cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/3922769
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/RevolutionaryAd8204 on 2024-09-14 15:50:43+00:00.
Eventually, Sony will stop supporting the PS5 and it’ll be a brick. If Valve ever stops supporting the Steamdeck, it’ll keep running.
Also I’m that scenario, you know Valve only gave it up for something dramatically better.
All (most?) of your games will run on your future computers.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
And even then it’s no guarantee. Plenty of games needed support from the likes of GoG to run. Hell, I couldn’t even play Ex Machina because I had a HDR monitor and the game detected that and completely broke. Disabling HDR in Windows did nothing.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
well. there’s already winlator (basically box86 / wine-wrapper for android).
Not as polished and far as Proton is, but the bones are there.A CPU architecture change wouldn’t be a deathblow.
Ex Machina the movie or the 1984 “game”? That’s before Mario was even a thing.
Fucking auto correct…
It was Nex Machina.
That’s a 2017 game
Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.
That doesn’t make any sense. I can play multiple games from 2017 with no problem at all. I play games from 2012 and up just fine too. That’s something the devs messed up for that specific game, or it’s a problem with your PC.
You can play DOS games just fine right now, so yes it’s a good bet. And a far better bet than the PS6 being backwards compatible.
The crazy thing for me is that I have a little handheld specific for dos games. The problem I run into every time is having to setup computer keyboard bindings for each game to play them using the built-in controller. I really want retroarch or another dos emulator to do profiles for different games and I haven’t seen that yet.
Device, maybe. What happens to the games bought from a DRM monopoly?
While valve has a lot of deserved goodwill, that’s always the problem - they’re well-behaved, but set up in a way in which the customer has no leverage if they where to change their approach tommorow.
Good thing drm-free games run just as well on the steam deck.
It plays piracy-reclaimed games just fine.
These devices have different use cases. Steam Deck also is digital only. If a publisher decides to kill a game, they can control whether you can or can’t play the game. PS5 Pro is expensive, but so are video cards nowadays. PS5 Pro is just following a trend set years before, including the shift from physical games and cost. The only way to stop anti-consumer trends is to stop buying expensive hardware (PS5 Pro included). Also, give some love to physical copies of games.
Saying the Steam Deck is digital only is like saying a tower computer is digital only. That’s purely false. If you can put it on a tower computer, you can put it on the Steam Deck.
All the Steam Deck, like many modern tower computers, needs for physical copies is a USB media reader.
If we can argue that Sony will stop supporting the PS5 in the future, who’s to say in the future, (without the good leadership), Steam won’t restrict what can be put on the Steam Deck? We have a lot of arguments for wanting a Steam Deck and an alternative OS to boot for gaming, but saying PS5 will be bricked in the future is not a strong one.
Because the Steam Deck is just computer hardware. I can already install whatever OS I want to and Steam won’t know that it’s a Steam Deck anymore.
Beacause, Today, I can already load another OS on the Steamdeck. Not so much on the PS5.
- Take Steam Deck
- Wipe OS and install Bazzite/Nobara
- Install Heroic Launcher / Non Steam Launcher
- Install games from them
Nuclear apocalypse happens and internet is down
- Get ISOs of games in a USB drive
- Plug it into the deck and install
After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.
The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.
And the once PlayStation exclusive games have also been made available to Steam, thereby making them also accessible to Steam Deck. So the latter is infinitely a better choice!
Subscription for Internet access is the one that’s always baffled me. What a stupid business model. I guess devices not belonging to their buyers is not a new thing.
is it for “internet” or access to ps servers?
It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.
I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.
It’s the same on xbox
It makes sense because servers are expensive to operate. The real scam is nintendo where you pay for P2P multiplayer…
They’re expensive when you’re not already building a CDN for delivery of massive files all around the world. Economies of scale quickly matter there.
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.
Web servers are different from game servers. You need a lot of performance and fast low latency servers to keep up with realtime game play. Webservers however dont need that and can benefit of load balancing accross multiple servers. Scale of economy helps a lot, but with game servers the cost doesnt change much because a session has to be on a single machine.
As for distribution costs, most of the cost is manufacturing and physical distribution of discs. So yeah, they are making a killing by continuing to take a a huge cut from game sales when most of their distribution is online.
At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.
You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).
Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.
Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.
Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Can you plug a steam deck to the tv and use a controller? Cause if not, I don’t want it
Steam Deck + USB type C dock + HDMI cable + bluetooth controller. You’re done
The Steam Deck is a slightly funny shaped x86_64 laptop. It has an AMD APU in it. You can hook it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and do your taxes on it if you want.
Ah, my kind of fun.
Playing Accounting Tycoon on the Steam Deck.
What’s there not to like?!
Yeah, you can, haha (almost like the switch). You stick it in a dock with HDMI out and add a controller by USB, USB dongle, or Bluetooth.
Sure, but don’t expect incredible graphics on a 4k display. It’s a handheld after all.
What does it go up to? I currently play on 1080p anyways
Hooked up to a TV or monitor it’ll do 4k. You can even use FSR upscaling to actually game at 4K, but there’s still a performance hit and I don’t think any recent games are actually playable in 4K. (Upscaled to 1080P, on the other hand, is a different story.)
Plugging it into the TV & playing Jackbox games where everyone uses their phones as a controller is a great party trick.
You can do that with just a smart tv though
Yep. Connect using Bluetooth or via a USB dongle/dock.
That’s what I would do with it too. Good question.
Yes? Durh?
Not everyone is terminally online, dude.
This is why people think PC gamers are assholes
If you think $700 is bad, it’s £700 in the UK… which is $913. 🤢
Also:
-
median household income, UK (2022): £32,400 ($42,265)
-
median household income, USA (2022): $74,580
A PS5 Pro is 26% of the typical UK household monthly income.
A PS5 Pro is 11% of the typical US household monthly income.
The US pricing is bad. The UK pricing is absolutely insane.
The OLED Deck starts at £479. Still a lot but not as egregious. The LCD Deck is currently £262 ($344), which is pretty great.
I don’t remember exactly, but some relative poverty lines start at 60% of median household income.
- £700 / (£32,400 * .6 / 12) ≈ .43, thus 43% of monthly income for a poor household in the UK
- $700 / ($74,580 * .6 / 12) ≈ .19, thus 19% of monthly income for a poor household in the US
I hope median household income is netto, otherwise this is skewed.
Anyone know the cost in the US including tax? Don’t they leave that off?
The US doesn’t have a national sales tax, so it depends whether the individual state imposes a tax or not.
It varies state by state, some like Oregon have 0% tax, but most will be around
13%6-8% or so iirc.The highest state sales tax is 9.56%, most states are 6-8%. Though some major cities also have a small sales tax as well.
I live in Washington state and I’m pretty certain the sales tax here is 10% (slightly higher than your maximum figure of 9.56%). It’s a pretty well known trick here that you can account for tax just by decimal shifting and adding (ex: 5.29$ without would be 5.29$ + 0.529$ ~= 5.81$ with tax). Is that 9.56% an “in practice” figure that accounts for rounding down? I’m curious where you read it.
I found it on This website. WA is listed at 9.38%. I’m guessing your county or city has an additional sales tax.
That’s the average local + state sales tax in Washington. State sales tax is 6.5%, local varies from 1.2% - 3.85% (Seattle, for a total of 10.35%)
Thanks for the correction!
No sales tax in NH either.
how does this work if you live close to another state? As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?
Texas has 8.25% but New Mexico is 5.125%
Sunland Park, NM (which is part of El Paso, TX metro are has an additional city+county tax of 2.125% so the taxes are the same as in Texas (the numbers may be slightly off, but the final tax rate is very close to Texas)
Vancouver Washington residents drive to PDX for their jobs, to shop, eat dinner etc…
To put details to other person’s point: Even if you lived pretty close, for a lot of things, the gas cost would probably offset a lot of the savings. For big things for sure it would make some sense but for other things it just wouldn’t make any sense. You’d have to live right on the border and have a town with stores that carry whatever you’re buying also be pretty close.
Convenience. Unless you live right near the border, it’s probably faster/easier to shop in your own state than drive all the way to another.
But if you do live near the border of a state without a sales tax, then it’s pretty common to shop in the neighboring state, especially for larger purchases.
In Washington alcohol is so expensive that any reasonably sized party of alcoholics it’s cheaper to drive across the entire state to buy in Idaho (forgive this disaster of a sentence structure I’m awake like 5hr early because of cats)
In some cases like that, where you’re in a state that has no sales tax, but near the border of one that does, they’ll actually check ID and charge you sales tax if you’re from the sales tax state.
