this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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The ability to suspend and resume cleanly, that's literally it. The Steam Deck manages it basically perfectly, but no windows handheld ever has or likely ever will, it's just a limitation of Windows. That's (to me, and to a lot of other people) the most important feature of a hand-held gaming device.
Edit: Look at every successful (or even moderately successful) mainstream handheld device in the past... I don't know, 20 years? The NDS (and derivatives), PSP, PS Vita, Switch... all had the ability to suspend gameplay at the push of a button and resume it cleanly at any time. It's hugely important to anyone actually using a portable device as a portable device, and not just as a way to sit on the couch and play games rather than sitting in front of their PC.
Got it. I think I see what you mean but I’m not sure if I just got lucky or if the games I play have accounted for it but I am able to just suspend and resume without issue on my windows handheld. Unless we have different definitions for what we call suspend. When I want to suspend, I usually pause the game and push the power button once and leave it like that for hours and then come back and push the power button again to turn the screen on and resume playing. I’ve done the same thing on a steam deck and it works similarly there as well so I’ve not noticed any difference. Unless you mean the ability to somehow take a snapshot of the running games state and store in on non volatile disk and completely power down and turn it back on to resume. If steam deck can do that out of the box, that is indeed impressive.
What you're talking about is what I'm talking about, too. In my experience, though, (with two different Windows based handhelds, one of which was a GPD Win, though an earlier model than the one being discussed in this article,) it works sometimes. I'd say it had maybe an 85% success rate, but that other 15%, it wouldn't resume, or if it did, the game would crash, and a 15% chance of losing my progress is just not something I'm willing to deal with. I've had 1 case with the Steam Deck where it did not successfully resume mid-game, total, since getting one just under 2 years ago.
I've looked at reviews of a bunch of other similar products but this ended up being a major complaint about all of them. Which one do you have, out of curiosity?
I have a rog ally and legion go but I only use the legion go for portable gaming so that’s the only one I’ve tried suspend/resume on and it has worked for the two games that I’m currently playing on it.
I'm running a rog ally and the latest update has changed sleep from hit and miss to consistently good. I also bought it because the price was 1/2 of a comparable laptop(secondhand market) so handheld form factor wasn't a selling point to me.