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.
I feel like people have gotten Stockholm syndrome from phones with new generations every year.
Current hardware still works fine. If you have frame troubles, lower settings and mess with your battery/performance profiles.
Do not solve the problem by offering to give companies another 500 of your dollars.
(If you’re playing your Deck at home and have a beefy PC, though, you can always stream from your PC to your deck for better performance! On most networks, there’s virtually 0 latency! Highly recommend.)
This is why I am trying to decide whether to get one now or wait for the 2nd generation. If I buy one now, I will NOT be upgrading to gen 2.
Ohh. My bad.
Tech influencer folks predict a 2026 drop for the second revision, so if you can wait that long (or trust these predictions they’re making) I’d wait.
Big vouch for streaming. I mostly use my deck at home so I can play on the couch instead of staying cooped up in the office after spending all day at the same desk for work.
The deck can run a lot of games natively surprisingly well, sure, but sunshine/moonlight are incredible. Even games that run fine natively, I’ll still typically stream to my deck instead just for the battery life.
Get a Steam Deck OLED. Just do it. It is currently and will remain for a very long time a very capable device.
I actually kinda HOPE they don’t release a new generation for a good long while, so devs have some pressure to target it for new games, which also means that those new games will remain playable on other older hardware as well.
Is the Deck going to be your first / primary gaming device?
I got my Deck primarily for indie games, 10-30 year old games, or other generally “light” / casual games to play on the go or while watching a show with my partner.
For more demanding games, I’ll run them on my gaming PC and stream to my Deck via Sunshine / Moonlight / Moondeck. This has the added benefit of very low power consumption, meaning that instead of a ~2 hour battery life I get 6 or more.
The added benefit here is that a lot of games seem to be shipping increasingly unoptimized. Things that might have finnicky performance on my 3840 x 1600 monitor run silky smooth when I squish them down to 1920 x 1080 to stream to the Deck, usually with maxed out settings.
In the context of how I’m using it, Steam Deck is probably never going to be obsolete.
If you’re considering it as your primary device and primarily want to play modern AAA games, you should probably be spending at least 2-3x as much on a laptop or desktop. For that use case, Steam Deck is more appropriate as a companion device.
Yes the Deck will be my primary gaming device, but I don’t primarily want to play modern AAA games. My gaming library will be a variety indies, AA and a few AAA games.
I don’t want to invest in a gaming laptop or desktop, I would rather use cloud gaming in the cases I need better graphics.
Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games?
It did that on day 1. It’s a mobile device. You have to temper your expectations.
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.
The XBOX is not going to have similar performance. The Nintendo is actually quite a bit more performant. But more importantly the games on these devices are going to be specifically designed and optimized to run on a specific piece of hardware.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don’t mind medium details.
It obviously depends on the game but newer AAA titles are going to struggle to hit 30FPS on 800p/low.
If you want something with more performance you should get the Legion Go (non S) or Ally X and run Bazzite on it.
Should I wait for the next gen?
Valve is very quiet about these things. I don’t think anyone saw the OLED model coming. There were no leaks or rumors. Just boom, one day there it was. So probably no one knows and anyone who says they do is probably lying.
The Steam Deck runs games at PS4-level graphics fairly well. It will definitely struggle with newer AAA games if they don’t have graphics options low enough for the Deck.
me, who bought the steam deck primarily to play roms of games from 30 years ago: never had a problem so far.
Yeah I will very likely spend half of the time playing retro games on it. At the same time I don’t want to regret when there is a new AAA game that I really want to play. (There is nothing annouced that I considered as “must play”, and I am not interested in GTA6).
Even if a new AAA comes out that you’re eagerly wanting to play and the performance may not be great on Steam Deck, don’t forget about all the hundreds of games you also love that can be played on Steam Deck. Or the ROMs from nostalgic consoles that you love.
If you have a gaming solution now and you’re not ready to commit, just wait for the inevitable next gen Deck as you’ll be happier that way. Of course we’ll never know when it is coming.
Get a device now and play the games you want? Or wait ~2 years and get the next gen so you can play some games better?
Only you can make that informed decision that works best for you. Best of luck!
That’s a very reasonable take. Thanks.
Sure thing. I also read more comments and saw you have a laptop and stream games to a tablet.
For my use case, I have a desktop PC for when I want to play at high fidelity and have serious time to sit down and game. The Steam Deck I have is for the free moments of gaming time I can get. I can be on the couch and game. Sit on my porch during a break and game for a bit. I can click the button to sleep the console and pick up in two days from right where I left off - either Steam games or ROMs.
A Steam Deck isn’t cheap so definitely weigh your options and find out what works best for you. If you feel you want the performance uplift and can just wait, then put your laptop in another room so you won’t hear it and steam it to a tablet with a controller in your hands or something. That’ll give you a great experience, too. Then you can get Deck 2 and feel happier with your decision.
If money isn’t as much of a concern, freaking get it now lol.
Same, the last roughly 40 hours of my gameplay on the Deck have been PS1/2 and Xbox games, with a few hours of New Vegas sprinkled in.
As the Steam Deck isn’t new and is apparently struggling with some AAÀs, that’s why I got a used Steam Deck 2 months ago to run alongside my PS5.
I really don’t regret the move as I can play every future AAA I could want on the Playstation and so many games (including older AAÀs) on the Steam Deck.
For me it’s the perfect combo at under 1000.-(around 1000$).
