Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We were expecting to be down both a Grace and a Tam but at the very last minute, Tam was available. We talked a bit about the new Return to Monkey Island game and how it is educating us on important anchor facts. From there we talk about one of the longest-to-deliver Kickstarter called Two Guys Spaceventure, which styles itself as a new Space Quest game but largely fails at delivering. From there we talk about the card games of Richard Garfield and what his initial design intent was versus how the games actually play. From there we talk a bit about Star Ocean: The Divine Force which has released a demo this week. We talked a bit about the announcement of the 4000 Series Nvidia cards and the 70% price increase that comes with them. We talked about how Twitch seems to be eating itself and the onslaught of folks shifting to YouTube after changes in revenue splits. Finally, Bel talks about getting a Steam Deck and how he has already caused his device to get into a boot loop. We talk a bit about how the hardware works as an utterly hands-off console for Tam but also allows Bel to tinker endlessly with his setup.
Yesterday I set a list of things that I wanted to do in pretty short order in order to get things that are not steam up and running on my new deck. Yesterday I managed to accomplish four of them, and this morning I am going to walk you through the process of getting things up and running. This will not necessarily be a straightforward tutorial, because there are a few tools along the way that makes the entire process much easier. However as you can see in the above screenshot I have Cyberpunk 2077 installed from GOG, Ooblets installed from the Epic Game Store, Stadia streaming configured, and Xbox Cloud Gaming configured. This morning I am going to talk you through how to do each of them.
Using Steam Link for Remote Desktop
First things first, I highly suggest you grab the stand-alone Steam Link application. While under normal circumstances, this would allow you to play your steam games on another machine. In this specific case, we are going to use it as a remote desktop application. You can connect to your Steam Deck while in desktop mode, and gain access to the keyboard and mouse from your computer which will greatly speed up data input. The only thing that does not work is cut and paste… and I have been using a Google Doc as swap space that I can have open both on the Steam Deck and my Desktop as a way of passing inputs back and forth. This video covers the mobile steam link setup, but it is going to function much the same way and should help you through the pairing process if you have never completed it.
Once you have set up Steam link, you should be able to flip your device into Desktop Mode through the power menu and then connect to it like a Linux desktop. In theory, you should now see a screen something similar to the above with some icons in the taskbar. The first thing we are going to need to do is to launch the discover app. It should be the third icon from the left that looks like a blue shopping bag. This application is essentially a Linux app store and allows you to very easily download and install applications. We are essentially going to grab two things… Microsoft Edge and a piece of software called Boiler.
Downloading Edge and Boilr
Once in the discover app you can either type “Edge” into the search bar or filter down by application type and Edge will be located under Applications > Internet > Web Browsers. Please note the very first time you load Discover, it will take a very long time for the applications to show up. It seems to be downloading some databases in the background. If you get to a screen that says something to the effect of no applications found, close the app and relaunch it. We are specifically downloading Edge as our web browser because Microsoft did a really cool thing and added native support for the Steam Deck as a controller, which means we won’t have to manually map inputs as though we were using a keyboard.
While we are in Discover, go ahead and download an app called “Boilr”. I found out about this application through this video, but essentially it is a helper application that assists in registering games with the Steam Deck and adding custom artwork. It will automagically import games that were installed through Heroic Games Launcher, which I will talk about a little bit later but also be extremely helpful in making our cloud streaming links look reasonable. It has a database of artwork that you can search through and pick which image you want to use for the games on your deck.
Configuring Xbox Cloud Gaming
Now that we have Microsoft Edge and Boilr installed, we are going to begin the process of setting up Xbox Cloud Gaming first. While still in the desktop mode we are going to need to do a few things to make sure that Microsoft Edge has access to your controller. This is going to require you to input some console commands, which is in part why I suggested configuring Steam Link so you had access to a keyboard. This is all going to use an application that can be found in the System menu called Konsole, which is the KDE Shell application. The very first thing we have to do is set a password for our steam deck account. This process is initiated with the following command:
passwd
When you type that in and hit enter, it will prompt you to submit a new password. You will not be able to see your key input, this is normal. Hit enter and it will prompt you to verify the password you just input, which again will not echo your keypresses to the screen by default. If you successfully typed the same password twice you should now have your password configured. Remember this, you will need to use it any time you issue a command that requires elevated access.
