100% agree with Rich's choice! My GTX 970 was the biggest leap in graphics hardware that I experiences, was at an awesome price, and it still lives in my PC that I use everyday until newer cards become 'available' again.
I have to say the 1080ti might be one of the best for me, you got so much more performance then on a 1080 non ti .. 30%, sure it was expensive but 30% more for 30% more performance on a "ti" gpu will probably never happen again.
@@themadnes5413 I was expecting at least an honorable mention, but was surprised nobody did, shrug. I had a 1080 for a bit, after a 970, that felt like a pretty mighty increase, and i only heard good things about the 1080ti, especially when owners of it were still using it in the chip shortage.
Great content as always, however wanted to point out that I often find these Direct Weekly videos have sync issues between audio and video (in this video it's only on Rich and Alex's VOD, John's is absolutely fine). It's a small problem, but there is a tiny delay , I wonder if that's the typical issue when recording with OBS.
@26:08 spot on take. There's been a surge of speculation culture which only causes hype which only causes disappointment. People need to chill with their expectations. The Nintendo fan UA-cam video creators prey on clicks with hype and speculation which only hurts the game announcements in the end. It's wild.
The worst part is if you make the mistake of trying to engage with any of them to get them to cool their jets. The Switch Pro rumours were absolutely silly by the end, but kept being spurred on by Spawn Wave and others. I really lost a lot of respect for SW in particular over it, because it was so obvious that it just wasn't going to happen.
I just don't get why the chat was spamming BotW2 demands when Nintendo literally told us first half of 2022 games were going to be the focus... We only know BotW2 is *PLANNED* for 2022, but it's not even confirmed to make it this year. So expecting it in a Direct that straight up ignores late 2022 games is just dumb.
What else was brutal is if a button/trigger went out. Lost my ZL in 2018. It was a complete joke to fix compared to a PS4/One controller. Cool tech for the time though.
To be fair the battery only fills half of the battery compartment. I believe they planned to have a much bigger battery, but reduced the size to keep the Gamepad lightweight
What's crazy about it to me is how much empty space it has. Like there was zero effort in making it smaller/lighter in its design. Big areas of plastic between buttons and the joysticks, etc. Steam deck is big but you can see from its design they didn't waste any space with it, and what it has within its size is a powerhouse compared to a Wii U or any other handheld.
1:04:00 Let's not forget what an actual monster G80 was, in various aspects of course. Incredibly complex with a huge die size for its time, nvidia had all hands on deck to get this thing running properly. Afaik it was also the first chip since NV30 that needed a 2nd metal respin. Unfortunately, there's no way it would've made it into a (feasible) PS3 design.
Regarding screen, I think they prioritize contrast. Lowlight performance being an important part of a handheld. (I'd imagine this is why it has a light sensor, and the ability for the screen to go as dim as it can)
33:40 I agree John, we had some endearing non-CD, system chip-based soundtracks on PS1 and Saturn - like CCross and Shining Force 3, sounded really nice. A bit like amped-up/higher sample rate SNES music. Perfect for RPGs (although NiGHTS is a good example of dynamic streaming chip tunes as well). Ironically, the Saturn had the superior soundchip spec on paper vs PS1, but 1) the Saturn sound drivers were tough to work with and debug outside first-party, and 2) Sony allotted far more RAM to the PS1's soundchip, ultimately making it easier to work with and more flexible (Sega had to invent a pseudo real-time decompression library 'Cybersound' I believe, borrowing the Saturn's DSP to help stream - not ideal). Note: You go back a generation to Mega CD, and it was fun to hear all of Sonic CD's 'Past' music were pure chip tunes as well - some great ones, albeit short (and this fact kinda' defeats the "Japanese or US Sonic CD soundtrack?" argument, because the US composer never bothered to re-do the Past chip tune, so there's a massive clash there between the Past chiptunes and Present and Future redbook music - which all mesh together perfectly in the Japanese version).
You can hear the difference between the two sound chips in Mega Man 8, which almost exclusively used them on both 32 bit machines. Saturn sounded *so much* better, and yet the PS1 version's music is the one included with each soundtrack release! And yes, the Mega-CD vs. Sega CD arguement with Sonic CD is pretty dumb, and the Mega-CD soundtrack just fits more with the PCM Past tracks.
@@AceTrainerX3 It's been a while, can't remember MM8's tunes, but I think golden era mid-late 90s Capcom would be a Sega third-party with a good grasp of the Saturn's stubborn-but-awesome Yamaha sound chip. Sega and Capcom were pretty tight during that era (arcade fighter ports, RAM carts, 2D-powerhouse, etc.) so they probably had great access to the devkit revisions with nice PCM compression techniques.
I think that every portable device with rechargeable battery should have tech to bypass the battery and use the charger as a dedicated power supply to run the device without causing the battery to wear down when in use with a power supply.
I would think by now that if you have the charger cable connected, the device should bypass the battery and get the energy from the cable, it would save on were and tear on the battery as well.
