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Digital Foundry: 'Too Big' For Steam Deck? Unreal Engine 5 First-Gen Games Put To The Test vs Xbox Series S
- Thread starter adamsapple
- Start date
Magic Carpet
Gold Member
Alan was my Wakeup call, Steamdeck not a viable solution for these new games.
Zathalus
Member
If you use your deck mainly at home, have a good wifi and desktop PC it can be. Just use home streaming, only adds a tiny bit of latency.
DanielG165
Member
I love my Steam Deck, but it can barely run the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn, Hogwarts Legacy, Sonic Frontiers, and God of War without serious drawbacks, and the likes of those games absolutely shredding its battery life. I know that Valve marketed it as being able to run AAA games, and it can do for some, but most super heavy titles aren’t a good experience on it. Of course the Steam Deck isn’t going to run most UE5 games well, and Oliver stating that Immortals looked better on it versus the Series S had me scratching my head.
The game looks softer on the small Xbox, yeah, but I’d would rather take that than have it look super crunchy on the Deck. For what it is, a portable PC with an internal lithium ion battery, the Steam Deck is great. However, a powerhouse it is not, especially when compared to the other handheld PCs that have since released, though the Deck is the far easier device to operate and play games with.
Maybe whenever Valve releases the next model, we’ll be able to realistically play AAA games and UE5 titles on the Steam Deck without sacrificing TOO much. As it stands today though, the Steam Deck, while brilliant, is more of an exercise in frustration than fun when trying to run big games at reasonable performance levels, natively, that is.
The game looks softer on the small Xbox, yeah, but I’d would rather take that than have it look super crunchy on the Deck. For what it is, a portable PC with an internal lithium ion battery, the Steam Deck is great. However, a powerhouse it is not, especially when compared to the other handheld PCs that have since released, though the Deck is the far easier device to operate and play games with.
Maybe whenever Valve releases the next model, we’ll be able to realistically play AAA games and UE5 titles on the Steam Deck without sacrificing TOO much. As it stands today though, the Steam Deck, while brilliant, is more of an exercise in frustration than fun when trying to run big games at reasonable performance levels, natively, that is.
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Comandr
Member
Steam Deck was punching above its weight class from day one. The only thing that will really help at this point is further advancement in frame reconstruction and generation tech that will trickle down to the steam deck.
For me, it sucks from a power consumption standpoint. I don't want to have to run two computers to play one game. I'm also extremely sensitive to streaming artifacts, and would rather just have worse image quality than deal with that. There's just nothing like a natively rendered experience.
Magic Carpet
Gold Member
You can still use the deck on older and less intensive games. No need to stay at home.
Zathalus
Member
I don't disagree with that, just that if you want to play more intensive games without terrible performance and battery life you can use streaming as a workaround.
I don't think you should have any steaming artifacts with a 150mbit AV1 stream. What helps is setting the stream up from your PC at 1920x1200 and then downsampling to 800p on the deck. All of this does require good Wifi so you don't get dropped frames or lag.
The usage of desktop does impact power usage on the deck though, no way around that.
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CamHostage
Member
It's been interesting to see that (unless I've missed something,) there's not yet a game which cannot scale down to the Steam Deck. Performance has hit a place where you generally would not want to play some of the top-end games on it if you had to (although also, no big game has had customized settings/optimization for Deck, and a large number of these are running through the Proton compatibility layer,) so you can't rely on it for every PC you ever want to play on a handheld. However, everything runs at some level of playability and no major graphical effect or bleeding-edge engine technology has so far denied Deck from trying.
(Some of this is the state of the industry changing priorities away from custom "next-gen" applications in order to fit as wide a range of hardware as needed to support sales, some of this is that scalability in engines has mooted the value of leaving cross-gen out of the plans, some of this is how much of the next-generation advancement comes from non-realtime pre-release work like ML for training face/body rigs and deep-learning for AI upscaling. But also, Deck is just an impressive little piece of kit.)
(Some of this is the state of the industry changing priorities away from custom "next-gen" applications in order to fit as wide a range of hardware as needed to support sales, some of this is that scalability in engines has mooted the value of leaving cross-gen out of the plans, some of this is how much of the next-generation advancement comes from non-realtime pre-release work like ML for training face/body rigs and deep-learning for AI upscaling. But also, Deck is just an impressive little piece of kit.)
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GHG
Member
I don't think the deck is designed for modern AAA games and I wouldn't dream of trying to run any of them on my deck (with the exceptions being Midnight Suns and Diablo 4). But if I were to do it then it would be at lower settings than what's on display here. Either that or cap the games to 40/30fps and crank the settings/resolution.
rocketleague
Neo Member
deck won't and will never be a valuable option for modren AAA games. its slightly worse than a base ps4. a decade old console. Otherwise its absolutely gorgeous machine especially the Oled one.
TaroYamada
Member
Deck excels at older AAA and indies, however it's pretty damn capable. I had good luck with it on newer stuff like Diablo IV, Atomic Heart and Sonic Frontiers, where I was able to configure a good looking experience running at my target FPS of 40 (now 45 on the OLED).
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
I run Hogwarts Legacy, sure it can dip sometimes below 30 FPS, but I am running it like so and it is a blast (it is the OLED model which has a bit more memory bandwidth):
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balls of snow
Member
Yeah I would never subject my deck oled to run these unreal 5 games. Thats what moonlight and chiaki4deck are for. Steamdeck 2 is gonna be a beast though.