It depends, a lot of modern AAA games run fine but a good amount of them are very unoptimized and run poorly on the Deck.
Valve said not to expect a hardware refresh soon since newer chips are more expensive and not that much faster, just look at the handheld PCs selling for ~$900 that are only 25% faster.
There are plenty of benchmarks online so you can check if the games you want will work properly or not.
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)
The next gen steam deck likely isn’t coming out for quite awhile still, so it’s probably not worth waiting for next gen.
Performance wise, the Steam Deck does struggle to run new AAA games if they’re poorly optimized, use UE5, or have mandatory ray tracing for lighting. It’s still possible to play most of these games, but it will depend on your tolerance for graphics quality or your willingness to install performance mods. There’s also no shortage of good games to play, slightly older AAA games generally work flawlessly and nearly all AA/indie games run great. I have enough good games in my library where I could never buy another game and always have something good to play.
The switch 2 in portable mode has nearly identical power to the Steam Deck, so if it sells anywhere close to Switch 1 I think we’ll see a lot of games target being able to run on it. The switch 1 was far enough behind modern platforms to not be worth optimizing for, for most AAA games/devs. But the switch 2 and steam deck generally have enough power to run new games at an almost acceptable level, and that makes optimization a much more appealing target.
Also worth considering is local streaming. If you have a decent PC/PS5 you can stream games to the deck. It can be a good compromise for the games that don’t run great natively.
I wouldn’t be concerned.
We’re at a point in portable technology where increased performance means decreased battery life and makes the system need to be larger and less comfortable to hold (makes it release more heat, which has to go somewhere).
I do not believe there is enough demand to expect a larger, hotter, SteamDeck with poorer battery life to be released soon, or maybe ever.
Decks went from GDPWin with intel HD 615 integrated graphics, running desktop windows in 2016 (we were amazed it could run 2011’s Arkham City 25 fps low (definitely playable! lmao)) to Steam Deck where people are still reasonably posting about it having console parity.
RE “outdated soon”: this is a $350 handheld x86 computer with an APU powerful enough to drive complex 3d games at 720p. People are going to be buying Steam Decks until they stop making them. Capability and performance per $$ is extremely good for numerous use cases, including people who are gaming like OP.
RE devs optimizing for SD/Switch2/XBS: i hope OP is right? definitely where non-AAA studios are going to be aiming, but AAA studios have weird corpo masters who rarely operate in ways that would make sense to cool people.
If you are looking for an affordable device to play AAA games well on with no issues, get a ps5.
If you are looking for a hand held to play indie titles and the plethora of older games available I’d go for the steam deck.
I think it’ll be a while until we get a hand held experience like the steam deck but with AAA capable hardware.
I think it’ll be a while until we get a hand held experience like the steam deck but with AAA capable hardware.
That will never happen. Physically larger devices are always going to be more performant. And AAA titles will just increase the demands of games accordingly.
Do you mean that the Steam Deck is currently not capable of AAA?
Its relatively “low” resolution really helps it achieve better fps, but the trend of not optimizing and praying FSR does it good enough may be an issue.
I’ve never tried the really big titles on it, so I can’t say reliably, I’m afraid.
Its a complicated answer. It can play probably most modern AAA games. But it likely won’t be a great experience and I can only describe it as playable. If you want a very good experience with the steam deck, then use it for mid spec games or less and it’ll be perfect and have good battery life. If you want more then maybe try another hand held, or a console.
In the end the device you play your games on needs to do one thing well, and that’s to play the games you WANT to play.
Here is my opinion. I absolutely love playing oblivion on my gaming laptop with RTX4080. It looks gorgeous and so do a lot of games.
That said, I’d rather play on the deck with somewhat less graphics and chill on the couch after a long day of work. I just love the portability. Performance is okay for most games (it even plays oblivion okayish with reasonable graphics). A lot of games are optimized pretty well for it.
I just see it as an open source switch you can do and play anything you like on. I have tried windows on it too but personally it has no benefit for me so I use steamOS.
Games I play on it: Oblivion remastered Borderlands 3 Risk of Rain 2 Elden Ring GTA V
I also stream from my PlayStation 5 to my deck with chiaki4deck.
FYI- you can also stream from your laptop to the Deck. Technically you can do it on a per-game basis through Steam (which you may have already noticed), but I find it’s even better to install Steam Link as a non-Steam game, similar to what you probably did with Chiaki. As long as you have a good local network it’s great and uses way less of the Deck’s power.
I have no idea why Valve hasn’t added Steam Link to the Steam store. That would make things so much easier, and you get way more settings and fewer bugs that way than doing the per-game streaming option.
Check out out Sunshine / Moonlight and Moondeck if you haven’t already
Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?
I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.
Steam Link just… Works. It’s an official Valve thing. There’s a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it’s not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I’m on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b
My crystal ball says buy one now.
My brother has a Lenovo Legion Go (the original one, not the S). I am definitely in envy of the big display, the higher refresh rate, and the more powerful chip. However it’s a bit ehh in terms of ergonomics. It also runs windows but that’s irrelevant because you can install steamOS.
There’s a good chance I’ll get a Legion Go next and stick steamOS on it unless we see a steam deck 2 soon that’s bigger and punchier. I know we all love our retro and indie games, but it is nice to be able to play more demanding games from time to time.
Yeah ergonomics is extremely important to me. I also try to avoid products from Chinese companies.