@@griffgames9538 I should hope most do but with the corrupt nature of business, it wouldn't surprise me if they have it going through the battery even when plugged in, anything to do more damage to the battery in the hope of getting us to upgrade sooner rather than later.
The best idea to provide consistent battery life would be to have presets. Optimal power for Varied performance. High power for high fps but 2-3 hours of battery life. Balanced preset for 4-5 hours of battery life. Then low powered mode for 6-8 hours for indie or non graphic intense games.
Instead of relying on just the developers to make these, let the community make game and system setting presets in the same fashion controller settings can be made, shared and edited by the community. Naturally you can have official ones, but how many devs will go back to their older games and support them like this?
Of course a 1-click solution would be great, but the Steam Deck allows you to change it's TDP, so you can adjust the Steam Decks power to a certain battery life range. Then select an appropriat in-game graphics preset and cap to either 30 or 60fps.
@@izamanaick If it sells well, the devs will put in the effort. Companies literally hire porting companies to complete port their games to switch with improvement tweaks and extra content. How much effort would a steam deck profile take in comparison??
thanks for answering the question about 16x af, I just couldn't find a good answer online so I thought I'd ask the experts! Thanks for making my weekend too :)
To be honest it wasn't well answered though. John said "there are bottlenecks", Alex said "there are different considerations on consoles", but no mention of what the bottlenecks or considerations are, nor reconciliation to the fact it's near impossible to notice a difference in performance on PC.
@@philth7587 In the past I believe it was a VRAM bottleneck on console, but the new consoles have plenty of memory so I don't see why every game can't run at 16x or at least 8x nowadays. On PC the difference to VRAM is minor normally though, so I'm not really sure if it's something else.
I honestly can't wait to see their Horizon Forbidden West PS4 VS PS5 comparison. I want to know specifically about the PS4 version, how it runs on the PS5 and if there are elements in graphical settings missing or if it's all included and we are better off with the PS4 version to play it on everything.
@@philth7587 One case where unified APU memory isn't as effective as discrete for offloading AF. AF is cheap as chips on PC typically. Thankfully we're seeing better AF on Series and PS5.
@@Games-cj8 The PS5's performance mode is ostensibly running the PS4 Pro presets at locked (tiny cutscene blips aside) 60fps. Which actually looks quite alright. Horizon 1 did look rather sexy on the Pro, imperfect 30fps aside. Haven't seen Forbidden West on Pro, but apparently the frame-rate is alright and image quality passes.
1:19:50 John is right. "8K gaming" isn't on the map right now. Display adoption is tiny, content is tiny. The PS5 and Series X will support 8K primarily for 8K video and photo support. That's the idea when you see the "8K" logo on their boxes/ store pages. Not games. I mean, sure, you could offer a pristine native 8K version of Frogger and call it a "native 8K console game." Or any game up through OG Xbox, possibly. But let's be real about native 8K real-time modern AAA game rendering on console (or beefy PC). Let's just call that... "Sounds good, but maybe next time".
The Toyurist is 8K60 on PS5. It's not the most impressive looking game, but saying the Consoles could only handle a game like Frogger at 8K is a bit far off the mark (even as a joke).
I honestly think Alex should dip his toes into Linux gaming. One thing I have found out with Proton, and DXVK in particular (which converts DX9-DX11 API calls to Vulkan) is that it actually has a positive effect on memory bandwidth, and stutters. APUs benefit greatly, since they have a shared memory structure. The reason being that older DirectX games require the CPU to prepare draw calls for the GPU. Hence there's a lot more traffic- and memory transfers going on between them. In Vulkan, the draw calls can be executed on the GPU directly. Proton also establishes a shader cache before running the game, reducing even the famous Unreal stuttering to an absolute minimum. And the binary x64 or x86 game code doesn't need translation at all since it is still running on the same architecture. Games like Dishonored, I have a couple of stress points which won't go past 45fps on my Vega 8 laptop in Windows (most likely due to memory bandwidth). In Linux with Proton. 60fps and no stutters. People have this perceived notion that Linux gaming will be slower, but in fact. Proton can actually have positive performance impact (except DX12, which has a far less mature translation layer). I really hope the Steam Deck will allow the Linux's user base to skyrocket. Hopefully it will allow for an avenue of choice for gamers, especially when more devs targets Linux as a viable gaming platform.
The dx9 implementation in some older games is so dodgy I find myself increasingly using dxvk even when I'm a Win10 PC user. It doesn't alway work but when it does dxvk can be so transformative, is ridiculous how big of a difference it can make on GTA IV and Dead Space.
Some games actually run better in Linux compared to Windows on the same hardware, it's clearly showing that Proton is doing such a good job that some games that are native to Windows actually runs faster on Linux and I suspect things will only get better as SteamOS and Proton matures. I also have to admit, I'm not sure I'm I'm more excited about the Steam Deck or SteamOS as both could be a game changer not just for PC gamers but console gamers as well over the long run.
@@paul1979uk2000 lol - apparently you are not understanding why that happens from time to time and why that will neve be more than atypical. Anything for the cause, I guess. Fanaticism is brain rot - your dream of everyone leaving Windows and go over to a Valve blessed Linux is just trading one devil for another.