Next up we are going to have to give the Microsoft Edge browser permission to use the controller. Thankfully Microsoft is being awesome in this case and has given us a guide that we can follow to do this entire process. While still in the console application you need to type the following, or open the web article above and paste it into the command line:
If you are in the console session that you just opened and set your password, it should execute without issue. If you are in a new session it will prompt you to enter your password. When you do so it should execute and then we are ready to start setting up the shortcuts.
Now we are going to launch Steam while still in Desktop Mode, and add a “Non-Steam Game to My Library”. In the dialogs that follow, choose Microsoft Edge, and this instance of Edge is where we are going to configure Xbox Cloud Gaming. Once you’ve successfully added Edge to your library, find it on the lefthand side menu of your games, and choose properties.
The first thing we want to do is change the name from Microsoft Edge to something like “Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)”. This naming is largely so that we will have an easier time finding images for it later in boilr. The final step before being able to test this is to configure the launch options. By default the launch parameters for Microsoft Edge looks like this:
run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=/app/bin/edge --file-forwarding com.microsoft.Edge @@u @@
This will launch the browser directly into XCloud and allow you to begin streaming. Now while still in Steam Desktop Mode, we want to test this out. Essentially everything that you do in Desktop mode, you are going to need to launch it at least once to make sure it is working as expected. Close out of any existing copies of Edge and give the new shortcut you just created a spin.
If done correctly you will get the Xbox Cloud Gaming website launched full screen. It is likely going to require you to log into it the first time but should remember your information each time you launch it from that point forward. Before we go back to game mode, there is one last thing we want to do in order to make the experience slightly better.
Now you want to launch Boiler, and if you click on the images tab you should see a section stubbed out for “Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)”. If you click into that section it should allow you to configure an image for each of the display areas within Steam aka the Hero, Grid, Big Picture, etc images. When you are finished setting everything up there is an icon that the bottom that shows a Controller with an arrow pointing at the Steam logo. This will import your changes into the steam database on the local machine, and when you flip back to game mode, it will now show all of those images correctly.
While it was a lot of steps… you have not configured XCloud streaming on your steam deck.
Configuring Stadia
The steps for configuring Stadia for the most part follow the same sequence as configuring XCloud, but having done several of them you can simply start at the adding a Non-Steam game to your library step. Once again you want to find Microsoft Edge in your list and add it to your library, and then view properties on that game. In the shortcut, we want to rename this one from Edge to Stadia, and again we are going to have to change some of the launch options. The default launch should look like this:
run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=/app/bin/edge --file-forwarding com.microsoft.Edge @@u @@
Once again we are appending a chunk of text to the end of those launch parameters that will configure the window size, kiosk mode, and launch the stadia website:
Once again you want to close out any Edge windows that you have open and launch your shortcut. In theory, if everything worked as expected you should see a full-screen session of the Stadia website. You will need to log in with your google account, but once done you should have full access to stadia. Your final step would be to launch boilr again and configure the images so that it has something other than an ugly grey square when in game mode.
Configuring Epic Game Store and GOG
This process is going to be considerably easier than everything you have just gone through. It will still require you to be in Desktop Mode, however. Launch Discover again and this time type in “Heroic” which should bring up the Heroic Games Launcher. This application is an open-source installer that currently covers both Epic Games Store and GOG. It does a few other things that I will talk about later, but the first step is installing it. Click install and once finished launch the application while in Desktop Mode.
