Steam Deck |OT| Your Games are Going Places

[Ouroboros]

2-5 more months. Glad to hear that the fan whine was taken care of in the latest beta update. That might have been a deal-breaker for me. What's the Resetera consensus on the fan noise/temperature? Seems positive from what I've read on other sites.

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Fan noise was my biggest complaint. After beta update I would compare both fan noise and heat to the switch if you have one.

Playing DMC5 for over an hour the fan is barely / kind of noticeable with volume on a low setting.

Indie games (loop hero) or older pc games / new ports of older games (Ni No Kuni) the fan isn't noticeable at all.

Emulation varies. Anything newer like PS3 it cranks. But older stuff like PS2 or lower fan and heat is minimal at best.

I love the Deck. I haven't touched my Xbox Series X or switch since it arrived…and probably won't until Xenoblade Chronicles 3 drops on Switch.

If I can somehow emulate Mac OS9 and play my old Mac games on the Deck, it will be the complete package for me.

 

[Ovvv]

SMG2 requires nunchuck

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There should be a way to configure the right stick as the "cursor." I guess this may wrap back onto your question about the nunchuck though lol

Fan noise was my biggest complaint. After beta update I would compare both fan noise and heat to the switch if you have one.

Playing DMC5 for over an hour the fan is barely / kind of noticeable with volume on a low setting.

Indie games (loop hero) or older pc games / new ports of older games (Ni No Kuni) the fan isn't noticeable at all.

Emulation varies. Anything newer like PS3 it cranks. But older stuff like PS2 or lower fan and heat is minimal at best.

I love the Deck. I haven't touched my Xbox Series X or switch since it arrived…and probably won't until Xenoblade Chronicles 3 drops on Switch.

If I can somehow emulate Mac OS9 and play my old Mac games on the Deck, it will be the complete package for me.

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We playing Chronicles 3 on this thing. BELIEVE!

 

[BryanFulton]

Fan noise was my biggest complaint. After beta update I would compare both fan noise and heat to the switch if you have one.

Playing DMC5 for over an hour the fan is barely / kind of noticeable with volume on a low setting.

Indie games (loop hero) or older pc games / new ports of older games (Ni No Kuni) the fan isn't noticeable at all.

Emulation varies. Anything newer like PS3 it cranks. But older stuff like PS2 or lower fan and heat is minimal at best.

I love the Deck. I haven't touched my Xbox Series X or switch since it arrived…and probably won't until Xenoblade Chronicles 3 drops on Switch.

If I can somehow emulate Mac OS9 and play my old Mac games on the Deck, it will be the complete package for me.

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Sounds great. Thank you for the info!

 

[Burt]

Trying to get drivers for my drawing tablet installed via desktop mode

and yeah

I'm not up for this linux stuff

time to get an SD card and dual boot windows

Anyone have any SD card recommendations?

 

[Casper]

Thanks god that website is a clusterfuck and I'm too stupid to use it correctly, or in a way that seems enjoyable. 😅

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I will absolutely not share with you the 2 to 3 steps it would take to make it easily show you your wishlist sorted by price cut. You are welcome.

 

[SolarLune]

Trying to get drivers for my drawing tablet installed via desktop mode

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Which tablet?

 

[Burt]

Which tablet?

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Huion Kamvas 16 2021

 

[DigitalOp]

Damn you Steam Deck.....

You give me a deep deep urge to rebuy my Switch library again as PC ports.......

Must resist urge....

Spoiler

The wild shit about it is taking advantage of sales I could buy the 15 Switch games I own for under 70$ more than likely

 

[Casper]

Got Minecraft running with PolyMC finally, no idea why it didn't work before.

I see people say that you can add something like "-l <instance name>" in the command line of Steam to have PolyMC launch your instance of the game directly without having to launch it manually from it, I tried adding that at the end of what was already in there but it doesn't seem to work.
No idea if I didn't format it properly (tried multiple things) or if it is something else :o

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Give

`--launch <instance name>`

a try instead.

 

[Ouroboros]

We playing Chronicles 3 on this thing. BELIEVE!

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The dream.

 

[Bentendo24]

How likely do you think it'll be that we will be able to play starfield on this?

 

[inner-G]

Damn you Steam Deck.....

You give me a deep deep urge to rebuy my Switch library again as PC ports.......

Must resist urge....