@@xBINARYGODx You obviously don't understand what Linux is. Linux is open source operating system, it's not owned by anyone. I have daily driven it on my laptop for 5 years and for the first time in 25 years I feel like I am finally in control of my computer again. No ads, no bloatware, no personal data collection, no online account requirements. Everything within the OS is available to end users. Find something you don't like about how your computer functions? Well in Linux you can change that. I have made my laptop go from 4h of battery life to 6h just by customizing the power profiles and using a CPU scheduler script. Something I was never able to achieve in Windows. In Linux I can change OS-level keyboard shortcuts, I can change how it looks, I can even change the desktop environment if I am not happy with how it functions, I choose myself when I want to update the OS, and I am even in control of which OS kernel I run. In Windows my laptop used 4GB of RAM on boot. My current Linux install uses 0.6GB. Everything quicker, snappier, and more reliable than windows (as long as you have compatible hardware) I mean, google uses linux for android. And I don't like android due to google's business practices. But that doesn't have anything to do with Linux. Let say that Valve starts being dicks. Well if that's the case then you are fucked by both Microsoft and Valve at the same time. In Linux at least it's only Valve. ;)
Gaming on Linux is not accessible to 80+% of windows users. Dont get me wrong proton and the gaming community on linux are amazing and way better than what we had like even 5 years ago, but really daily driving linux as a gamer is not straightforward and can often be infuriating for the uninitiated. To drive Linux as a whole you need to have a different relationship with your os than most Windows/OSX users have. If you dont get that little kick of dopamine for troubleshooting issues or telling your distro "shut up and do what I am telling you" then I have to imagine Linux would be akin to pulling teeth. To me solving the puzzle is half the fun, but for a whole slew of folks, they want things to work and dont want to spend time and energy making it work themselves. Do i think those users are missing out? Heck yeah, but regardless they are not wrong for having that expectation. They wanna double click a game and be playing, not trying to follow a questionably out of date fourm post to diagnose why they arent. I think linux is great for any gamer who wants to better understand their machine while getting most of the gaming experience they are conditioned for by windows or mac os.
people worried about what dying light 2 means for the generation shouldn't be. They didnt use mesh shaders / primitive shaders, they didnt use rapid packed math, and they didnt use dynamic resolution scaling. its a game designed around whats possible on PS4 / xbone that is pushing some extras for PS5 / series X.
@@ReLapse85 Horizon 2 isnt especially next gen either. Loading times are quite slow and 60fps mode seems like something they started development on 4 months ago. R&C and Demon's Souls are the only truly next gen games. Maybe Ghostwire and GT7 will bring back some interesting tech.
I thought the most interesting aspects of the Deck from Phawx's coverage is the efficiency you can get by parking CPU cores on some games (which diverts more energy to the GPU), and reducing the SoC TDP to 11-12 watts. You can get like 90% of the stock performance in many games for good power savings and more battery life. Plus that system-wide FSR... 540p -> 720p more efficiency gains. Very excited, seems like a tweaker's dream.
30:10 I'm excited for the Mario Kart 8 expansion. True it's an old game, but I love playing new content for old games that I love to play. Although it looks like all of the tracks they showed off were copy-pasted from the mobile game Mario Kart Tour. That said, Mario Kart Tour has 39 tracks in total. So I'm expecting each season we'll be getting one "brand new" (remake) track with 7 copied over from MK Tour. Still, it'll be a blast to have all of these under one game.
Gamexplain did a comparison vid and the new DLC versions clearly have higher quality textures, lighting and particle effects. They just dont at this stage look as good as the MK8D original tracks.
If they had 39 Mario Kart Tour tracks and less than 10 tracks from past games, people will be furious lol. I dont think thatll be the case (hopefully) Not really sure where you saw most of the tracks being Tour either? I saw 3 tracks for Tour and 5 being confirmed from the actual mainline games (id post a screenshot if I could, but its confirmed already)
Me, my "gaming room" only has 1 chair to make space for VR play, being able to play on the couch or in bed with this seems great, will also give it to my wife to try to see if she can get into some PC games as she loves her Switch
Me! Me! Me! Especially the more ''non-triple A'' titles where the screen size is perfect for and won't demand the absolute max of the system. Which is like half of my Steam library thankfully :) Hope this becomes a major hit, but I think it will! A fully unlocked PC system as powerful as this one, and in the freaking palm of your hand, will have the modding- and emulator scene go crazy ❤
Thumbs up! I am living in USA for an interchange educational program and I couldn´t bring my desktop Pc and it has no sense to buy a big one here since I will have to return in 1 or 2 years so Steam Deck will be a perfect solution... Now I would like to know when I will have it on my hands hahaha I bought it on August so who guess...
1:18:20 This is incorrect. The PS5 and XBOX Series consoles are RDNA 2 and Zen 2 NOT Zen 3... Just wanted to point that out. I'm surprised that none of you caught that! Come on Digital Foundry...