When you first open the application it will prompt you to log into your Epic Games account and your GOG account. Doing each will allow the application to access the games you have access to on your account. Once you have completed each, those games should now show up in your library as something you have the ability to download and install.
For GOG I chose to install Cyberpunk 2077, since that is ultimately where I own my copy of that game. It took forever to install and just so you are aware it goes through a process. The first bit is to download the game, then it goes through a configuring files step, then finally it installs the game and does some cleanup before the game is ready to play. Given that I was installing an over 60GB game to an SD card… this all took a very long time. Unfortunately, the Heroic Game Launcher only allows you to download a single game at a time, and things cannot be queued up.
Once finished I launched the game the first time in the Desktop Mode to make sure it was working as expected. Then I hopped into Boilr to make sure the images were correctly set. Then from that point forward I could launch the game happily in game mode. Effectively everything you do in Desktop Mode at least once in order to make sure it will run when you flip back into Game Mode. Essentially Game Mode masks a lot of processes so if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to see why.
I used Ooblets as my test case for Epic Game Store and again the same process followed. I started the download, and thankfully this one went much faster considering it is only around 800MB for the entire game. I let it finish, then launched it to test that everything worked as expected. Finally, I hopped over into Boilr to configure the images. Since then I have launched both Cyberpunk 2077 and Ooblets a few times while in game mode and everything worked flawlessly.
So in theory, if you have been following along to this point you should now have easy access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, Stadia, Epic Games Store, and Cyberpunk 2077 on your Steam Deck. Next up I think I am going to start playing around with emulation. There is something called EmuDeck that acts as a launcher for a whole slew of emulators and handles their configuration.
One last bonus benefit of the Heroic Games Launcher is it also serves as a really straightforward way to download and install a large number of Proton compatibility versions. As you follow specific guides they might recommend that you use a specific version of the proton drivers in order to get the best performance. Inside the HGS, there is a whole section labeled the “Wine Manager” that allows you to quickly install every Wine-GE, Wine-Lutris, and Proton-GE driver that you could want. So far the Steam Deck feels like the handheld I have always wanted, that I can basically configure to do anything that I could ever want to do with it.
Good Morning Friends! I have joined the tribe that is an owner of the Steam Deck. In all honesty, it did not take nearly as long to get my Deck as I thought it might have. For those who might be going down this path and trying to judge the time the process takes to complete… I placed my reservation for the Steam Deck on May 27th or 2022. This was considerably after the original reservation start date of July 16th of 2021, and long after they had already begun shipping out decks. I knew I would have to wait quite a while but was largely okay with that. I completed the confirmation and payment for the Deck on September 12th and then received it on September 20th, with it actually shipping on the 17th some 5 days after the confirmation. We’ve heard anecdotal tales of Valve trying to speed up this process considerably and if you place an order today it lists a window of September to December as the time frame.
The Steam Deck comes in three configurations, and part of the reason why it took me so long to order mine was trying to decide which model I should go for. Thankfully I had a wealth of resources talking about the process of using and upgrading the Deck to help me narrow my choices. So when it comes to gaming I love having a bunch of games installed at any given time. Currently, on my desktop, I have 3 TB of fast NVMe storage and 4 TB of slow mechanical storage. So I knew from the start that 512 for the largest model was simply not going to cut it at all. The core difference between the models comes down to two things… firstly the type and size of storage included and secondly for the final model the finish of the screen. Given that I knew at some point I would be likely dropping at 2 TB m.2 drive in my unit and an anti-glare screen protector, I opted to go for the smallest available amount of storage space.
Basically, it did not make sense to me to pay a markup for storage, that was not going to be useful in the long run… and was really too small for me to repurpose in another environment later. With storage essentially every month, you delay your purchases… the amount of storage that you can buy for your dollar increases. Again thanks to the wealth of information floating around about the Steam Deck I also know that loading games from an SD Card are honestly not that different from loading via internal storage. The above video is an example of this, and having seen it in person… the difference really is that negligible. Loading a game from an SD card takes a bit the very first time, but after that, the games load extremely quickly.
