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Steam! Now on your Couch! The Steamdeck Coming this Winter!
madhair60
Video games
Everything I try stutters, hitches. I mean... it's fine. But it's not what I was sold on, you know? I think people need to wind their necks in a bit where this thing's performance is concerned 
I've played Wrath of Cortex and it slows down when I do a spin attack and hitches. LOTR Return of the King, constantly frame drops where it didn't originally. It's fine! It's okay! But I'm kinda disappointed nonetheless.
Playing DC Bangai-Oh this morning in bed sort of alleviated my annoyance a bit!
Weirdly, PS2 is spot on!
I've played Wrath of Cortex and it slows down when I do a spin attack and hitches. LOTR Return of the King, constantly frame drops where it didn't originally. It's fine! It's okay! But I'm kinda disappointed nonetheless.Playing DC Bangai-Oh this morning in bed sort of alleviated my annoyance a bit!
Weirdly, PS2 is spot on!
I definitely have not played either of those games on Deck (or... ever lmao. Video World ass games), so that's bad to hear. Smash Melee hitches once or twice the first time you launch it, but I think as it caches shaders it stops. Which is weird, since, yeah, Dolphin doesn't do that on my PC, but it does go away.
Becksworth
Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
Are your game files formatted correctly? Sounds like it is finding the BIOS file at least.
Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
Interesting, may have to give this a go. I tend to get spotty performance in Super Mario Galaxy, so perhaps this will fix the issue.
I do wonder if you need a factory reset or something - I know "Verified" doesn't always mean it's going to be perfect, but by and large everything I've thrown at it works fine. I think someone else here had issues with games crashing and performing poorly as well, and the reset fixed it.
I do wonder if you need a factory reset or something - I know "Verified" doesn't always mean it's going to be perfect, but by and large everything I've thrown at it works fine. I think someone else here had issues with games crashing and performing poorly as well, and the reset fixed it.
madhair60
Video games
Okay - it was as simple as that. The annoyance comes from the fact that Emulation Station simply displays a folder, say "Dracula X", then the three files inside are just "Dracula X" again. Of the three identically named files, the middle one was correct, and the game loaded.
Fuck's sake! Something new with every system!
Yeah, it's like that for every CD based system, it's annoying. There are a couple ways to make it so you don't have to faff about finding the .cue - you can either "Favorite" it so it has a star next to it, or you can edit the name that shows up by editing the metadata, which is done by pressing start, selecting "edit metadata," then picking the name of the file and changing it to what you want, perhaps by putting (Launch) at the end of the filename or something, or whatever you like. Still stupid and annoying, and (imo) less a Deck problem*, and more a Retroarch/Emulation Station problem - it should know which files it needs to use to launch games, and not wav files or whatever! Filter those out! I run into this with Switch games, too - I can't remember the filename type off the top of my head, but there's a bunch of files that won't launch the game, and one that will, so I have all the "launcher" files as favorites. It's really dumb!
*the reason I say this is because a lot of the issues one has getting emulation up and running on Deck, whether you use EmuDeck or not, are the same issues one has setting up a Raspberry Pi with Emulation Station, which I've done twice. A lot of the problems one encounters on Deck are the same as on Pi, so I had experience getting around them.
*the reason I say this is because a lot of the issues one has getting emulation up and running on Deck, whether you use EmuDeck or not, are the same issues one has setting up a Raspberry Pi with Emulation Station, which I've done twice. A lot of the problems one encounters on Deck are the same as on Pi, so I had experience getting around them.
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I've been hit with the Wrong Battery report bug. My Deck crashed on Vampire Survivors with a low battery message a few days ago and since then I've had bad battery life (and 35% health >_<). So I topped the battery up and then left the Deck with max brightness at the Home screen so it can discharge completely. The OS estimated it would run out of juice in 2 hours - that was 9 hours ago, and it's been sitting steady at 3% since hour 2 or so. Once it completely discharges I will top it back again and hopefully get my battery life back again.
It's a known issue - the battery miscalibrates awfully easy. Lots of threads everywhere (like this one from the Steam forums). Current theory is that if you ever use a power unit that is not the one included in the Deck (which I did because I forgot the factory one at home) your odds of getting this bug increases.
It could be looking for a specific bios file - might be an incorrect filename, or it's looking for a US bios, etc. I downloaded the 351ELEC-20211122-BIOS file from this link, unzipped it, and put the bios files in the correct bios folder. The various emulators are very picky about the bios filename, which was a problem for me on my Raspberry Pi in the past, so I assume it'll be a problem here, too. The behavior of loading a black screen and going right back to the menu says to me it's a bios issue - if it were a rom issue, you'd get the screen with the Saturn CD player and no game (typically, anyway).
Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
Battery calibration issues are also well-known on phones. I've had a couple of Android phones that get very confused about their power state on occasion.
@Kazin is probably right about the BIOS stuff - it can be very finicky about things. If you've got standalone RA on your system, you may be able to try it from there instead and see if it gives more feedback into what's going on.
@Kazin is probably right about the BIOS stuff - it can be very finicky about things. If you've got standalone RA on your system, you may be able to try it from there instead and see if it gives more feedback into what's going on.
Becksworth
Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
Well it's Arch Linux under the hood, so it could be worse.
madhair60
Video games
This pack fixed it, THANK YOU
John
(he/him)
I saw a link to this video today, talking about some potential tweaks to help performance outside of the SteamOS settings.
1. Increase pagefile from 1GB to 16GB. I can see why Valve wouldn't want to change this by default, since people always complain about the OS using more and more space that could be reserved for games.
2. Tell the OS to use the pagefile less, i.e. try to put data in RAM first, then move it to the pagefile if RAM is full. Theoretically if RAM gets full, it could introduce slowdown as things are chunked in and out of it, but the speediness of RAM vs pagefile means you're getting a little more performance this way 99% of the time.
3. Run TRIM on the SSD, does some general cleanup in storage.
4. Increase the amount of RAM that the GPU shared memory has access to, from 1GB to 4GB.
github.com
The first three are accomplished by using his utility linked at Github above, but the fourth one is just a BIOS change. The TRIM setting was just added to the SteamOS Beta version, so he's updated the utility to check for that OS and to not do anything if you have it. Performance gains aren't anything special in my experience, but I did see a slight difference. Before changing anything, I loaded up Horizon Zero Dawn, and in the opening area I was seeing around 25-30FPS with whatever settings I had previously tweaked. Afterwards, I was seeing 30-35FPS.
1. Increase pagefile from 1GB to 16GB. I can see why Valve wouldn't want to change this by default, since people always complain about the OS using more and more space that could be reserved for games.
2. Tell the OS to use the pagefile less, i.e. try to put data in RAM first, then move it to the pagefile if RAM is full. Theoretically if RAM gets full, it could introduce slowdown as things are chunked in and out of it, but the speediness of RAM vs pagefile means you're getting a little more performance this way 99% of the time.
3. Run TRIM on the SSD, does some general cleanup in storage.
4. Increase the amount of RAM that the GPU shared memory has access to, from 1GB to 4GB.
GitHub - CryoByte33/steam-deck-utilities: Scripts to help make the Steam Deck the best it can be.
Scripts to help make the Steam Deck the best it can be. - GitHub - CryoByte33/steam-deck-utilities: Scripts to help make the Steam Deck the best it can be.
github.com
The first three are accomplished by using his utility linked at Github above, but the fourth one is just a BIOS change. The TRIM setting was just added to the SteamOS Beta version, so he's updated the utility to check for that OS and to not do anything if you have it. Performance gains aren't anything special in my experience, but I did see a slight difference. Before changing anything, I loaded up Horizon Zero Dawn, and in the opening area I was seeing around 25-30FPS with whatever settings I had previously tweaked. Afterwards, I was seeing 30-35FPS.
John
(he/him)
I don't think much at all? He does mention one tweak of pinning the cpu/gpu to set speeds instead of fluctuating, which would affect battery life. I haven't mucked around with that setting, or the multithreading options because that requires yet another utility (Powertools) and it seems like the benefit's just not there for losing the dynamic power usage/battery life.
Becksworth
Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
The sRGB update for Steamdeck left beta this week, and it's wild the Steamdeck's more faded screen colors were largely just a product of Valves inexperience working with handheld hardware and not the quality of the LCD screen.
Probably next year around tax time, since we usually get a refund and/or I get a bonus in March.
John
(he/him)
With the OLED screen, bigger battery, better cooling and cheaper, it’s more of an upgrade than the OLED switch model is, IMO. If I didn’t already have one, I would snap one up as soon as funds were available.
That said, it’s not enough of an upgrade that I would consider replacing my first gen model. My kids aren’t into PC games, so I wouldn’t be able to hand it down, and I think it still locks the Steam account to one game playing at a single time, so we would be fighting to play on my account. I still have hundreds of games that play well on the OG hardware, so I’m good for a few years until the generational upgrade comes out.
That said, it’s not enough of an upgrade that I would consider replacing my first gen model. My kids aren’t into PC games, so I wouldn’t be able to hand it down, and I think it still locks the Steam account to one game playing at a single time, so we would be fighting to play on my account. I still have hundreds of games that play well on the OG hardware, so I’m good for a few years until the generational upgrade comes out.
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