So long as we get 60fps options on most games, i’ll continue to be happy with the current gen consoles. Resolution isn’t the sole piece to image quality, so if they sacrifice it a bit to better other visual items or 60 fps, then go for it.
Steam seems to have pulled off an Apple-esque hardware creation here. The integration between hardware and software seems quite advantageous over competing products. Most notably, the control over the SoC as a means of milking every ounce of performance vs battery life with a focus on scalability. Interested to see how much Valve works on automatic optimization (eg a game is put up on the Steam store and automatically creates a tailored Steamdeck variant) going forward.
@@Exhumatu I think the comparison to Apple is more in regards to Valve bootstrapping a vertically integrated hardware/software stack, using mostly OSS components on the software side instead of being entirely proprietary like Apple.
@@Exhumatu I am only referring to Apple's tight integration of hardware and software creating a great deal of efficiency. When compared to competitors like GPD Win, Aya Neo, Valve will be capable of creating performance per watt that those companies will not likely achieve. I'm not saying Valve is adopting how Apple operates.
@@BlacklistBill Oh, trully sorry in that case! My mistake for not reading your comment as I should have in the first place. I blame it on my extreme allergic reaction to the above mentioned name.
Is this the same as QoS prioritization such as what some nicer ASUS routers have, or is Smart Queues its own thing? I'm always curious about premium router features.
In my anecdotal experience, CPE wise, Ubiquiti Unifi implementation of SQM is not only stupid easy to activate on USG routers but very effective. Just to cite a relatively cheap kind of devices.
1:14:22 - How come Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition runs equally as good on AMD hardware as nvidia hardware? I mean the 6600XT runs the game slightly faster than a RTX3060... 65-90fps in "The Volga" mission using 1440p Normal RT, Very High Settings, 2x VRS 0,8x shading rate + tesselation. Which is basically the normal performance differential between the cards (the 6600XT lies somewhere between the 3060 and 3060Ti in rasterized performance). I don't necessarily believe AMD RT performance to be as bad as you guys make it out to be. It's just that a lot of current RT titles use RTX SDK, which isn't kind to RDNA2. Doom Eternal, with RT enabled the drop in FPS just a slight bit lower than RTX cards, especially if you don't cherry pick ultra nightmare settings and play at something more reasonable. Like high settings. I know I get around 120fps in 1080p with high settings + RT... So really, is RDNA2 as bad as you guys make it out to be? Sure the RTX cards are better at RT in most games, but when looking at the more "open implementations" the gap narrows substantially, to a level where I feel like AMD could be easily recommended.
Rich is spot on re: today's GPU prices. Pandemic scarcity and mining and scalping aside, I've been seeing frickin' Rx 580s and GTX 1660s going for straight-up stupid prices lately. Sometimes $150-200 more than pre-2020 prices. Inflated, horseshit prices. Hell, I've been seeing people selling (or trying to) 8GB Rx570s for $350 USD. Piss off.
Exactly. I bought a 570 for my SO's PC for 85€ in 2020 xD havent upgraded my own 1080ti because of the ridiculous prices and availability AND i absolutely refuse to pay a single dime over the announced original MSRPs.
@@DaimlerStool dude, 1080 ti is a beast. I have been a budget gamer all my life, and I have been gaming on gtx 1050 2gb then upgraded to RX 570 4gb for the past 5 years. Do you happen to use your pc for productivity that makes you want to upgrade the gpu?
Hey DF, with your upcoming test for the Steamdeck I would be really interested how the Steamdeck works with a powerbank ( there are banks out there that have an output charge of 45W). Greetings
I can save you the trouble and say it’ll be fine, any battery that outputs at over 15 watt will either keep it going or slow it’s depletion significantly, aim for high mah and other than a slight loss in efficiency due to overhead you’ll have a great semi portable device ( think like a big game gear with its battery pack attached and yes I had one of those as well )
Steam Deck supports USB PD3.0 so it should be able to charge with the powerbanks max speed (up to 45W) for all standard powerbanks. From the reviews it looks like if the Steam Deck is running at full tilt (uncapped fps, 100% brightness, wifi etc), the total system power is around 25W, so it should run below that for the most part. I'm guessing 20W on average should cover most games.
In performance yes, but the screen isn’t up to the task of displaying the full range of colours of the systems it’s emulating, except some old handhelds (reminder that DS Lite was capable of displaying a wider colour gamut than Steam Deck)
@@mikeuk666 Why do you think that? It should be great for emulation on a handheld device. It'll be able to run any emulator completely fine, other than RPCS3 (PS3) and Xenia (XBox 360). Even the Switch emulator Yuzu, should run completely fine on it, since that also runs OK on the other recent PC based handhelds, like the AYA NEO, Win3 and OneXPlayer. There's no other handheld device out there at the moment, that's capable of emulating so many systems and running those emulated games on it, any better. Bear in mind it's also a fully bloated PC, unlike many of the Chinese "Handheld emulators", handheld consoles, Smartphones and Pads, so obviously it's also capable of running hell a lot of PC titles (both new and old)
Has anyone looked in to how the Steam Deck performs plugged in to a monitor and treated as a portable gaming PC (like a Mac mini?) It would be a good budget option to get in to PC gaming.