I happened to have a 512GB SD card that I could repurpose for this adventure, which is a bit slower than the image that I am showing above and it works fine. However, if you are inspired by this blog post what you are ultimately looking for in order to get the best performance is an SD Card with the following properties.
A2 – This denotes the Application Performance class and indicates the expected number of Random Read and Writes to the disk. A2 indicates that a disk can sustain 4000 IOPS for random reads and 2000 IOPS for random writes, as opposed to 1500/500 for A1 classification.
U3 – This indicates that the disk supports a maximum transfer speed of 30 MB/s.
If you find an SD Card with those classifications and is from a reputable vendor… you are effectively going to have the best possible results. The card I am actually using is an A1/U1 model which supports the 1500/500 IOPS and 10 MB/s throughputs and I am not experiencing any issues with games. Another cool thing about the SD Cards and the Steam Deck is that you can apparently hot-swap them. So if you have a number of smaller cards you could in theory have specific games on each, and swap them in the middle of your play session or while traveling.
I think the most impressive thing initially is just how sturdy the unit feels. There is no way that Valve is not taking a very large loss on the $399 unit because it feels so exceptionally well crafted. On the hand, it feels very much like a better Nintendo Switch. The grips form to your hands and the little sloped areas on the front of the unique conform perfectly to the curve of your palms. Admittedly I have notoriously large hands, but I was expecting the unit to feel far heavier. It really does not feel significantly different than the weight of the original switch and joycons together. The only real complaint I have is right now my shoulder buttons, and back buttons feel extremely stiff to press. I assume over time this will be less of a case but they are at least for the moment a bit awkward. The face buttons and d-pad, however feel excellent and have a very satisfying actuation. The thumbstick is also excellent and feels like this happy medium between something like the Series X controller and a low-index stick like that of the Switch.
Another impressive thing is the sheer number of configuration options this device has. One of the first things I did was spend some of the points that I have been accruing for years while purchasing games on Steam buying this sweet rainbow keyboard. If you think about the device itself it has two analog sticks, eight face buttons, four shoulder buttons, four back buttons, and two trackpads… all of which are entirely configurable for every single game that you choose to play. On top of that there is easy support for downloading community profiles that someone else has gone through the effort of setting up for a specific game. Little things like mouse emulation using the right trackpad and back triggers to represent left and right mouse buttons… sounds awkward at first but I adapted to it exceptionally quickly.
If you want to get really custom, there is functionality in the UI to add in pop-up menus when you press a trackpad, and the above video covers adding a menu to Guild Wars 2. You can also configure different actions to different usages of the same button so that a tap, a double tap, and a press and hold… all perform different actions. However, this also outlines the key problem that is going to exist for a lot of users. The Steam Deck is not exactly “plug and play”. Even the basic things like installing Cult of the Lamb, required me to fiddle with it a bit to at a minimum set the resolution to the correct 1280×800 16:10 aspect ratio. Most games have required at least something to fiddle with in order to get the best from them.
The deepest dive so far however have been when I was trying to get New World working. Admittedly I am not quite there on the control scheme, but it is functional. Essentially with my desire to start over from scratch and level a new character when the next major patch drops, I figured I might go ahead and get things running on the Steam Deck. In order to do this, I had to track down a piece of software called Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime to fix an error when the game boots up and tries to dial home to EasyAntiCheat Servers and fails. This did not involve going into the desktop mode or running any shell commands, but I still had to know to do it, which required a certain measure of research. Other things that I want to get running are going to require me to do a lot more esoteric things with the device but again… wanting to play a game is often going to require you to resort to google.
