4 ms·

The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Somethi

The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.

KeplerBoy 1y ago
It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity. Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
- fendy3002 1y ago
  Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
  - secabeen 1y ago
    MH: World runs fine, but MH: Wilds does not, so it's right at the edge.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer
  - jon-wood 1y ago
    Portal RTX isn’t a new game, its Portal on supermax settings, so the original point on making sure low settings work still stands.
    - LoganDark 1y ago
      It's not just Portal on any settings. Portal RTX uses a completely different rendering engine to reimplement Portal's visuals using full path tracing.
- teamonkey 1y ago
  I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses. The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080). The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time. Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back then. The performance problems in modern games are often not caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader recompilations in the hot path).
    - teamonkey 1y ago
      Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general performance problems. Shader complexity will though, which is a function of render quality. But I’m confused about why you think fill rate isn’t an issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and even then that’s only to maintain the same detail; you bought a 4K screen for more detail.
      - everdrive 1y ago
        > If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
        teamonkey 1y ago
        I think people do it because they want the best quality but they underestimate how much compute power is needed to drive it properly.
- dahauns 1y ago
  Yeah, sure...I'd like to see something like MSFS2024 or BeamNG.drive running on a PS3.
- izacus 1y ago
  Cyberpunk 2077 proved that one wrong very easily :D
  - TheCapeGreek 1y ago
    I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable. The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen. Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
    - izacus 1y ago
      Yeah, and famously CP2077 isn't really playable on PS4 and Xbox One era hardware. Even HDD equipped machines need to downgrade the streaming. The game on new machines is quite impressive, quite unlike anything else made.
      - TheCapeGreek 1y ago
        I've had a great experience with the game even at 4K on a 3060 desktop, I just didn't find it workable on the Deck.
    - goosedragons 1y ago
      I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in handheld mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      Played and beat on an OLED deck, twice. Extremely playable. 30fps or higher almost all the time, handheld and docked work great. It's the #10 top most played game on Steam Deck. https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed
piltdownman 1y ago
The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance. If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    To make the point, if you turn the next-gen Nanite and Lumen features off, UE5 will typically be faster (more optimised!) than UE4. And don’t get me wrong, those features are great, but they’re not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is a priority.
  - izacus 1y ago
    When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers. This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing. Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump. The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it. And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2]. [1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-ridiculous-patch-sizes.1503703/ https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-r... [2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becoming-excessive.396399/ https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becom...
Perz1val 1y ago
It has limited performance, but it is also very limited by the display resolution, so it kind of cancels out
KronisLV 1y ago
Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.
- izacus 1y ago
  Yeah, UE5 games don't even run well on 5090s these days -_-
  - KronisLV 1y ago
    For anyone doubting this, here's some receipts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++ are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and people almost inevitably still write code that has memory safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with the languages). Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their own engines or use literally anything other than UE5, like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get there but now both the visuals and performance are quite good across the board.
  - sleepybrett 1y ago
    I can't imagine how shit space marine 2 would run if it was built on ue5.
energy123 1y ago
That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
LaGrange 1y ago
Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.

KeplerBoy 1y ago

It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity. Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.

fendy3002 1y ago
Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
- secabeen 1y ago
  MH: World runs fine, but MH: Wilds does not, so it's right at the edge.
LoganDark 1y ago
Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer
- jon-wood 1y ago
  Portal RTX isn’t a new game, its Portal on supermax settings, so the original point on making sure low settings work still stands.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    It's not just Portal on any settings. Portal RTX uses a completely different rendering engine to reimplement Portal's visuals using full path tracing.
teamonkey 1y ago
I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses. The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080). The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time. Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back then. The performance problems in modern games are often not caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader recompilations in the hot path).
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general performance problems. Shader complexity will though, which is a function of render quality. But I’m confused about why you think fill rate isn’t an issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and even then that’s only to maintain the same detail; you bought a 4K screen for more detail.
    - everdrive 1y ago
      > If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
      - teamonkey 1y ago
        I think people do it because they want the best quality but they underestimate how much compute power is needed to drive it properly.
dahauns 1y ago
Yeah, sure...I'd like to see something like MSFS2024 or BeamNG.drive running on a PS3.
izacus 1y ago
Cyberpunk 2077 proved that one wrong very easily :D
- TheCapeGreek 1y ago
  I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable. The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen. Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Yeah, and famously CP2077 isn't really playable on PS4 and Xbox One era hardware. Even HDD equipped machines need to downgrade the streaming. The game on new machines is quite impressive, quite unlike anything else made.
    - TheCapeGreek 1y ago
      I've had a great experience with the game even at 4K on a 3060 desktop, I just didn't find it workable on the Deck.
  - goosedragons 1y ago
    I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in handheld mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    Played and beat on an OLED deck, twice. Extremely playable. 30fps or higher almost all the time, handheld and docked work great. It's the #10 top most played game on Steam Deck. https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed

piltdownman 1y ago

The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.

mschuster91 1y ago
UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance. If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
- teamonkey 1y ago
  To make the point, if you turn the next-gen Nanite and Lumen features off, UE5 will typically be faster (more optimised!) than UE4. And don’t get me wrong, those features are great, but they’re not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is a priority.
- izacus 1y ago
  When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers. This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing. Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump. The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it. And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2]. [1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-ridiculous-patch-sizes.1503703/ https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-r... [2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becoming-excessive.396399/ https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becom...

Perz1val 1y ago

It has limited performance, but it is also very limited by the display resolution, so it kind of cancels out

KronisLV 1y ago

Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.

izacus 1y ago
Yeah, UE5 games don't even run well on 5090s these days -_-
- KronisLV 1y ago
  For anyone doubting this, here's some receipts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++ are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and people almost inevitably still write code that has memory safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with the languages). Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their own engines or use literally anything other than UE5, like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get there but now both the visuals and performance are quite good across the board.
- sleepybrett 1y ago
  I can't imagine how shit space marine 2 would run if it was built on ue5.

energy123 1y ago

That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.

LaGrange 1y ago

Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.