this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Steam Deck

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Valve’s Good Guy Image Makes Up For The Steam Deck’s Problems (www.forbes.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I have both and even with all of the Ally’s jank I’ll take the Ally over the Deck any day. The extra hardware power and the VRR screen means the games I play are silky smooth.

I honestly can’t go back to the Deck.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Choice in this market is good for end users, as is competition. Both of the machines are a compromise in one way or another and different in substantial ways, so it's really just down to personal preference. I can't wait to see how this market grows over the next few years.

[–] Nibodhika 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you suspend and go back to the middle of the game on the ally? If so would you mind uploading a video of it to YouTube since no one credible mentions of it's possible and people who claim it is never provide any evidence of it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If I can find some time, I’ll record it and reply to you with a link.

You really can, but it’s jank just like the rest of the Ally. The sleep mode is totally borked with some games. It just wakes up a few minutes later and starts draining the battery.

For example, I started a game of Minecraft Dungeons last week and put it to sleep. It kept waking back up, but even after it ran out of power, the game was still running when I turned it back on after charging it a few days later.

There’s also a setting that makes the Ally hibernate after a bit of time in sleep (not sure how long the time is) by default, but that needs the sleep to actually sleep or it’ll just run out of power beforehand.

With that being said, the performance of already-running games after the device comes back from hibernation is pretty bad. If I had to guess, it might be because it has to re-upload all the textures to the APU which is technically distinct from the CPU thanks to it being more of a PC than a console? But that’s pure speculation.

[–] Nibodhika 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the reply, although a video would be cool just because no one has shown it, what you described is exactly what I expected, i.e. it doesn't work in any meaningful way. That's the way it has always been, windows sleep/hibernate is not meant to go back to a game because that involves more stuff than just RAM status. Most programs are not constantly doing stuff, so they can be interrupted at any point, games unfortunately need to be interrupted in a point where they can, not to mention dealing with the fact that you possibly have a frame that took hours to render depending on how the engine counts time. What Valve did is a huge achievement, because games for consoles have signals they receive asking them to prepare to be suspended, but the same game on PC would not have that. Valve had to do a generic way to pause any game, at any point, and they nailed it, I'm amazed that people seemed to have realised how huge that was when the deck came out, but every new portable with slightly more horsepower gets praised when it can't do the most basic thing a portable console should be able to.