So far the actual gameplay however has been phenomenal, and the screen looks gorgeous. I’ve yet to put in a ton of hours on the device because right now it feels like buying a new computer. I am still very much in the “moving in phase” and getting everything set up the way that I want it. I am also doing copious amounts of research because it seems like this device really is the swiss army knife of handheld gaming. Effectively for $400 it appears to be a one size fits all platform and I am going to venture forth into uncharted waters soon. I’ve been collecting a number of things that I am going to start trying and likely reporting back on the success. Here are the things I am planning on attempting to get working.
XCloud Streaming
Xbox and PS5 Remote Play
Epic Game Store and GOG via Heroic Games Launcher
PlayStation Now/PS+
A Plethora of Emulators including Switch/WiiU
Stadia
Android games
Battle.net
Most of these things are going to require some nonsense but given my penchant for such things I am going to soldier on.
I honestly do not feel like I have done a lot with my device yet, but already I am extremely happy with it. I had been holding off on other handheld purchases because at least on paper the Steam Deck seemed like it would be able to do anything I wanted it to do. What is making this all possible however is the legion of fans that are pouring information out into the world. More than a million steam decks have shipped and given that a huge chunk of that player base is folks who are willing to fiddle with things… it ends up equating to massive community support. I even have some nonsense ideas about maybe trying to get one of the laptop devices designed for Samsung Dex, and potentially replace my existing laptop with it.
As always as I do dumb things, I will be giving you information about what has worked and what did not work terribly well.
Yesterday was the big Keynote from GTC… which is a conference that Nvidia essentially made up in order to have a venue in which to sell their graphics cards. One of the hot debates from yesterday was whether or not CEO Jensen Huang was an AI character and rendered in real-time… seeing as the last generation he did the entire demo in a virtual environment. The larger talking point however was the price tag associated with this generation. As is often the case Nvidia focused entirely on the highest end of their graphics cards, namely the 4080 and 4090. For those who don’t remember the “90” series came on board the last generation and has effectively replaced the Titan nomenclature for their extremely high-end cards that are not necessarily targeted at gaming. The products announced yesterday:
GeForce RTX 4090 24GB – $1599.99 MSRP
GeForce RTX 4080 16GB – $1199.99 MSRP
GeForce RTX 4080 12GB – $899.99 MSRP
From there you can expect board partners to release variants ranging from lower ram versions that are likely cheaper and cards with extra features that will cost more than the founder’s edition cards. One thing that will be interesting to see however is how the lineup of third-party cards shakes out now that EVGA has decided to stop producing Nvidia cards… and graphics cards entirely. Based on some very terse comments released around that news… it seems that board partners are often losing money on the higher-end graphics cards due to the chip costs set by Nvidia, and the price ceiling placed on product families.
If you compare the pricing of the last several generations, you can see that the lowest-end version of the 4080 is an almost 30% increase over the cost of the MSRP of the previous generation. Unfortunately, as we all know too well, it was almost impossible to find a graphics card during most of that generation for anywhere close to that price point. The pandemic happened and made the market go wonky… with issues in the supply chain followed by an increased demand brought on by a boom in gaming. This was only increased by the fact that so many set out of the 2000 series completely due to a similarly high 16% price increase over the previous generation.
I lucked into buying a reasonably priced prebuilt system for my birthday last year. It was a good call for me personally because I needed to completely refresh my system, as I was still using a 5th gen Intel platform. However at least part of my logic behind the purchase was that if anything went really wrong, I could at a minimum flip the graphics card and make more money than I paid for the system. At that point, I had checked Ebay and the 3080 was selling through at around $2500 each. However, a lot of things have changed since then. Firstly the supply chain issues have cleared up a bit, and the demand for chips has lessened to the point where most card manufacturers have cards in stock. Combine this with some very public crashes in cryptocurrency and the recent move of Etherium from proof of work to proof of stake… and the third-party market is deluged with used cards. If I were careful I could probably pick up a 3080 right now for under $500, which is a significant change in the market.
