Steam Deck

[Guspaz]

The OLED Steam Deck internal design/layout is radically different than the LCD Steam Deck hardware was. You can't put the new screen in the old Steam Deck. To quote Valve, "I'm sure people will try it, but it's probably not going to go well,"

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Thanks for the 411 on the oled monitor not being a drop-in replacement with a 1st gen Steam Deck, Guspaz.

It's been revealed that Valve went with a Samsung produced 7.4" oled screen setup with their latest Steam Deck oled offerings.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Guspaz]

It's dual-sourced from Samsung and BOE, and it's not clear yet if they're comparable, because if you look at reviews you can see some massive differences in measured sRGB coverage on OLED Steam Decks between different reviewers.

[bobrocks95]

Eugh, was not hoping to play the lottery like original adopters had to with the fans.

[Guspaz]

I'm hoping it's just testing methodology or something, because (and I might get the exact percentages wrong since it's from memory) I saw one reviewer claiming something like a 93% coverage of sRGB while multiple others were reporting something more like 145%. So either one or more reviewers is doing something wrong, or one or more reviewers is using very different testing methodology, or there's a huge difference in the capabilities of the Samsung versus the BOE displays. I'm not sure anybody has actually tried to compare them yet.

[bobrocks95]

I'm hoping it's just testing methodology or something, because (and I might get the exact percentages wrong since it's from memory) I saw one reviewer claiming something like a 93% coverage of sRGB while multiple others were reporting something more like 145%. So either one or more reviewers is doing something wrong, or one or more reviewers is using very different testing methodology, or there's a huge difference in the capabilities of the Samsung versus the BOE displays. I'm not sure anybody has actually tried to compare them yet.

I'll keep an eye out, I do think it would take one person having both displays side-by-side doing identical tests to get any sort of valid comparison.

It can't be as bad as getting a 3DS with TN panels.

[Steven]

There's a popup store in Haneda Airport that's selling Steam Decks for the next two weeks, and it seems that they have some on display or something. Provided I don't suddenly become overwhelmed by laziness (highly possible), I'm planning on going there tomorrow to check them out. I am not buying one yet, though; they are extremely expensive here, with the far more powerful ROG Ally being very competitive for only a tiny increase in price; the Z1 (not the Extreme) is only 5000 yen more than the 512GB OLED Steam Deck.

That said, the ROG Ally seems like a pain to use in comparison, lacks a lot of the cool stuff the Steam Deck can do, and I have very little interest in any games that are going to actually use any of that extra power.

[Steven]

Got sick and felt like shit yesterday, so I didn't go. Feel much better today, so I'll probably go later this week.

Anyway, I found something interesting: Digital Foundry input lag testing of Steam Deck LCD and OLED. Any thoughts on these numbers?

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundr ... better-too

Only two games were tested and I have neither of them, so the sample size is small, but isn't this level of input lag basically complete garbage? That's kind of rhetorical, as that's worse than basically every Switch game that I have and the Switch is generally regarded as being a laggy piece of shit. I don't have any equipment to test input lag at all, so I'm not capable of doing any testing on the games that I do have, but if the thing has this much lag I don't think it's worth buying at all.

[bobrocks95]

Got sick and felt like shit yesterday, so I didn't go. Feel much better today, so I'll probably go later this week.

Anyway, I found something interesting: Digital Foundry input lag testing of Steam Deck LCD and OLED. Any thoughts on these numbers?

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundr ... better-too

Only two games were tested and I have neither of them, so the sample size is small, but isn't this level of input lag basically complete garbage? I don't have any equipment to test input lag at all, so I'm not capable of doing any testing on the games that I do have, but if the thing has this much lag I don't think it's worth buying at all.

Those numbers don't sound wild for modern games actually. You'd want some comparison point that's closer to something you're familiar with, ie a shmup that has been analyzed to death across various ports/platforms.

[Steven]

Got sick and felt like shit yesterday, so I didn't go. Feel much better today, so I'll probably go later this week.

Anyway, I found something interesting: Digital Foundry input lag testing of Steam Deck LCD and OLED. Any thoughts on these numbers?

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundr ... better-too

Only two games were tested and I have neither of them, so the sample size is small, but isn't this level of input lag basically complete garbage? I don't have any equipment to test input lag at all, so I'm not capable of doing any testing on the games that I do have, but if the thing has this much lag I don't think it's worth buying at all.

Those numbers don't sound wild for modern games actually. You'd want some comparison point that's closer to something you're familiar with, ie a shmup that has been analyzed to death across various ports/platforms.

Yeah. Ikaruga would probably be good, as that has lag tests for pretty much every system that it's been on and it's always extremely fast and consistent.

[orange808]

Steam Deck doesn't have Fresync and it matters if you plan to emulate shmups with high expectations.

[Steven]

I don't use MAME or any other sort of PC emulator aside from those extremely few M2 ShotTriggers games that are on PC.

[orange808]

Fair enough. Although, you might ask yourself how many of the ports you are playing are proper old school ports. There was a distant time that you signed an NDA and you got to see the source for an arcade title. Then, you set about the impossible task of reproducing those behaviors on a home machine with wildly different hardware. Of course, a proper "from scratch" coded port definitely is not an emulator.

On the other hand, a lot of the "ports" that are available now didn't get that treatment. That's real game development and it's a lot of work. It's a complete development cycle. It's much easier to use an established emulator of some kind and grab some fast money playing the roms. In fact, I bet all the roms are downloaded from the internet. There's no way these devs or the IP holders are doing all the necessary work to get rom sets together.

So, you may or not be using mame (or another emulator). And, you are probably using a legacy build or a broken Frankenstein port of the embedded emulator (because devs have to dance around the GPL bits) with fewer options and features.

Buying rights to the games and roms is necessary, but you dont have to actually play what you bought.

Of course, it's up to you. Are you playing mame? Yes and no.

[bobrocks95]

Huh, the dock supports FreeSync... Maybe the new OLED screen will with its 90Hz refresh rate?

[Guspaz]

It does not support VRR. The OLED screen is reportedly a variant of the one used in the Switch OLED, which tied Valve's hands since it uses a display protocol that does not support VRR.

However, the Deck does support changing the refresh rate of the screen to match your specified FPS cap, doubling/trippling frames as required to get the highest refresh rate that still lines up with the specified cap.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

With the Steam OS v3.5.5 update, a Steam Deck hooked up to an appropriately updated Steam Dock setup now supports VRR in Dock Mode. It's about damn time that Valve implemented this feature (as mentioned back in September of 2023 with the Steam OS v3.5.5 beta patch).

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[orange808]

Well, I was talking about using a portable as a portable. I have a PC that plugs into a stationary display. YMMV.