Adventures in Steam Deck

by

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.

Maybe Skip This Generation

by

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.

Gracie the Mess

by

Friends… this is one of those mornings when I got nothing. I could rattle on about the New World PTR some more but I am honestly not feeling it. I could just skip a day and not make a post. Instead, I think I am going to lean heavily on how cute my furry children are, and post about the cats. The ominous shadow in front of a very blue picture of John Oliver is Gracie. She has decided that she really likes standing in front of my monitor and watching the television. Yes, I know this is bad for her eyes just like it is bad for anyone’s eyes… and as much as I place her elsewhere when she decides this is a thing she wants to do… there is no stopping her. There is a shelf that I use as a monitor riser, and she loves standing on top of it and monitoring what happens to be going on with my screen. This is how my morning started out.

She is a bit of a mess and has finally discovered something that every cat discovers. In the living room, we have this rock ledge at the top of our fireplace, which is easily accessible from the balcony. At some point, every cat we have ever had discovers this ledge, and the same is true with Gracie. Thankfully she has only stepped out onto it and then backed up onto the balcony. Mollie our weirdest cat… has actually managed to jump from the ledge onto the sofa in the room below. Since Gracie appears to be a cat without fear… we both figure it is only a matter of time before this happens. She is growing so fast, but still very much in full kitten mode all of the time. I do wonder what an adult Gracie is going to be like since she seems to be in everything currently. I will be thankful when she is a little bit slower and a little bit bigger… so we don’t have to live in mortal fear at all times of her sneaking out the front door. I don’t think she necessarily wants to go outside but she LOVES rushing through open doors.

She makes up for the madness though with how sweet she is the majority of the time. Lately, she has spent a lot of time sleeping on a blanket I have placed on my desk. When we first got her, she was very much attached to my wife and that was the only human she really cared about. Since then, like happens with all cats it seems… the person who feeds them ultimately becomes the center of their attention. So lately Gracie has spent a lot more time following me around during the day than she did previously. It frustrates my wife to no end that she cannot seem to get her to just lay down and chill, whereas that is mostly the default mode in my office. Sure she roams around a bit, but more often than not she just ends up snoozing beside me.

While I do not have a photo of this specific event, I am hoping maybe to see a repeat of it today. I was a bit slow in throwing away the empty soda flat, and Josie has adopted it. Yesterday Gracie had decided she needed to also curl up in the not-quite-empty soda flat beside her. It was adorable, but I happened to run downstairs without my phone. Josie has been adapting to having a little sister, but it seems to have been a bit of a hard transition. The two of them play constantly, and will get really close to snuggling… but never quite do so. Josie is I think struggling with no longer being the little kid, and even though I am attempting to supplement with a lot of extra attention… still seems stressed. I am hoping that over time this will settle out because adding a third cat has absolutely uprooted the stable peace in the household.

There are times Josie becomes super snuggly, like the other day trying to squeeze between me and my laptop and figure out how to snuggle. Her usual location is on my legs, but Gracie has decided that she also loves that spot. When Kensie was alive, she would lay down on my legs even if Josie was on them… and Josie has not quite figured out that she is much larger than the new kitten and can basically do whatever she wants. There is more than enough room for both of them, but Josie tends to avoid taking the same spot that Gracie has already commandeered. Maybe she remembers being frustrated when Kenzie used to take a spot from her. It has been frustrating to see my baby girl stressed though, and I am hoping that given enough time it all calms out.

I always feel bad that I never have as many photos of Mollie, but she is a much harder cat to capture. She will lay beside me for hours, but when I turn on the lights in my office and grab my phone… she often bolts. She is constantly moments away from running out of the room and has been that way since she was small. I love her but she is a complete mess of a cat and is completely uncertain of what to think about the kitten. There are moments that I think she is trying to play and other moments that she seems like she is on the offensive. I think she really needs to be in a single-cat home environment honestly, but you take a cat for life when you adopt one and she seems to be happy enough. Everything is a process for her, and while she now sometimes crawls up in bed with us… it is eternally short-lived. Getting attention from her is so special because it is so hard fought.

Anyways this friends is what happens when I don’t have much to say about gaming, and instead, I lean back on talking about my kids.

The End of Time

by

I think I have reached a point with Path of Exile where I am done with it for the moment. I accomplished what I set out to do and completed all 115 nodes on the Atlas tree. I could push further, but my gameplay lately has been more frustrating than it has been successful. We talked about this on the podcast over the weekend, but for all of the things that I love about this game… there are an equal number of things that I greatly dislike. Not the least of which is XP loss on death, and it feels like I either need to grind safe things to protect my XP gains… or throw caution to the wind and do more challenging content. However regardless I have to make this choice of do I go for content that feels meaningful, or I go for the remaining skills on the passive tree.