Interesting to see how it could play indie games in higher resolutions and older PC games. I have a 3080ti desktop but would still connect the Deck into my TV to play less demanding games
Cyberpunk has been updated and has MASSIVE performance changes especially to those of us with AMD CPUs. Would really appreciate an updated reccomended settings/performance video if you guys aren't already working on it
I don't get the point of "those options should not show up on my 3090 pc" How are those options any different from having a frame limiter that's allowed to go down to 30 (which most games have) or setting textures to low? Should those options also be hidden if you're running a 3090?
1:07:10 yeah there's plenty of us (DOZENS :D) still with a 970 ! It STILL works WONDERS even in 2022, still playing Warframe maxed out (or almost) in 1440p, FFXIV also maxed out 1440p ! Honestly even Forza Horizon 4 worked beautifully, although at 30fps at 1440p. It's only been since 2019-2020 that... yeah, forget about AAA gaming. I tried AC Valhalla through a friends Ubi account and, even at 1080p, it wasn't great, between 25-45 fps wildly varying. But I agree it was a legendary card. And the Radeon 9700 Pro as well absolutely, still have that card too !
Sourcing OLED screens for a handheld is actually very hard today. The reason is aspect ratios. You cant source a 16:9 OLED for a handheld today. Nintendo must have ordered a huge batch of screens to get them to cut the OLED panels differently for them.
@@HugoStiglitz88 Do you know how screens are made and cut? There’s a reason that 55 inch TVs are easy to get and can be reasonably cheap but 65+ have massive price increases because of the way the screens are manufactured and how much of a yield they can get. If the 7 inches that Valve needs doesn’t play nice with current manufacturers requirements, it will be hard for them to order any for a reasonable price on top of the normal price difference of older LCD vs OLED.
You're still taking the general CU bank hostage for that ML API, which isn't as elegant as dedicated cores (Nvidia) handling the engine/frame data parsing for deep reconstruction.
@@griffgames9538 Thankyou for the reply and explanation, did i read something a while ago that MS waited to finalize the system to add the extra CU's for ML, i cant recall where but if memory serves me i'm sure i read something about it when the final specs were released
I do agree the battery is kinda small but they don’t have a lot space for bigger battery. Should be option to connect bigger external battery imo.. but Steam deck looks like it’s going be a hit. I hope it helps push Linux forward, along with vulkan api. We need another os that will challenge bloated windows for gaming. Linux could be that os. But we need get all hardware vender onboard along with all dev for both indie and AAA gaming. Linux is the future. Heck. Even ms does NOT trust there own os. As they use custom Linux for their cloud and servers. Which proof how much better Linux is. I’d like see steam deck but in console like box but with updated stats. 6 c /12 thread version with zen 2 or 3+ with RDNA 3 would nice system. Running Vavle custom steam os. Would also good.
Hmmm. Rich was talking about throwing more bandwidth at game streaming. This is like talking about framerate purely in FPS without talking about frame timing at all. Cloud stream could probably be done with a lot less bandwitdth than people think but the most important aspects around a solid cloud gaming experience would be a discussion around Latency (The average time it takes a packet to get from point A to point B) and jitter (The consistency in which that average latency is) Unfortunately, everyone only seems to talk about internet speeds in terms of bandwidth and that conversation itself is going to need to change for ISPs to focus more on latency and jitter.
I've always been slightly curious about what you termed jitter. I've lived in a lot of places and noticed some ISP's with equal bandwidth had a lot less lag time between the packets being sent and performed better. Figured that had to be an important aspect to cloud gaming.
What are you talking about regarding Nintendo Direct backlash?? From what I have seen this was one of the best received directs they had in ages. Also, I can't believe you talked about this direct without even mentioning the new "wii" Sports at all.
I love it when people take terribly optimized console ports and say the console is weak. Guardians of the Galaxy shouldn’t be 60 fps @1080p, that is ridiculous. It is an issue of the engine and optimization. If you wanna take a look at what the dream of optimization is look at Ori and the will of the whisps on Switch. If you wanna have an idea what a certain hardware is capable of you need to take a look at the best looking and best performing titles and then make an assessment. I mean Last of US 2 2 on PS4 looks and runs phenomenal despite the old ass hardware.
57:30 It's true. My workmate still runs an i7 7700k with a Gtx 1080 and swears by it (at 1440p). It's an older 4 core-8 thread that still punches above its age/weight. He lucked out on a motherboard with decent m.2 slot & DDR4 bandwidth, so he's also fast-ish SSD/Ram equipped. A proper multithreaded/SMT older CPU can still perform well in today's multicore-intelligent engines. Of course he's hitting a brickwall now for future upgrades, though. I wouldn't advise anyone to jump at a second hand gaming PC from that gen now, in 2022. It was workable up until like 2020. Edit: also, the nm and TDPs make them rather power-inefficient vs today's CPUs, and can necessitate hardcore cooling/power supplies.
