I am loving my steam deck oled but....

[DoomsDay]

Ok, gaming experience on the steamdeck I am loving. I find I have a few issues that I am really struggling to overcome.

My eyesight is not the best, im old, use reading glasses while playing and I struggle to read most text on the 7.4 inch display. Oddly enough, super baseball extra innings, I have no issues reading text on.

I try to american trucker sim which says its verified and I find the text really hard to read. Ive noticed that is the case in most of the games I have. text is really a big issue.

Now the latest issue is that of trying to play on a 4k tv. I have not had a good experience with this. If im sitting at the main menu, evrything looks great. no problems. If I click on ANY game, I now see tearing on the screen. this is before going into the game. I also start seeing my tv go blank for about 1-2 seconds randomly and when you go into any game, it starts blanking out a little more frequently, like maybe once every minute or two. very annoying. Text I notice is still hard to read even on a 75 inch tv. Just an overall not good experience while docked. Ive tried it twice now and both times was like this. And finally, I am noticing almost a second of lag in input from my wireless controller. that also makes it harder to play.

Any suggestions? I would love to be able to play some of my games on the big screen tv.


My current setup:
Jsaux dock
4k hdmi cable
8bit ultimate controller
Yamaha 4k receiver
75 inch samsung tv

[🌎Earth]

Do you happen to have half-rate shading on? It's in the battery saving menu that has options for refresh rate caps and whatnot. That option will often make text very hard to read. I figured it's worth asking since you say you have this issue with text even on a 4k tv.

Regarding the second of lag, is it possible the HDMI port you are plugging into has a game mode setting? My Samsung TV does, and I have to turn that mode on for each HDMI port as they don't share settings.

Not too sure about the blinking, but I know some TV's blink like that when changing resolutions, maybe there is a setting for that though I don't know what it'd be called.

[yokoshlomo]

You might try to leave your receiver out of the connection and see if this is fixing the problems.
Its been years since I used one myself, but there were always some hickups with them.

[Zef]

Originally posted by DoomsDay:

I try to american trucker sim which says its verified and I find the text really hard to read. Ive noticed that is the case in most of the games I have. text is really a big issue.

Now the latest issue is that of trying to play on a 4k tv. I have not had a good experience with this. If im sitting at the main menu, evrything looks great. no problems. If I click on ANY game, I now see tearing on the screen.
Any suggestions? I would love to be able to play some of my games on the big screen tv.

For the UI and text scaling thing this is not a steam deck issue perse but due to the nature of it being a handheld with a 7.4 800P screen.

It's up to the developers to make the text/UI more readable for smaller screens, steam itself ain't gonna do it for them. It's indeed more noticable on some titles, because they were never intended to be played on such a small screen.

For your second point i assume that you're trying to play the games in native 4K resolution? Cause that simply ain't gonna work, unlesss you're playing 2D indies or titles from before 2010.

Either you heavily use FSR or downscale the resolution.

[DoomsDay]

So I did a lot of testing just in one game, super baseball extra innings. I changed every setting I could. nothing stops the screen blanking briefly. I then went to the tv, set it to game mode, turned everything off that it would let me and nothing, it still does the screen blink. I powered off the deck, powered it back on, went back into baseball, still does it.

I then tried other games using the default settings. 60fps limit, no limit, hdr on and off. auto scaling, each of the scaling options, nothing stops it. I just saw the idea of removing the receiver out of the loop, I will try that and see how that does.

[[?]legit]

I don't think the steam deck is powerful enough to play games in 4k... Also if you're only playing with 60hz, the screen tearing will be very strong.

Try to turn down the settings and play with in 120 hz, if your TV supports it.