*** The Official Steam Deck Thread ***

Joxeon said:
Not sure if there's a dedicated thread but just seen this, seems odd as Steam is widely regarded as one of the most consumer friendly stores in gaming.

www.bbc.co.uk

UK legal action against Valve over Steam prices gets go ahead

Millions of gamers could get compensation if the lawsuit - which accuses Valve of charging inflated prices - succeeds.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
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It takes 30% from developers other stores don't.

It's reputation exceeds its policies IMO.
 
Anyone else find performance issues on their Steam Deck when streaming from a PC using Moonlight/Sunshine?

I was doing this for a few years using an Nvidia shield before I got the deck, and it worked great; when I got the deck I figured I could retire the shield and use a dock to connect the deck to the TV, use it natively on low powered games, and stream from the PC for the big AAA games with fancy graphics.

Not had much time to sit down for gaming recently, but this past week I've managed to get a few hours in - been playing Horizon Forbidden West, and noticed the performance wasn't what I remembered it being.

Setting the Moonlight bitrate anything above 90mbps would result in unplayable lag, and although below that was playable, it still felt a bit unresponsive, with quite a bit of graphical artifacting, screen tearing etc.

Tonight I connected the Shield back up to compare, and it's significantly better. Even with the bitrate set to the maximum 150, there's no noticeable latency, and the picture is pixel perfect, no artifacting at all, even in fast moving scenes - if it wasn't for the 60hz limit of the Shield, it would essentially be indiscernible from my PC being connected directly to the TV.

In both cases the devices were wired via the same network cable, the same HDMI cable, same host PC with the same settings (4k/60 + HDR), so the only difference being the device itself (and in the case of the steam deck, the dock)

I expected the deck to be faster, given it's a gaming specific device and about 6 years newer, but unless the dock is causing a bottleneck (entirely feasible I suppose) then apparently that isn't the case!
 
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Haggisman said:
Anyone else find performance issues on their Steam Deck when streaming from a PC using Moonlight/Sunshine?

I was doing this for a few years using an Nvidia shield before I got the deck, and it worked great; when I got the deck I figured I could retire the shield and use a dock to connect the deck to the TV, use it natively on low powered games, and stream from the PC for the big AAA games with fancy graphics.

Not had much time to sit down for gaming recently, but this past week I've managed to get a few hours in - been playing Horizon Forbidden West, and noticed the performance wasn't what I remembered it being.

Setting the Moonlight bitrate anything above 90mbps would result in unplayable lag, and although below that was playable, it still felt a bit unresponsive, with quite a bit of graphical artifacting, screen tearing etc.

Tonight I connected the Shield back up to compare, and it's significantly better. Even with the bitrate set to the maximum 150, there's no noticeable latency, and the picture is pixel perfect, no artifacting at all, even in fast moving scenes - if it wasn't for the 60hz limit of the Shield, it would essentially be indiscernible from my PC being connected directly to the TV.

In both cases the devices were wired via the same network cable, the same HDMI cable, same host PC with the same settings (4k/60 + HDR), so the only difference being the device itself (and in the case of the steam deck, the dock)

I expected the deck to be faster, given it's a gaming specific device and about 6 years newer, but unless the dock is causing a bottleneck (entirely feasible I suppose) then apparently that isn't the case!
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Have you tried running Apollo on the PC, I run it on my pc and run Moonlight on deck with no problems.

Used this guide..

 
oggiet said:
Have you tried running Apollo on the PC, I run it on my pc and run Moonlight on deck with no problems.

Used this guide..

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Isn't Apollo just an offshoot of Sunshine? So the same engine in the background.

Do you run it docked? I tried last night just on the deck and it seemed to be fine, so either it's the wired connection (didn't get a chance to try it docked but via wifi), the fact it's outputting 4k to the TV (although it was still decoding the 4k stream even if it was only outputting to the deck screen) or the dock itself (but I don't really want to spend £40+ on a new dock just to find it doesn't make s difference)
 
Haggisman said:
Isn't Apollo just an offshoot of Sunshine? So the same engine in the background.