Spoiler

The wild shit about it is taking advantage of sales I could buy the 15 Switch games I own for under 70$ more than likely

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Trade the switch games to GameStop, you can get a Steam gift card w the credit and prob end up with more games than you have now.

 

[DigitalOp]

Trade the switch games to GameStop, you can get a Steam gift card w the credit and prob end up with more games than you have now.

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I went digital on Switch, made all the sense at the time. But now Im at the weird weird crossroads where Im not gonna lug a Switch and Deck around at the same time.

Cant really regret it cuz the Switch walked which allowed the Deck to run.... but damn its pretty much time to retire Nintendo's best console (IMO)....
Ill still mess with the first party stuff

Edit: But you know what? I do have some physical titles that I'll never go back to. Thats still a good idea, along with other physical games I dont need

 

[TheSix]

How does EmuDeck get updated without breaking anything?

 

[Maximo]

Edit:

 

[Sangral]

Any way to unlock the more VRAM if you aren't on Windows or is this Windows/Bios exclusive at the moment?

It's super weird that all games max out at 1GB on Steam OS currently.

 

[Becks']

The beta update has helped with the fan but it still whines sometimes.

 

[MoogleMaestro]

Huion Kamvas 16 2021

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There's pretty good wacom support out of the box but for huion's official drivers it's probably not really designed for steam os's read only file system. Normally on linux you would want to install digimend kernel drivers for non wacom tablets, but again, steam makes these root level changes difficult to prevent the system from being broken on a dependency level, I dont think that's an option.

So yeah, linux driver situation could be better for non wacom tablets. There are people working on it, but I'm not sure they could be applied without valve choosing to include the digimend kernel drivers in the base install.

So tldr people should really ask huion to improve and update their drivers for linux. :)

 

[Huey]

Edward850 any sense as to whether or not we'll get verified status for Powerslave, Doom 64 and Quake any time soon? No rush as I'm enjoying all of them as they are (though can't recall if they needed any modifications to run now), more just curious. I'd like to see them all featured prominently on the Deck store's main verified page, retro shooters in general and the Nightdive efforts in particular are wonderful on this machine.

 

[Edward850]

Edward850 any sense as to whether or not we'll get verified status for Powerslave, Doom 64 and Quake any time soon? No rush as I'm enjoying all of them as they are, just curious. I'd like to see them all featured prominently on the Deck store's main verified page, retro shooters in general and the Nightdive efforts in particular are wonderful on this machine.

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I don't think that's anything we have control over. It's a valve controlled thing. Besides, I can't even get a Steam Deck, they refuse to let me even preorder one for some reason and they won't even send me a development one (we got exactly one which is with one of our producers in the UK), so to us they might as well not exist at the moment.

 

[Winnie]

Rogue Legacy 2 uses 17w, but if you capped with the TPD settings to like 5w it runs exactly the same. Weird.

 

[Falus]

Seriously 40hz is such a game changer
It happened at the same time as ps5 vrr update and playing ratchet / Spider-Man at 40fps opened my eyes about this being the best sweet spot for good frame rate and best IQ

And now with the steam deck it allows the same while using less power and Being more silent. So good

 

[CommodoreKong]

Any way to unlock the more VRAM if you aren't on Windows or is this Windows/Bios exclusive at the moment?

It's super weird that all games max out at 1GB on Steam OS currently.

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Steam Deck shares the 16 GB RAM pool between GPU memory and regular memory like modern consoles. From what I understand the GPU can take about half of the RAM.

I think the APU might have 1 GB of dedicated memory so that might be what it's seeing in SteamOS.

 

[Renteka-Bond]

I've been thinking of getting a glass screen protector but also will have the 512gb model.

I was wondering about how putting one over the matte finish works. Do you think it reduces visibility or anything? Does it look just like regular glass once you put it on there? Does it get rid of the anti-glare "haze"? Sorry for so many questions.

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No problem!

It doesn't really reduce visibility that I've noticed. The Anti Glare, of course, doesn't work but otherwise, it's been clear as day and I have a bit of peace of mind for it.

 

[JigglesBunny]

Received my new unit Friday afternoon after RMAing my original Deck. Very, very happy to say that not only is the APU not busted on this one but I also won the fan lottery and don't have any egregious backlight bleed.

I'm happy as a clam right now and just spent three hours playing Dying Light 2 without a single hitch.