7700k is 5 years old cpu its not that much for high end processor. Imo it will still deliver decent gaming performance for another 2 years or so however it gets hammered hard in games like cyberpunk and it gets obliterated in battlefield 2042.
As someone who already has a gaming pc with a great screen my planned use case for the steam deck is not to play the AAA games. I want to play those on my bigger screen and more powerful setup. I want the stream deck for playing things like Hades and isometric RPGs or shooters and games like slay the spire. That type of game I think feels really good on a hand held device and doesn't feel good on bigger screens. I would guess that most steam deck early adopters are in the same boat on that. Playing a AAA game on it might be fun on the go occasionally but usually when I want that big budget experience I also want it on a big budget setup if possible
Valve should implement shareable game profiles if they haven't already. Like the controller profiles in Big Picture mode but for GFX settings, like Max Performance, Max Battery and Balanced.
Thank you for all the content you make. My husband watches every video and it really brightens his day. If you guys ever do Cameo, I know he'd be over the moon to get a message from you guys.
Q6600 gang! Still have my one in my retro PC paired with 4GB DDR2 1066mhz and an 8800GTX. It had issues with 2011 titles like BF3, Crysis 3 and interestingly Black Ops 1 (which for some reason was very CPU limited on PC, 2600k almost tripled the framerate). Would love to see that back in the day DX10 test Alex! Would be a great video!
i don't think you should skip to the 8800 gt for your next gpu video. for me the most impressive graphical leap i saw in my lifetime was the year 2004 and some of the games pushing rendering in that era. specifically half life 2 and doom 3 were absolutely mind blowing and felt like a sneak peak at the way games would look in the HD era. The lighting, shadows, high poly models, the hugely improved animations (source engines facial tech was a revelation) etc. were all so ahead of what was possible on consoles of the time. that being said the card to cover would probably be the radeon 9700 although my personal experience was with the x850
I think the reason Nintendo is still so successful is they rejected the move to realism and even avoided politics and stuck to entertainment and escaping reality and given the state of the world right now its appealing to those who buy a game and don't want a woke lecture. In such a crowded industry they are the only ones to stick to games as a priority.
1:19:00 I recall the very well sourced rumor that big push for the pro consoles was that Sony was told they would have to move off of the chip used due to the process node going offline. So they made the pro consoles instead of paying to keep up an old process.
God, Alex is so boring in these Direct Weekly videos. He needs to expand his taste on gaming. Otherwise bring someone else on that can actually be apart of the discussion.
I think in this era games should focus on SCALABILITY first: chip shortage, GPUs not available, old gen consoles still extremely popular for the next years, cheaper consoles like Xbox Series S, Steam Deck, gaming laptops ever more popular, also with lower specs, and even ultrabook APUs significantly more powerful that can now run AAA games are all factors that should point game developers to focus on scalability! Supported hardware should range from GTX 1050 level performance for 1080p 30, to RTX 3090Ti for Ray Tracing at 4K 120hz Also, if the game is not too demanding porting it on Switch could also be a great opportunity considering the popularity and the very large installed base. Also, having CROSS PLAY is crucial for every multiplayer game!
The Wii/PS2 Version of the Force Unleashed actually has more content than the 360/Ps3/PC Version. The fighting wasnt that great on that PS2/Wii Version, if I remember correctly!
I was also fascinated by Steam Deck’s performance versus Aya Neo Next. I think it reveals this to be more than a simple integration job, but more deeply tuned and possible more semi-custom microcode/silicon than we all anticipated. I’m very curious about Oculus Quest 2 link cable performance, or other inside-out VR workloads.
Haven’t thought about that use case, interesting one. Currently using airlink for games like Half-life Alyx and superhot without any issue, however for games like beat saber native app is much less latency. Edit: spelling error
it's simply the generational progress - AMD didnt' release a properly new GPU architecture for APUs/SOCs for quite some time and the old one was already slow when it was new
@45:00 I've gamed happily over 4g connecting with moonlight to my home machine , on a normal cable line here (like a 300mbit/50mbit homeline ). Moonlight has options to fix frame pacing of the stream (uses proper frame pacing on the client side ). No heaps of bandwidth of required at all.
DF has way more credibility than any other outlet. That's what pisses me off. I like Linus but that dudes knowledge on games performance is a joke compared to the digital foundry. DF is A.B.A.P.
The people that got them are PC channels, it's a PC like Valve have constantly said and as much as I love Digital Foundry it's very much console orientated. Plus Gamers nexus will go into far deeper analysis than DF ever will. Linus has close to 10 times the reach of DF on youtube, it doesn't take much thought to realise why those channels were chosen to showcase a new PC
I would like to see the Deck get an update every 4 or so years. I wouldn't mind an update around the same time as new gpu line's launch. The thing about the steam deck that troubles mee less about refresh's than other hardware is that it is running PC software, so you won't have to worry so much about exclusive games. Oculus Quest 2 was barely out before RE4 was exclusive, even though it ran fine side-loaded onto a Quest 1, or when a new iPhone comes out and there are games or apps you can't use. the people with the old steam deck will still be able to play games at lower settings, or sell them on the used market and buy the new one how the gpu market works.