In most countries it’s the sale point which matters, not which state you reside in, for indirect tax. I would assume it’s the same in the US. For example if you’re on holiday in a different state or country, they wouldn’t charge what you’re charged back home.
Yep, but the states with sales tax get tired of getting cheated out of their tax revenue. The specific example where I saw this was a major hardware store chain in Oregon (no sales tax) right near the border of Washington (6.5% sales tax). They asked everyone “Washington or Oregon” at the register and checked ID for anyone who said Oregon.
Quick search says that Washington considers it a “sales and use” tax, so anything purchased out of state, but intended for use in Washington is supposed to be taxed. Kinda messed up, really.
As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?
Mostly the states are quite big, so it’s not worth the trouble. But along various state borders, it distorts the shopping experience in odd ways.
I’ve been to towns that are missing common retailers entirely, because everyone drives to the next town over (in another state), to avoid a tax.
We also have a rich history of driving across state lines to purchase stuff that’s illegal in our own state. It’s also illegal to bring it back, but the borders aren’t patrolled, so the only way to get caught is to have a traffic violation while doing it.
Or so I’ve heard. I never break any laws, myself.
You still have to waste 30 minutes of your time driving over there. I’m not wasting 30 minutes of my time to save $5
If you think 26% is bad, in Russia it’s going to be priced at around ₽80-100k(~$883, VAT included), but the median monthly salary is ₽43.500 - $480… That’s well over 100% median household income given that over 38% families only have a single parent. And I’m pretty sure that’s not even the worst out there, think like Argentina has an extortionate import tax or something?
If you think $700 is bad
I don’t:
So the most comparable console there is $456, and this is $700.
That is bad.
The PS5 Pro barely costs more to produce.
$700 is bad. $913 is awful.
Just because the PS3 (a console universally panned as being way too expensive) was similar doesn’t mean PS5 Pro pricing is alright.
Cool chart.
It really makes the point to me that the PS1 and PS2, when adjusted for inflation, and for relative compute power, were just such a fantastic deal.
I was recovering from some serious console-purchase fatigue, when I bought my PS1 to replace my garage sale purchased Super NES. It was a big deal to me.
I’ve paid PS5 prices (inflation adjusted) for a game system a few times (my first Switch and SteamDeck), but they’ve been a lot more mind blowing than what appears to be on offer today.
Disclaimer: My favorite game is 8-bit, anyway.
Also drives home the point the PS3 was insanely priced.
I’m not sure what this proves 🤔
Charts like that are great, I love to see them. However, they need to have a year for the inflation-adjusted dollars else it’s nearly meaningless when referred back to.
-
Not to mention that you can buy the previous version for 300 € and get most of the same value (less storage, gpu, screen, battery)
gpu?
The oled version contains a different soc iirc
You can also upgrade the storage and screen if you want.
You cannot put an OLED screen in an LCD model.
They have different internals. The screen upgrades that exist for the LCD are to swap in the anti-glare coated version, or a higher resolution.
deleted by creator
Ah, I didn’t realise that. But I mostly use my Steamdeck docked for gaming on my TV so personally haven’t bothered looking into a screen upgrade.
It’s probably not worth the effort. It’s one of the more complex mods, and the screen with additional resolution comes with a bunch of drawbacks, and the anti-glare coating isn’t that big a deal.
Both of those are still upgrades though - they didn’t say “upgrade the screen to LED”. It’s a good callout though!
I bought 512GB OLED and then immediately swapped the SSD to 2 Tb
I’m not sure if it’s the meme but here (Europe) there is a huge difference in price between the basic 512GB OLED SD and the basic PS5 pro option.
569€ vs 800€.
… and you have to pay for PS Plus repetitively to play games with friends.
Jokes on you I don’t have any friends
*squints* Sir, that is an LCD model you have there.
Yeah, but can any of those play the saves I already have on my computer??
The Steam saves, yes, the Steam deck would play them just fine.
Either through Steam Cloud as others have already said, or something like Ludusavi.
Yes, the Steam Deck can use saves you have in the Steam cloud. You can also probably manually copy the files over.
Um… Yeah? You about Steam Cloud, right?
Besides that, if it’s a none-Steam game you could just… Transfer the same file to the Deck. Did with a couple of games through Google Drive.
