Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
So basically I power the deck on, log in, click on a game. That's it.
Yeah, windows is truly terrible.
Also I don't see how that makes me a masochist, lol. In fact, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible, hence why I chose to use windows. You keep making rocket science out of something very very simple.
Ahhhh but herein lies the big difference for me. If you want the best performance and small form factor for around 500 local currencies, the deck is definitely the way to go. You can get better performance going for an old desktop you can build yourself eith something like a 1070 or 1080, a 6 core CPU like a 5830k and 16 GB of the finest DDR4 memory money can buy or an Xbox Series S. But of course you lose portability in those.
For 800 however, you can get quite a few things that are as fast or faster. Including laptops. You do lose portability but if you are keeping it conected to the mains, why get an Ally at all?
Mini PC, desktop built out of spares, Series S, gaming laptop... Lots of options.
Don't buy into all the marketing hype. Sometimes less IS more.
People buy into this crap and the first thing they do is turn around and start complaining about how short the battery life is.
Pick your battles imho. Do you want a 2% visual increase at the expense of 10% battery life; or do you want to be able to play a little longer with visuals that for the most part, are identical to something with slightly higher resolution.
It's like a lot of the graphics settings today. Heck half of them make such little difference to the visual appeal of a video game; yet some how take up absurd amounts of resources. To me, those small "improvements" aren't worth the cost of processing power. 9/10 times, the improvements aren't even visible while actually playing the game, but instead only while standing idle and actively observing for the changes. Everything else is blended by motion blur.
Gaming on Windows is far from very simple. Windows requires frequent maintenance in order to not crap itself. Even then, unless you have a set of goldilocks hardware and the luck of the Irish, you’re going to run into hitches fairly often. Windows has been on the decline for over a decade.
About 40% of my time on the Ally is spent troubleshooting and tweaking Windows.
So I suggest you look up the benchmarks and decide for yourself.
If you never take it anywhere, then it seems like you're locking yourself into only two options (by sticking to handhelds) when there are many more builds/whatever out there. There's a previous comment in this thread that points out the price differences and that Ally's pricing already pushes you into range of other systems (especially if price doesn't really deter you).
The 64GB Deck, I think, is the way to go. The price differences between the 512 Deck ($649) and the Ally ($699) compared to the 64GB Deck ($399) allow the smaller Deck to be upgraded with a 1TB SSD and 1TB card and still come in "under budget." The other differences between the small Deck and the other two (for most people) will not be critical.
This whole thread kind of reminds me of Sega's Dreamcast (arguably the best console of its day) getting wrecked by Sony's Playstation 2 (the cost-effective up-and-comer). Dreamcast's superior mojo didn't hold up in the end compared to PS's affordability and broadening player-base. Based on what points others have made, I would suggest sticking with the Deck you own (or upgrading it) and wait out the Ally... at some point down the road you'll presumably be in the market for another device to game on, perhaps a future <insert gaming/computer system here> would be more viable then.
Then there's issues with Windows' compatability with hardware breaking, either through updates or Windows' bloated code base gradually getting more and more in its own way. I stopped using my X99 build in 2021 because an up to date Windows 10 would render USB on my board highly unstable. 2022+ Windows versions have issues with the wifi cards in my 2021 ROG Strix Advantage and ROG Flow X13 laptops, often failing to initialize them until a few minutes after booting/waking (this is a battle I found not worth fighting on a MSI GS75 9SF-243, a 2019 laptop).
Then there's the occassional needing to fix Windows' background services screwing up.
Windows intermittently not recognizing peripherals.
Windows' background processes fighting user programs for resources.
Clearing out bloat (temp files from web browsing, built in background tasks, file deletion, etc.) from storage (Windows does a horrible job).
That's just the recent stuff from my personal machines. Alot of that stuff is what normies don't do, and is a huge (often primary) contributor to their machines bogging down, which leads to premature replacement.
Don't forget that you can easily ruin the visuals by running 720p on a 1080p screen without something like FSR, if you're gunning for FPS.
Actchually *lifts glasses to the top ofnthe nose* power has seldom been a factor in the console wars. Release date, availability and games are what wins the wars.
PS1:
Weaker than Saturn or N64.
PS2: Weaker than Gamecube and Xbox (Dreamcast had weaker CPU but stronger GPU so I would call it a draw).
Wii: Weaker than PS3 and Xbox 360 by a fair margin
Switch: not even in the same ballpark as the PS4 or XBone and definitely not close to the PS5 and Series S/X. Yet it outsells them yearnon year.
And we can go handheld too:
Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita, Nintendo DS and GBA and the PSP (honestly, tye GBA sold 1 million more units than the PSP and then the DS just demolished whatever hope sony had of even atempting to wrest control of the handheld market), the original gameboy and everything else thrown against it including the game gear... Combined.
I see the Steam Deck a bit like the Gameboy. It came up first, great long term support planned, sold enough units that most enthusiasts got one and now they don't see the value in "upgrading". I went from the "will buy" Field to "wait and see" to "no". And the process was quite logical. I was in a huge emulation binge when the Ally was announced. Followednthe marketing closely and got pissed off from being lied to. Then I started to install AAA titles on my deck and playing them to gauge the performance and the improvements I would see on the Ally just didn't feel enough to warrant an "upgrade". Especially as I do play strategy games on my deck and those trackpads are a must! But the deck handled all games good enough that I just don't see the value in it. Especially in Europe where we pay 800 euros or 700 pounds instead of dollars. Especially when you considernthat in 2 years time thendeck will still be actively supported and the Ally will most definitely not be supported.
So yeah, due to coming out first and having enough performance that even 2 years worth of upgrades to AMD APUs can't achieve a clean sweep of the deck, the high level of support and the console like experience and price (you can literally buy 2 decks for the price of an Ally in Europe) I would say the deck is unbeatable. And it will sell at least an order of magnitude more than the Ally did.
Anyway, feel free to show us the event logs of how windows resets your settings "if you step away from my machine for a few minutes" or whatever you mean with that. I call bs.
Again, in a year of regular steam deck gaming, I have experienced 0 issues. (I have replaced steamOS with widows btw). I did not need to fix or workaround anything in windows.
Uh huh. You are either incompetent, dishonest or you actually don't own the ally at all. Sounds more like you're making up stuff m'dude. What exactly are you troubleshooting / fixing?
Like the Gameboy, the Deck came in substantially cheaper than any prior option worth considering, and provided a better overall experience than them
These issues directly get in the way of gaming.
Beyond the literal list of things Windows needs fixed that you replied to, the tendency for Windows to want to fight controller input outside of games.
Fixed that for you.
You've demonstrated, repeatedly, that you do not know a thing about the Steam Deck, the Ally, Linux, or Windows.
Hard to tell, but I think you got my point backwards, attempted to correct me, then ultimately agreed with me.
My comparison was Playstation 2 (more affordable unit = Deck) outsold and surpassed the "more powerful" Dreamcast (Ally). The timeline for releases (of the consoles) is obviously the other way around (from the handheld computers), but the lower price of the one console allowed it to essentially sweep the other. Also, neither Ally nor Deck make me think "Gameboy," but now that you've mentioned it, it's a little like Game Gear coming after Gameboy... Gameboy still did better cause Game Gear ate batteries like a kid eats candy... but enough with the metaphors!
The controller input on my windows deck is entirely handled by SteamInput as long as steam is opened, and yeah, I'm using every single button on my deck outside of games as well, the touchpads, trigger remapping - all working perfect without any issues.
Windows does not fight any controller inputs.