I have both the Deck and the ROG Ally. The Deck feels like a complete product and is great to use. The Ally is impressive when pushing over 100fps on relatively demanding games, but the overall user experience is garbage. Windows is a terrible platform for a handheld. I dual boot it with Arch now and can run gamescope session for the Deck experience, but I just recently figured out how to use ryzenadj for TDP control so I could see anything near full performance. The buttons don't work for navigating the Steam UI when in game. Audio requires a UEFI override. It's still a better experience than Windows but nothing compared to the "it just works" console style Deck experience. The Deck hardware is more ergonomic and has better designed controls too. Trackpads are incredibly overlooked.
Yeah, reminds me of the original Gameboy. Weak hardware, terrible screen, great battery life, awesome first-party support, stupidly robust. Sold a hundred million or so. Up against the Game Gear and Atari Lynx, which although basically miniature consoles, had an unquenchable hunger for batteries and crap games. Complete turkeys. All of Nintendo's other, very successful, handhelds continue the same idea; yes, a Switch is really underpowered compared to the newest Playstation, but that's not it's niche.
Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?
You could have had a miniaturised nuclear reactor and I still don't think it would have kept up with the game gears appetite 😁 great little device but missed the mark on intended use.
Yes; you can pack more powerful hardware into the space that a Deck, or a Switch, or even your phone, takes up. But is the amount of fun you get from that device increased in reasonable proportion to its increased cost?
This is one area where the Steam Deck may have got it wrong. The Switch has games made specifically for its hardware, so to a certain extent, the specs don't matter. The Steam Deck though has already been reported to struggle with some games, even with the lowered resolution.
For a console that's only about 18 months old, that's a bit disappointing. I obviously wouldn't expect it to be able to play new AAA games forever, but I would have thought that it would have taken a bit longer before it started to struggle.
There are games that aren't appropriate for the hardware, 18 months old or not.
Some people struggle to grasp that.
That's my point. This is a quote from the Steam Deck website:
We partnered with AMD to create Steam Deck's custom APU, optimized for handheld gaming. It is a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 powerhouse, delivering more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.
If I read that and bought a Steam Deck, then found out that it can't run a new release smoothly, I wouldn't be very happy.
It's all well and good having a compatibility list for released games, but their marketing makes it sound like it can play anything.
A fair point.
Not moving the goalposts but steam offers the playability index. So to know "which" AAA games at "what" performance is really varied.
I think it is a bunch of media speak that they wrote there and is a poor representation of what the hardware can honestly do.
As always, it pays to research purchases thoroughly.
Is killing the point? Just make it all better. Get rid of DRM and subscriptions to play your own games, let people use LAN and their own servers for multiplayer.
