this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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I’ve been going back and forth between actively looking to buy one and saying I’ll wait til they get better hardware. Was expecting to have to wait for a while for that so this was definitely surprising.
However while my interest in the new one is incredibly high, I still can’t shake the feeling that it’s still a bit underpowered. Not being able to get above 30/40 FPS in games like Cyberpunk make me feel like I’d be at least a little disappointed. Granted being able to even play AAA games at all on a handheld is awesome, so I may be being unrealistic here in my expectations (I’ve never owned a handheld so my comparisons are just with PCs and consoles).
Nevertheless I think I might finally take the plunge on the 16th.
I've been playing cyberpunk a lot on both my pc and deck. I thought that it would be a way worse experience going from desktop to handheld, however, it really is a decent experience. I've had the same luck with other games as well. Cyberpunk specifically runs avg 40/50 after I installed CryoUtilities and changed the vram buffer (for those who are curious).
My experience is quite the opposite. Cyberpunk feels too stuttery to me on the deck. I’ve also installed CryoUtilities and tried using the 3.5 update.
There are places in the city that are worse than others for performance but I've only ever noticed stutters and the like while driving. Do you use power utils? I don't have an overclock but I make sure the governor is set to performance. Could just be luck on my end though.
Yeah, they made the SoC run cooler and at lower power, so I wonder why they didn't just let it push to 20W instead of keeping it at a max TDP of 15W.
Maybe their custom APU just can't yield any more performance at all and just flattens out above that? I know the 6800U and 7800U handhelds tend to flatten out above 25-30W. I've moved on from my Deck to a Windows handheld, but I still really like the tweaks they've made to this.
you can change the TDP of the steam deck, and it yields comparatively very minor performance improvements at 20 Watts of power.
If I recall the early benchmarks by The Phawx, the Deck got the best performance-per-watt around 11 W TDP. So yeah at 15 W and up, it flattens out. Pushing it harder just drains the battery for diminishing FPS returns.
I think he says the sweet spot for *800Us was closer to 18 W, but I don't remember that as clearly.
My hands-on experience with both is that the Deck sings in the 12-15 range and the stock 6800 wants to be 15-20. After that the extra heat and noise doesn't justify the gains unless you really want to play something that is just at the edge.
I only have a Deck but 9 watts has been the magic number for me. Good battery life and very little fan noise in most games. I even run RDR2 at that with Cryobyte's "prettiest" settings, and it stays darn close to 30 FPS. I may have bumped down far shadows and water a notch but honestly it still looks great.
It's definitely a matter of taste, but you still get a lot of performance per watt on the Deck between 9 and 12, so I typically prefer to crank it up a notch and aim for 35-40fps instead.
Which option is preferable probably depends on how sensitive you are to low fps vs fan noise, so there's no right answer.
30 fps will never be equal to 60 fps but for the biggest titles Valve has gone the extra mile to seriously even out frametimes which helps significantly with the experience. It's a difference I've noticed when comparing other handhelds as well, when the performance gain is meager on the Deck's competitors for a given title the variance is also way higher.