What’s next for the Steam Deck?
What’s next for the Steam Deck?
As improving tech hyper-accelerates the aging of all platforms, how is the Steam Deck holding up in the year 2023?
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"Consumers demand more and better graphics" Nah, we want optimization now thanks to the Deck. Games like Armored Core VI that are able to downscale fo. The Deck is REALLY nice while games like Remnant 2, which is an absolutely wonderful game, is completely unoptimized and only now can run on the deck ok after a big update for "Potato mode" graphics.
And yet some of the best AAA games of the past that can look better run at 60fps.
If anything, developers have gotten out of control with specs required to run their games. Jedi: Survivor is just ridiculous and more games seem to follow suit. Nintendo is obsessed with optimizing for lower end hardware, but imagine if they made a game squeezing out each and every ounce of what a game can be nowadays on newer hardware. We'd see some seriously amazing new optimization techniques as well as showing off the buffoonery that is the current specs situation. Hell, they already did it with Tears of the Kingdom anyways.
The Deck is got roughly 1.4 TFLOPs of GPU compute. Optimization is not some magic word that can overcome hardware limitations. There comes a point where games indeed demand more. A mid-range RTX 3060 will offer around 11 TFLOPs of compute.
If fsr and dlss are any indication, new technology has the capability of improving that performance for lower end hardware. The problem we're seeing now is that games are using dlss and fsr to "optimize" games instead of optimizing the game first then adding those technologies afterwards. I'm not saying every dev is doing this, but there are clear standouts where fsr and dlss are being used to pick up the slack for optimization, Starfield being the latest culprit.
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This is really good information, but I just can't get behind it I'm sorry. Things started to go downhill once dlss and fsr really started to take off and it's shown in damn near every major PC port. Remnant 2 is another culprit, the game ran like trash, even when I was running it through an rtx 4080 on GeForce now. I couldn't get it to go above 45fps even in 1440p on high settings without dlss in ward 13. This is becoming more commonplace with every release, baldurs gate 3 seems to be the only exception.
There was a fun Reddit thread a while ago where someone compiled several screenshots of older Reddit posts, videogame articles and forum posts, showing how every single year people claim "games today are so unoptimized" and "current year is when things started going downhill".
And you citing Baldur's Gate 3 as an example is somewhat interesting - the game's engine actually does have an optimization issue, a huge one: it only leverages 4 threads for the CPU. Everything above that gets underutilized and the game becomes extremely slow in places like Baldur's Gate itself thanks to the CPU being hammered.