As others already stated, its possible, provided the game itself is compatible with Steam Deck. While there is the Steam Cloud that saves and loads saves automatically (which does not cost you anything BTW), some games do not support the Cloud. As this is PC basically where you have access to the filesystem, you can copy files over. Only thing that is a problem is, that Steam Deck will not get recognized as a drive if you plug it to USB connection. That’s a whole other story, but to answer your question, yes.
Only issue you’ll probably have is if the cloud saves are for a different OS, so if you’re playing on Windows make sure it’s the Proton version of the game that’s installed on the Deck, if you’re playing a native Linux version of the game on your PC then make sure it’s the native Linux version that’s installed on the Deck (usual defaults to the Proton version).
It’s just an issue with the cloud save feature being too dumb, the path to the save folder isn’t the same on both platforms so it doesn’t sync well (although I think it does on some games).
It is rare to see a game get this wrong, the last one I saw was a Borderlands. If you look at a game’s Steamdb cloud listing, they list Windows’s save location, and then Mac/Linux saves are expressed as a rewrite rule.
Cloud saves on PS are handled quite simply - if you didn’t pay for your very own PS Plus then go fuck yourself. I have lost dozens of Aloy hours on my brother’s PS4.
I’ve had to fuck around with my Windows saves (backed to the cloud) when installing the Linux version of Wasteland 2 and the two Pillars of Eternity games and I eventually just gave up and installed them with Proton so it would download the saves to the right place for them to work.
If you play Deadfire on multiple Linux devices you need to install with Proton compatibility otherwise cloud saves don’t work at all because Steam doesn’t back up the right folder (it uses the Windows folder name which has a lower case o in the word Of), that means that if you wipe your hard drive and rely on cloud saves then you’re fucked because Steam will have created an empty folder to backup.
And remember, as I said, the Deck installs the Windows version by default but if you have Linux on your PC then chances are cloud saves between your Deck and PC won’t work unless you force the Deck to install the Linux version of games.
Midnight Suns is the one I know of, and they fixed it early on. :)
Both run games at 720p
This comment is brought to you by fsr
deleted by creator
You can also change the resolution in gaming mode
deleted by creator
IIRC they also just recently launched a new setting that allows you to permanently set the target resolution for all games (this might still only be in the beta branch though).
Previously you had to go into each game’s settings from Steam, and change the resolution there (which might be how you missed it).
PS5 Pro - only marginally better than an option that’s only $450.
Steam Deck OLED - only marginally better than an option that’s only $300.
Yeah, I don’t see any reason to upgrade either of mine. Really not worth it.
I think mid life upgrades targeting new customer and hard core types.
Regular folks just buy generational upgrades.
Like, they’re cool and tempting. But not anywhere near the price of a full unit when I have an already perfectly functioning one! If I could say swap the panel on the Deck (with relatively little effort), I would likely consider buying an upgrade kit but that’s not possible. Same thing with the PS5: if I could just buy the new gpu and replace the old one, I probably would. Never mind that it’s an apu so in this instance it’s really replacing the entire guts of the device, that’s a minor detail XD
Since buying a steam deck I’ve spent more money on games I can play on it than I would normally for the pc.
That’s still cheaper than buying a ps5 on its own without the extra cost of games.
Now that the Steam Deck and linux gaming has found some success I really hope Valve or someone else revisits the home console market with a similar approach.
You couldn’t really build a PC for the same price as a PS5 with the same performance unless you’re buying used parts in most places but that’s not because Sony is selling consoles at a loss right now like the olden days. A large system integrator like Valve (or xbox if they want to change their formula) could offer similar perf/price without all the downsides of these locked down consoles.
It won’t have the same performance as a PS5, but the new Minisforum MS-A1 with a user-upgradable CPU is a really interesting proposition. The Ryzen 8700G is pretty good, but I would expect solid upgrades to be available in the next few CPU generations.
I currently have an Nvidia Shield Pro (2019), and it’s fine. I have Moonlight installed and can stream from my desktop PC using Sunshine (I do this on my Steam Deck, too), but I don’t expect that Nvidia will make a replacement, and I don’t know if I would get it if they did.
The software outside of Steam’s big picture mode isn’t ready for a full Linux couch experience, but it’s close. The two projects to watch are KDE Plasma Bigscreen and Waydroid (some people are starting to get Android TV working) which would be a nice bridge to use apps designed for a TV UI until native Linux versions become available.
Isn’t that kind of what steam machines are supposed to be?
Honestly I think the trick for valve there would just be to release a build of steam OS people can install themselves into desktops (if they don’t already) and just have folks building their own machine for TV pc use.
