Yep, the rumble is weak as hell. It's a thing. I don't really care about rumble so it doesn't bother me, but you'll see lots of Reddit posts with people complaining. There are adjustments for haptic strength (the little vibrations when you click in desktop mode) but none for the rumble. I would guess that they're separate vibration motors.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
7 points (81.8% liked)
Steam Deck
14929 readers
595 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
i recall reading somewhere that the rumble on the steam deck is actually the haptic feedback motors and that is why it is weak
Yeah, if you check out the device teardown, the only motors are the touchpad haptic motors. Sure, they work great for subtle haptic feedback, but it's lame that it just doesn't feel anything like a normal controller rumble. It rumbles with half decent intensity during the startup sequence, so I'm not sure why it the haptics don't rumble at 100% in game.
When you're inside a game, click the Steam button and go the controller settings. Look for the trackpads settings and put haptics intensity at the top value.
You'll notice a big difference, but still don't expect something that feels like a controller with internal rumble.
There's a company called Immersion that owns a lot of patents related to rumble/haptic feedback.
They recently sued Valve saying that the Steam Deck and Valve Index violate their patents and the Valve hasn't paid for a right to use something that infringes on their tech.
If valve didn't pay to license the tech, we can assume that they consider their feedback tech to be different enough from the Immersion patents that it was worth selling without licensing it. The lack of stronger rumble in the deck may be partially an attempt to avoid an additional license fee in a budget priced device.
Glad/sad to see I'm not the only one who's disappointed with the "rumble". Still a beast of a device.