gives you much more control. You can make the text bigger and fit the screen better too. Mine was always showing a large black box around the screen.

imagine keeping an eye on stock for months with no joy and suddenly the 256gb version is back and you rush to buy.....still in stock 2 weeks later and now plenty of steam refurbished models with steam warranties for a lot less :D ffs

SSH is flawless and takes 2 minutes to set up, it is perfect, as in no different to Windows File explorer apart from the lag while the files are sent over wifi. All the others I tried first seem to choke on large files, I avoided SSH and tried everything else first because I thought it was all Linux command prompts but nah you just have to type in 2 simple ones and you're done forever.

Same here, I've put 70 hours into Satisfactory over the last few weeks. I play the PS5 a lot but Steam deck prob pips that at the moment too.

I don't think I've turned on my gaming PC since I got it.

It's running between 27 and 30 fps with the odd stutter. In villages you could knock another 5 frames off that. Also have occasional multi second delay when returning from menus but that's because of the ASTC recompression.

On the deck itself, I have increased the vram to 4 and increased the swapfile to 12.

In gamescope, I have half-rate shading, Refresh rate at 60, frames capped at 30. I'm playing while plugged in so I have no power limit set.

In Powertools, I have SMT off, min/max clock set to 3000/3500 with scheduler set to Performance. GPU min/max both at 1000.

In yuzu itself (nightly from the repository), I have the following. The important ones are DynamicFPS. If you spot anything that jumps out as hitting performance let me know.

Setting ASTC Decoding to CPU might help with the delay when exiting menus. I haven't got around to trying it yet.

I have unticked async shader building but I had it switched on while building shaders.

These might not be the best settings though. I might be missing something or doing something silly but it's quite playable.

You can grab Darkside detective 1&2 (made in Ireland), metro 2033 and last light (redux version) and Dishonored for €6.

Having a pretty strange issue at the moment, if I leave the deck sleeping for an extended amount of time (say at night) the controller stops working on wake, touch screen, volume, power all work but the controller doesn't. Had it yesterday and this morning but it randomly started working again both times.

Has anyone dealt with anything like this? I've done a factory reset to see if it's some setting/app I messed with.