What I live about DF, aside from the in depth content etc, is they don't involve politics. At least, not that I've seen. It's all about games and that's how it should be.
You can bet it's all hands on deck (no, not that Deck) at DF today to cover the new gen CP2077 upgrades. The good news is that unlike i.e., Dying Light 2, they've implemented DRS here. That should help. I'm going to dig in tonight.
@@griffgames9538 Yeah. Going to reinstall it later. Too bad I already 100 percented it more or less, but I still want to see the improvements. Edit - Played it last night. It was... Fine. HDR is slightly better, seems the whether is dynamic more often, it is slightly sharper, slightly smoother. The crowd density seems to be greater. It still has a few issues, and I would not say it's hugely improved over what was already on XSX, but it's good. It annoyingly reset perks automatically, but I couldn't tell if it was broken because it didn't seem to change my abilities in gameplay.
I loved the 8800GT. I remember walking in to best buy on that day back when it was supposed to launch in 2007 and had seen a BFG 8800GT SC for $379. That card was fantastic and was the first card that blew me away. I had upgraded from a 8600GT XXX and it was a huge leap.
In regards to the SD, I understand being critical of specs, especially when competition is involved, but we're a little jaded aren't we? Maybe steam is just like "look, we made steam deck to offer your library on the go with full, intuitive function. We didn't build the show stopper device for the uptight gamer. You want that? Well now it costs more."
I thought the Nintendo Direct was quite solid. I really wish the average player would just appreciate what's on offer rather than getting butt-hurt that a particular game hasn't been covered. Lots of strong content on display in the presentation as-is even without games like BOTW2 or Prime 4. Kirby in particular looks amazing--it really gives me Mario 3D World vibes.
Thats one thing i find interesting is how not all fields of tech advance the same like battery tech hasnt really changed much since the 90s but chipsets power draw and usage is like night and day.
The steam deck ideally should have a battery save mode which automatically switches the games preset to a little lower settings, maybe dials down the resolution. But that would be very hard to implement on a game by game basis. That’s where a platform like the switch has the edge
To be fair, would you really want to hold any portable gaming device for longer then a hour and half? I suspect that would hurt my hand even on a mobile phone which is lighter than the Steam Deck or Switch lol.
Batteries are one of the techs, that are in dire need a technical breakthrough going forward. It's not just mobile and wireless devices that are suffering with short battery life and long re-charge times, but also other things like electric cars. There is some hope though, there has been a few advancements been made lately. However, I doubt we see those come into effect, for a few more years yet.
It would be great if the developers add an option for presets, so anyone can make a preset and post somewhere so others can use it as well and you just have to copy the file
Console users now focus way too much on output resolution rather than visual fidelity. Making a game native 4k/60 fps just to hit some arbitrary benchmark isn't better than lowering the resolution and pushing the fidelity. When UE5 comes out 1080p or 1440p is gonna be the standard for 60 fps modes, but it'll still look better than games we have now.
I remember when Shadow of Mordor came out there was an HD texture pack you could install and it recommended more than 4GB of VRAM which was the most any card had at the time aside from a Titan. There was a mild freakout everywhere about it.
Man I would've loved DLSS in the consoles but it's of course impossible. I do often wonder what the consoles would look like if PS had gone with Nvidia. Would have probably made back compatibility harder but it would have been sweet.
When I saw Portal I thought it was the orange box at first, then realized it was a Portal Collection. Really cool stuff but still wish it was the orange box tbh.
Plus, don't you get some GTA Online currency bullshit with every purchase? So people are skimming CDkey sites for super cheap GTAV keys to milk those credits. /facepalm. Edit: But hey, if people enjoy it, have at it.
"I have a Steam Deck right down here"
*points to pants*
"Unfortunately, I can't show you the unit right now..."
Got that big Deck energy.
@@acdp11 lol
Richard's steamy deck unit
Everybody (Especially Chad Warden) knows he was pointing to his Wii.
They don't call him 'Leadbetter' for nothing. 😁
100% agree with Rich's choice! My GTX 970 was the biggest leap in graphics hardware that I experiences, was at an awesome price, and it still lives in my PC that I use everyday until newer cards become 'available' again.
Gave mine to my brother and it fits his lighter pc gaming perfectly, i like knowing my trusty card lives on in his pc when we play stuff together :)
I have to say the 1080ti might be one of the best for me, you got so much more performance then on a 1080 non ti .. 30%, sure it was expensive but 30% more for 30% more performance on a "ti" gpu will probably never happen again.
@@themadnes5413 I was expecting at least an honorable mention, but was surprised nobody did, shrug. I had a 1080 for a bit, after a 970, that felt like a pretty mighty increase, and i only heard good things about the 1080ti, especially when owners of it were still using it in the chip shortage.