 

[zoodoo]

Received my new unit Friday afternoon after RMAing my original Deck. Very, very happy to say that not only is the APU not busted on this one but I also won the fan lottery and don't have any egregious backlight bleed.

I'm happy as a clam right now and just spent three hours playing Dying Light 2 without a single hitch.

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Nice to hear

 

[asmith906]

I've run into a few games listed as playable give me an error when I start them up.do I need to use a different proton version? I loaded up the sega collection but I just get a black screen when I start a game.

I also tried final fantasy 4 3d remake. The game is listed as verified but there's no music.

 

[RyougaSaotome]

Hey Final Fantasy XIV Fam?

I've been trying to install FFXIV on my Deck using this video:



But when I go to the compatdata folder for the game, it's empty. There's nothing in there to modify.

I ran the installer on the Steam OS side (not the Steam version of the game, the trial you download off the site), but it doesn't generate anything in the compatdata folder?

What am I doing wrong?

 

[Contraband]

Running through the Death Stranding DC, going to knock out quite a bit of my backlog.

 

[Vagabond]

I have achieved the handheld version of spending more time modding Skyrim than playing it.

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Aww shit... Theres no Wabbajack working on Linux yet is there

 

[BeI]

Aww shit... Theres no Wabbajack working on Linux yet is there

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I didn't seem to have any luck downloading mod collections either because automatic Nexus downloads didn't seem to be working through Mod Organizer 2.

If you do get into modding still, get the Extended Hotkey System mod because you can use it to make all sorts of hotkey combos with SkyUi, then put them all on the trackpads and stuff.

 

[Skel1ingt0n]

Now I won't begrudge anyone their preferences, but I've fucked around with optimizing graphics settings and refresh rate for, like, 8 straight hours since the beta dropped and found 48Hz to be the sweet spot of image quality and motion clarity. It's a lot smoother than 40 and only drops in the super populated areas (where it always drops) and it looks better than the PS5 version (where I always played before). I recommend trying it out and seeing how it is for you.

Here's my settings if you're interested:



For a little extra stability at 48Hz (or equivalent stability at 50Hz) you could lower Transparent Lighting to Normal (I have it at High entirely because my hair looks better with it) and Ambient Occlusion to HBAO+: Standard. They have a fairly notably effect on performance for pretty minimal quality loss.

(Also, you could probably have Grass at High and Anisotropic Filtering at x16 without a performance impact, but I didn't see any real visual difference.)

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Legit huge thank you for sharing your settings and observations. I've mimicked your entire setup wholesale. You're right - the motion clarity of 48 vs. 40 is a massive improvement... and I played the EW MSQ for about 2.5 hrs last night and stayed locked at 48fps about 95% of the time (except for in Limsa, to be expected). Game looks absolutely fantastic, too.

This game feels like it was made for the Deck.

 

[cabelhigh]

Finally hooked up my deck to a TV with......mixed......results.

In Game mode, the Deck automatically outputs to the TV resolution and there's no way to change it. So I was getting like 20fps while playing NIDHOGG, which is pretty uncool.

Resolution fixed itself if I started the game in Desktop mode. Also worked fine on a 1080p TV

 

[jon bones]

Legit huge thank you for sharing your settings and observations. I've mimicked your entire setup wholesale. You're right - the motion clarity of 48 vs. 40 is a massive improvement... and I played the EW MSQ for about 2.5 hrs last night and stayed locked at 48fps about 95% of the time (except for in Limsa, to be expected). Game looks absolutely fantastic, too.

This game feels like it was made for the Deck.

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ughhh yall gonna make me reinstall this shit huh

fuck.

how do i find out if i can do this? i played first on ps4 beta, then ps4 proper, then steam. can my account be used with the work around?

 

[SolarLune]

Hey Final Fantasy XIV Fam?

I've been trying to install FFXIV on my Deck using this video:



But when I go to the compatdata folder for the game, it's empty. There's nothing in there to modify.

I ran the installer on the Steam OS side (not the Steam version of the game, the trial you download off the site), but it doesn't generate anything in the compatdata folder?

What am I doing wrong?

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Quick guess:

Steam generates the compatdata folder for proton for a game once you start it up on Steam. If you never start the Steam version of a game, it won't generate a compatdata folder where you'd expect (i.e. where the numerical steam ID of the game goes). The person in this video starts the Steam version of FFXIV at the beginning of the video, which means Steam created a compatdata folder there already.