There is also the problem that a lot of the features that are being added to these new RTX cards are not actually being used by the bulk of gaming. Ray tracing has yet to really take the world by storm, and Nvidia banked during the 2000 series that gamers would favor higher resolution gaming as opposed to higher framerate gaming. In February of 2021, Steam passed 50,000 games listed on the platform and available for sale. There is a curated list of all of the games that feature “RTX On” support and right now currently that list only contains 132 games. While Nvidia keeps pioneering new AI features on their cards… it is highly unlikely that we are going to see the benefit of them anytime soon. Sure I love the AI ability to knock out background noise on my microphone or clip out the background when I am on a video call but I am not running any heavy processing routines on my card. Instead, I am still spending most of my time running games at 1080p or 1440p at which point I favor framerate over raw rendering detail.
Don’t get me wrong… I think a lot of the things demonstrated in the keynote were extremely cool. However, I also think that most of those things don’t really factor into my usage pattern for the cards. Nvidia has gone hard on AI research and simulations, and the vast majority of its presentation was focused on that market. Gamers are no longer the key demographic that they are chasing as a company and likely have not been for a very long time. So my advice would be that unless you are one of those folks who just have to have the newest and shiniest thing… maybe you should skip this generation of graphics cards entirely. The price point is tied to an artificial anchor of demand that is not going to hold up in the long run. That price is anchored to the eBay highs of the pandemic and a desire to squeeze more profit from the consumer as a result.
You can snap up some pretty reasonable deals in the after-market right now on 3000 series cards, and that is honestly more cards than is needed to get you through to the next major graphical update. If you follow the trends, 4k gaming has not really taken off as anyone had hoped for either. As I said before gamers tend to be favoring running games at a lower resolution but 144hz or higher frame rate. Right now mining cards are flooding the market because it is no longer profitable in the least to run a graphics card setup. There have been numerous videos covering the fact that so long as the cooler is still functioning properly, it is perfectly fine to buy a mining graphics card for gaming performance.
The 2000 series was the last time that gamers largely gave a generation a hard pass, and it was not necessarily for the same reasons. While there was a much larger jump in price point, it was more a case that the performance increase was not all that significant over the 1000 series. The 4000 series on the other hand seem to be a pretty massive leap in performance over the 3000 series… but it isn’t performance that we really need yet. The price point of 4k high refresh gaming is still pretty steep when it comes to monitors that are largely still in the $700 range. Whereas you can pick up a 1440p panel for around $200 and at the most popular sizes of around 27-inch displays… there isn’t much noticeable difference between the two. You really need to get up into the 40-60 inch display range before 4k has a clear advantage over 1440p.
Basically I think the 4000 series is really cool, but way to costly for what it is giving us. Get a cheap/used 3000 series card and call it good and wait this generation out.
Update – 9/21 4 pm
When I made my post this morning I did not have all of the information, or at least I took some things for granted. If you have two cards that are 4080s… and announce them as the 16GB version and the 12GB version, I go into that assuming that is the key difference. They are apparently just completely different cards, and today there has been a lot of speculation that the 4080 12GB was originally intended to be announced as the 4070. Why this matters, is that the 4080 12GB is essentially a worse card than the existing 3080 cards. While the boost clock is higher, the RTX 4080 12GB only has 7680 CUDA cores, whereas the existing 3080 series has 8960. That is a difference of over 1280 CUDA cores, which seems at least on paper to be a significant loss in horsepower as compared to the current generation. I am not sure if the clock and memory speed differences make up for it, but it does not look great.
That also means that the true generational price comparison is not that 12GB thing being called a 4080, but instead the 16GB model that has the much higher CUDA core count or 9728. That also means that the price difference between a 3080 and a 4080 then is an over 70% increase as opposed to the 30% mentioned earlier. This honestly just keeps looking like a worse deal, and I again stand by my statement that you really should be looking at getting a 3000 series card while they are dropping in price with the incoming wave of new cards, instead of looking at the 4000 series.