If that happens, will that affect Microsoft’s share price?
That’s always been their plan, but it’s getting hit with Valve Time. My guess is that they won’t do it until all issues the major with NVIDIA GPUs have been fixed, as a public build that doesn’t run properly on a majority of machines wouldn’t go well. The latest driver is pretty good, but the Big Picture mode is still pretty much unusable.
At the very least they’re currently trying to bring official support over to other handhelds, as they’ve already confirmed that they want to official support for the ROG Ally and pushed out a update to SteamOS for the controller support.
Yeah. If Valve releases a remotely viable desktop console OS, I’ll immediately build one for my living room. If for no other reason, to keep the rest of the family away from my SteamDeck.
I have never felt as much envy as seeing someone play BG3 on an 8 hr flight. That was what sold me.
To cap it off the SOB killed Scratch and the Owlbear Cub. That flight was actual torture for multiple reasons.
Wow 8hrs, I’ve never gotten more than 2 on a laptop
The plane had USB chargers in the arm rest, but not 120v unfortunately.
Was BG3 smooth? I’m getting jealous if it was. It’s a hot mess on my shitty PC.
It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.
Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.
I think they were playing at a low res. 720p or maybe 480p. That said they didn’t even have stuttering. It was really impressive.
Mine is still on order haven’t got it yet.
Steam Deck screen is only 800p so that’s the resolution for all games. And it’s perfect for the screen size.
I’m so glad Valve did not give in to the tech-number-nerds who want 2K resolution on tiny screens, saves so much battery life.
Like I said it was clear and smooth. I don’t expect 4k in a handheld. Portable is it’s own metric.
Yep quite right, I was just clarifying because you said “low res. 720p or maybe 480p” - the Steam Deck is 800p native. Total agreement.
I’d be happy if it played Owlcat RPGs at near full settings. Those games are allot more fun than BG3, imo.
I digress though. It’d be nice to be able to play recent games again. If the deck can do that on my TV, I’m down.
We hook our Steam Deck up to a 4k projector and it looks amazing. The built in upscaler from 800p to 4k is astonishingly good. Obviously not AS good as native but and many games are limited to 30fps but holy smokes it’s more than good enough.
Hell yeah another Kingmaker/WOTR fan.
WotR for the win. never played Kingmaker. And I just got Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader. I don’t understand how these games aren’t more popular.
I feel like BG3 is big just because the camera zooms in close to the characters.
Kingmaker is fantastic. I’m not that big a fan of Rogue Trader though. I kinda hate the Imperium of Man, in 40K I am Ork only.
If you enjoy Owlcat then the Pillars and Tyranny from Obsidian are fantastic.
I’m going to look up all of their games eventually. They go hard on the systems and that’s a severely lacking quality these days.
Rogue Trader is cool, I’m only a few hours into it though. But man, the camera kills me. It’s got a weird rubber band effect to it that I don’t like.
But it’s mostly a nice improvement, or at least some different takes, on the WotR systems. My main complaint about their games is even with auto end turn on it never automatically ends any turns.
I didn’t play much of it but it ran well when I tired it. I just decided it was the type of game I wanted to plat with all the settings maxed on my laptop.
It couldn’t play at max settings?
Definitely not on Steam Deck.
I imagine certain scenes especially in the 3rd act would put alot of strain on the steam deck
In general the Steam Deck is not the kind of device that is going to run things at max settings. You are gonna play at 720p30FPS low settings but be happy you can play at all on a train or airplane. It’s really meant to be a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than a replacement for a gaming PC.
You can stream from your PC to your couch or bed if you are at home.
It is. From my experience a couple months back its crisp. Not the highest graphics, and it took a little getting used to from a high-end PC, but it was really nice. In certain aspects even preferable xD
The difference is that Steam Deck is actually cheap compared to what the competition does. It’s also the first generation of Steam Deck and the upgrade with an OLED (and lot of other stuff too) is actually substantial. And there are multiple versions of the Deck available to choose less drive space. Imagine this was an option on PS5 Professional too. Contrary, the PS5 Professional is the most expensive console compared to its competition. It’s so expensive, that it set a new bar.
That’s the opposite of what Steam Deck does. Steam Deck is the only current generation game console that gets cheaper over time. Also one is a handheld format, which is hard to make cheap, especially because its compatible to PC hardware (and software).