Do you run it docked? I tried last night just on the deck and it seemed to be fine, so either it's the wired connection (didn't get a chance to try it docked but via wifi), the fact it's outputting 4k to the TV (although it was still decoding the 4k stream even if it was only outputting to the deck screen) or the dock itself (but I don't really want to spend £40+ on a new dock just to find it doesn't make s difference)
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Docked and wired via Ethernet it works well for me. I can get away with it over wifi as long as I’m near one of my APs but as soon as there’s a bit of latency it’s not a great experience.
 
Well, I got the new dock, and saw some improvement, but it still wasn't as good as the Shield.

I then tried with the Steam Deck in desktop mode, and the performance was great, but there's no HDR support...

Finally this morning I installed the Deck image of Bazzite on a USB stick and tried that, and it works perfectly :)
 
Haggisman said:
Well, I got the new dock, and saw some improvement, but it still wasn't as good as the Shield.

I then tried with the Steam Deck in desktop mode, and the performance was great, but there's no HDR support...

Finally this morning I installed the Deck image of Bazzite on a USB stick and tried that, and it works perfectly :)
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Interesting. Have you tried it from desktop mode in SteamOS?
 
Interesting, so maybe a little bit of progress - it seems to be something to do with the image scaling the Deck applies in game mode. I noticed some strange graphical artifacts whilst fiddling with it, and found a couple of things:

Changing the scaling filter from SHARP to LINEAR gave a huge performance boost - basically got rid of all of the lag and stuttering, but resulting in a worse picture
I then noticed that although Moonlight was set to run at native resolution, it was still actually running at the SD screen resolution, I changed Moonlight to force 4k, and boom, performance issues gone, and perfect quality 4k picture... when static. As soon as anything moves, some kind of scaling/post-processing kicks in again :(. Fairly sure it's not compression on the actual stream, as it's not there when using the Shield or in desktop mode.

So close, and yet so far - none of the other settings in the performance tab seem to do anything, so need to do some more playing with the other settings to see if there's anything else I can disable.

Edit: possibly the launch options I've got set on Moonlight as well, need to see if those are still correct and not causing issues
 
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It looks like all models of the Steam Deck are starting to go out of stock worldwide. I think they are completely out of stock on all models in North America and Europe is starting to see the same. The UK seems to be OK for now but if you are thinking of getting one maybe get one sooner rather than later.

There hasn't been any comment from Valve about it but I think we can all guess the reason for it.
 
I'd been procrastinating about getting one for ages and leading up to Christmas I couldn't decide between a Deck and a Legion Go of some description (for more power), and by the time i'd decided whatever the deal I was looking at had ended. I decided eventually to get a 512 OLED, as I thought a price rise would happen (I also discounted the Go/other because of how quickly it seems support is dropped and noise, whereas the Deck is continually developed and runs quieter).

What i've found is it's a great device as long as you temper your expectations and play to it's strengths (also having a huge backlog of Indie games helps :) ) and when combined with streaming from my main gaming PC it's been a revelation to me.

One thing I have found invaluable is the instant pause and resume, I never realised just how handy that would be, it really is a killer feature.

Regarding worldwide stock; rumours of a restock are end of February (at least for the Far East), but the UK seems fine for the moment.

PS. for reference I play mainly puzzle/point & click and the occasional older fps/3rd person game, for which the deck is perfect (though my fetish for UE5 walking simulators as predicted struggle). Anything more demanding I stream (including the walking simulators ;) ), though usually they're the type of game i'd want to play on a bigger screen in any case but it is nice to have the option.
 
Mercurial said:
One thing I have found invaluable is the instant pause and resume, I never realised just how handy that would be, it really is a killer feature.
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Yeah, this really is a game changer, especially when you have kids; no more wasting time having to save & quit then reload later, or having to leave it on for an unknown length of time while you sort them out :)
 
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