If you started the Steam version of the game, it should generate the following folder: "<Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/39210/pfx/", with "<steam-folder>" here being the location of the steam library on your SSD or SD Card.

 

[Huey]

I don't think that's anything we have control over. It's a valve controlled thing. Besides, I can't even get a Steam Deck, they refuse to let me even preorder one for some reason and they won't even send me a development one (we got exactly one which is with one of our producers in the UK), so to us they might as well not exist at the moment.

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Gotcha - I thought Valve might be reviewing games and highlighting to developers how verification could proceed, but maybe that's asking a lot. And particularly so if devs don't have units 😑

Also, I mispoke Powerslave is verified (and incredible). And really with the recent update to the interface, Quake is great. Doom 64 is just requiring a bit of fiddling with the controls.

Anyways, was mainly just curious - thanks for the fast reply and keep up the great work 💪

 

[Sirhc]

I can finally play Gears 1. Lutris install scripts ftw
Problem: It only works in desktop mode lel

Only Rogue Squadron left then. Might as well settle for the N64 version tbh

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Weird that it doesn't work in BPM, what happens when you try and run it there? Lutris(and Bottles) has been a fickle beast for me lol, great when everything works but sometimes it just has some random ass issues.

 

[RyougaSaotome]

Quick guess:

Steam generates the compatdata folder for proton for a game once you start it up on Steam. If you never start the Steam version of a game, it won't generate a compatdata folder where you'd expect (i.e. where the numerical steam ID of the game goes). The person in this video starts the Steam version of FFXIV at the beginning of the video, which means Steam created a compatdata folder there already.

If you started the Steam version of the game, it should generate the following folder: "<Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/39210/pfx/", with "<steam-folder>" here being the location of the steam library on your SSD or SD Card.

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So this fixed the issue and I made all the modifications required, but when I boot the steam trial version on the Steam OS, using the latest version of GE Proton, it just goes to a load then back to the Steam OS menu.

When I use proton experimental it goes to the XIV launcher window and freezes there, despite the edits I made to the configure file.

Hm.

EDIT: NEVER MIND. I dunno what changed, but I went back into everything, exited out, and now it works??? Lol.

Thank you for your help!

 

[Rodney McKay]

Dragon Age Inquisition plays well, but there seems to be an issue where Gamepad controls just don't seem to work. I haven't come across any posts or instructions that have figured out how to get it to work.

What makes it extra annoying is that when you switch from K+M to Gamepad in the settings, you're locked out of using K+M, so you're stuck in Gamepad mode and not able to change it back because the controls don't work!.
The only way to switch it back is to edit a Profile text file in the save game folder.

Also annoying is that I have the game through Origin, so I'm not able to see all the custom K+M control config the community has made, so I'll need to start tinkering to customize how I want.

 

[Charpunk]

Dragon Age Inquisition plays well, but there seems to be an issue where Gamepad controls just don't seem to work. I haven't come across any posts or instructions that have figured out how to get it to work.

What makes it extra annoying is that when you switch from K+M to Gamepad in the settings, you're locked out of using K+M, so you're stuck in Gamepad mode and not able to change it back because the controls don't work!.
The only way to switch it back is to edit a Profile text file in the save game folder.

Also annoying is that I have the game through Origin, so I'm not able to see all the custom K+M control config the community has made, so I'll need to start tinkering to customize how I want.

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Haven't found a way to get that game to recognize the controller yet. Which is a bummer because it's one of the games I wanted to play again.

 

[JCizzle]

Dragon Age Inquisition plays well, but there seems to be an issue where Gamepad controls just don't seem to work. I haven't come across any posts or instructions that have figured out how to get it to work.

What makes it extra annoying is that when you switch from K+M to Gamepad in the settings, you're locked out of using K+M, so you're stuck in Gamepad mode and not able to change it back because the controls don't work!.
The only way to switch it back is to edit a Profile text file in the save game folder.

Also annoying is that I have the game through Origin, so I'm not able to see all the custom K+M control config the community has made, so I'll need to start tinkering to customize how I want.

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This bugs me so much. One of the big games I wanted to play on the deck

 

[TetraGenesis]

Legit huge thank you for sharing your settings and observations. I've mimicked your entire setup wholesale. You're right - the motion clarity of 48 vs. 40 is a massive improvement... and I played the EW MSQ for about 2.5 hrs last night and stayed locked at 48fps about 95% of the time (except for in Limsa, to be expected). Game looks absolutely fantastic, too.