I am not entirely certain I will be doing a Path of Exile league start again for a while. I had some fun, but it was more that I was driven by a specific purpose that allowed me to temporarily overlook the bad aspects of the game. I am uncertain why the design of Path of Exile is specifically punitive in nature, but it seems to be a common theme among ARPG enthusiasts. Where I would prefer if games just let you respec as often as you want, and that the core loop of the game be chasing loot not painting yourself into a corner and then having to deal with that frustration.

I spent a good chunk of time playing Last Epoch as that game is nearing the opening of wider multiplayer testing. While playing I also spent quite a bit of time listening to interviews with the development team to try and get a feeling for how punitive they feel a game should be designed. While they are less open than I would have liked, they seem to land more on the side of the player than Grinding Gear Games does. One of my early frustrations with the game was the gender-locked class design, but apparently, that is still on the table. Based on one interview they apparently want to expand the gender options but that would be after the finishing of the remaining class specializations. I am fine with waiting, but I am hoping when they take this pass they also open up some more character customization options.

I am really enjoying the Sentinel Class because it allows me to play something tanky feeling… while also maintaining access to Whirlwind. Essentially right now it feels like a blending of my two favorite Diablo classes the Barbarian and the Crusader. The only thing that could improve this feel is if buried somewhere there is a talent that lets me equip a two-handed weapon with a shield. For the moment the game feels very much like a weird love child of Chrono Trigger, Diablo, and Path of Exile. I really dig the crafting system so far because it is way more deterministic than that of Path of Exile, and even more open to changing things around than that of Diablo III. It seems like given enough attempts it would probably be pretty straightforward to gear out a character in this game.

Another thing that I really dig is how straightforward the loot filter is, and how they seem to be committed to putting guides in the game, instead of trying to make you rely on third-party sites. The only negative so far is that respecs are nowhere near as free as I would like them to be. They are not as punitive as Path of Exile, but you do have to roll things back a single point at a time which appears to cost gold. Changing your specialized skills and the trees associated with them seems to roll back experience with that skill. This means you would ultimately end up needing to re-level them to get them back to the place where you were previously. This isn’t much different than changing up your skill gems in Path of Exile but is still less open to modification than Diablo III would be.

All in all the game looks really good, but the proof will ultimately be in how the multiplayer game feels. That is ultimately what has killed my long-term enjoyment in Path of Exile. It isn’t really a game that I can sit down and play with my friend Ace in the way that we could Diablo III. Grouping in PoE is actively punitive, and you can’t just easily drop in and ride along for some chill gaming. Everything in that game also seems to be focused around trade value, and as such the gear that drops appears to mostly be shit and you are instead focused on gaining currency to then buy the items you actually need. It seems like based on the conversations I listened to… Last Epoch seems to not want this to happen. They want the trade to be free enough that if an item drops while your buddy is offline, you can give it to them… but to keep third-party trade from being the primary source of items.

I also spent a good chunk of my weekend poking around in the New World PTR. I’ve been playing a bit more with trade skills and verifying that you do in fact level a ton faster than you did previously. Across the board, your level gains are much faster as a character than previously. I’ve barely scratched the surface on Cutlass Keys and am almost level 40. I’ve been trying to push up trade skills a bit honestly as a source of gear. Since the PTR does not represent the actual live environment, there is nowhere near as much stuff on the trading post… and as such getting gear upgrades has been a bit of a challenge. I figured instead I would see how far and how easily I can level Armoring. This is a grind I have completed on live with my current main, and I am wondering just how difficult the 150-plus grind is going to be. Getting Smelting and Weaving to 100, just sort of happened automagically without me really trying and I am getting very close to the first major break point of 100 Armoring.

I am really looking into this patch dropping because it seems like I have convinced most of the AggroChat folks to try rolling again fresh on another server. We’ve yet to determine WHICH server yet, but likely whatever the lowest pop East/West server there is. I think there will be a sizeable influx of players for the Brimstone Sands patch. The new content appears also appears to be dropping items that can level your expertise, so that grind may also not be as bad as it once was. I’m thankful Demone Kim is back on the grind and knocking out often times multiple videos a day. I am not really spending any time testing Brimstone Sands content because I want that to be fresh when I complete my restart.

That was largely my weekend. Did any of you do anything fun? Drop me a line below telling me what you got up to.