This game feels like it was made for the Deck.

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I'm so happy to hear that! I agree that it feels like it was made for the Deck. I told my friends that it will be the downfall of me hahaha. It shouldn't be this easy to play FFXIV all the time lol

Just an aside on the refresh rate, I think too much has been made of 40 Hz as the default choice for this new feature. If 40fps is a "better 30fps", 48fps (and anything above) is a "more accessible 60fps". Which — if it looks as good as FFXIV does in this case — is absolutely worth trying for.

 

[TetraGenesis]

ughhh yall gonna make me reinstall this shit huh

fuck.

how do i find out if i can do this? i played first on ps4 beta, then ps4 proper, then steam. can my account be used with the work around?

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Yep! When you sign in with you Square Enix account your character is accessible from either platform. You do have to rebuy the expansions on PC if you only have them on PS4 though.

 

[Sirhc]

Just an aside on the refresh rate, I think too much has been made of 40 Hz as the default choice for this new feature. If 40fps is a "better 30fps", 48fps (and anything above) is a "more accessible 60fps". Which — if it looks as good as FFXIV does in this case — is absolutely worth trying for.

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Think it's definitely going to vary from game to game and person to person, vastly prefer around 45hz atleast from my experience but need to test some more games.

Amazing feature with being able to find that sweet spot for yourself easily and on the fly though.

 

[IMACOMPUTA]

I wish we had gotten more info on the official deck dock by now. I mean it's just a dock after all, but it would be super important to actually have??? lol

In better news I got Soldier of Fortune 2 to work. Had to put in some additional launch settings that I had initially skipped over when checking the lutris installation script, but which turned out to be absolutely vital to get it to run lmao

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Hey there! I'm trying to get sof2 working and not having any luck. What are the launch options you needed to add?

 

[SkekesisVR]

Running through the Death Stranding DC, going to knock out quite a bit of my backlog.

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How is performance for you? I keep getting super strange drops to 20s for a few seconds every few minutes, and can't keep a consistent 40

 

[Rodney McKay]

Haven't found a way to get that game to recognize the controller yet. Which is a bummer because it's one of the games I wanted to play again.

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This bugs me so much. One of the big games I wanted to play on the deck

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I'm actually starting to get a K+M configuration setup that's pretty close to the Gamepad controls.

I've made the left touch pad a 1-9 touch menu for selecting and using powers. That's different than the gamepad that uses the face buttons (and the left trigger to cycle), but this works pretty well.

Right touch pad I use for moving the camera around, so it's set to mouse movement with right-click on soft press (so it's the camera moving and not the cursor), and pressing the touch pad is set to 'V' to ping for loot and collectibles.

Right trigger is left click for attacking.
'A' is set to F Key for picking up loot, opening doors, etc.
'X' is set to Space bar for jump and skipping dialog.

 

[SolarLune]

So this fixed the issue and I made all the modifications required, but when I boot the steam trial version on the Steam OS, using the latest version of GE Proton, it just goes to a load then back to the Steam OS menu.

When I use proton experimental it goes to the XIV launcher window and freezes there, despite the edits I made to the configure file.

Hm.

EDIT: NEVER MIND. I dunno what changed, but I went back into everything, exited out, and now it works??? Lol.

Thank you for your help!

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No prob~ it's a lot to learn for people who're new to Linux, for sure.

 

[TetraGenesis]

Think it's definitely going to vary from game to game and person to person, vastly prefer around 45hz atleast from my experience but need to test some more games.

Amazing feature with being able to find that sweet spot for yourself easily and on the fly though.

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Totally. However people choose to use it, it's amazing the impact it has for so little effort on the player's end. I'll fiddle with every little option in the graphics settings of a game, trying to suss out how it affects performance/visuals and if it's worth the cost. Half the time my perception of what has changed is probably completely wrong or situational or a placebo. Not saying I won't still fiddle a ton but it's such a nice feeling being able to drag a single slider to an arbitrary number based on the performance you're getting rather than the performance you're trying to get.

 

[dreamfall]

How does Dragon Age 2 run? Is the controller configuration solid? Always bothered me that it wasn't properly adapted all those years back. Super excited to just play old Bioware games when I get mine!