@@richardtucker5938 970 then 1080 now 3080ti. All big jumps in performance 😁
@@paulsegrue5133 haha sorta same, except i am 3080 not ti
Great content as always, however wanted to point out that I often find these Direct Weekly videos have sync issues between audio and video (in this video it's only on Rich and Alex's VOD, John's is absolutely fine). It's a small problem, but there is a tiny delay , I wonder if that's the typical issue when recording with OBS.
I've never noticed that. Then again I mostly listen to this while I drive
Thanks, now i cant unsee it lol. and btw, John's audio is also desynced if you look closely
@@DarkReturns1 I listen at work lol guess it's time to notice it now.
I always have sync issues with my speakers and tv, I thought it was just me haha
Thanks for commenting this; I thought I was going crazy when there weren't any comments mentioning this on previous episodes.
Never thought we'd get a podcast. Almost 50 in now?! Congrats guys! Enjoy the road to 2M
@26:08 spot on take. There's been a surge of speculation culture which only causes hype which only causes disappointment. People need to chill with their expectations. The Nintendo fan UA-cam video creators prey on clicks with hype and speculation which only hurts the game announcements in the end. It's wild.
The worst part is if you make the mistake of trying to engage with any of them to get them to cool their jets. The Switch Pro rumours were absolutely silly by the end, but kept being spurred on by Spawn Wave and others. I really lost a lot of respect for SW in particular over it, because it was so obvious that it just wasn't going to happen.
I just don't get why the chat was spamming BotW2 demands when Nintendo literally told us first half of 2022 games were going to be the focus...
We only know BotW2 is *PLANNED* for 2022, but it's not even confirmed to make it this year. So expecting it in a Direct that straight up ignores late 2022 games is just dumb.
Nintendo is at fault, they can temper rumors any time they want - if they dont want to, they get what they are asking for via their inaction.
@@xBINARYGODx sure they could. But they shouldn't have to be babysitters
@@xBINARYGODx I'm not saying they are perfect though. Nintendo does make a TON of awful decisions. Their Directs are by far the least of their issues.
The community is gonna be alot of help with the steam deck game settings and hardware settings fps/battery life details with each game.
14:47 As a Wii U owner, I can attest to John and Richard's claims. That Gamepad's a freaking beast! *AND* it has awful battery life.
What else was brutal is if a button/trigger went out. Lost my ZL in 2018. It was a complete joke to fix compared to a PS4/One controller. Cool tech for the time though.
To be fair the battery only fills half of the battery compartment. I believe they planned to have a much bigger battery, but reduced the size to keep the Gamepad lightweight
@@EVPointMaster rather have more weight and more battery
@@EVPointMaster Yeah, that you had to purchase from Nintendo's online store. So good luck getting an OEM large size battery these days.
What's crazy about it to me is how much empty space it has. Like there was zero effort in making it smaller/lighter in its design. Big areas of plastic between buttons and the joysticks, etc. Steam deck is big but you can see from its design they didn't waste any space with it, and what it has within its size is a powerhouse compared to a Wii U or any other handheld.
1:04:00 Let's not forget what an actual monster G80 was, in various aspects of course. Incredibly complex with a huge die size for its time, nvidia had all hands on deck to get this thing running properly. Afaik it was also the first chip since NV30 that needed a 2nd metal respin. Unfortunately, there's no way it would've made it into a (feasible) PS3 design.
Regarding screen, I think they prioritize contrast. Lowlight performance being an important part of a handheld. (I'd imagine this is why it has a light sensor, and the ability for the screen to go as dim as it can)
I'm waiting for your review on the Cyberpunk 2077 v1.5 next gen update..
33:40 I agree John, we had some endearing non-CD, system chip-based soundtracks on PS1 and Saturn - like CCross and Shining Force 3, sounded really nice. A bit like amped-up/higher sample rate SNES music. Perfect for RPGs (although NiGHTS is a good example of dynamic streaming chip tunes as well).
Ironically, the Saturn had the superior soundchip spec on paper vs PS1, but 1) the Saturn sound drivers were tough to work with and debug outside first-party, and 2) Sony allotted far more RAM to the PS1's soundchip, ultimately making it easier to work with and more flexible (Sega had to invent a pseudo real-time decompression library 'Cybersound' I believe, borrowing the Saturn's DSP to help stream - not ideal).
Note: You go back a generation to Mega CD, and it was fun to hear all of Sonic CD's 'Past' music were pure chip tunes as well - some great ones, albeit short (and this fact kinda' defeats the "Japanese or US Sonic CD soundtrack?" argument, because the US composer never bothered to re-do the Past chip tune, so there's a massive clash there between the Past chiptunes and Present and Future redbook music - which all mesh together perfectly in the Japanese version).
It's now a thread of games with amazing soundtracks based on audio chip capabilities! :)
I'll add Vagrant Story. And maybe Alundra.
You can hear the difference between the two sound chips in Mega Man 8, which almost exclusively used them on both 32 bit machines. Saturn sounded *so much* better, and yet the PS1 version's music is the one included with each soundtrack release!
And yes, the Mega-CD vs. Sega CD arguement with Sonic CD is pretty dumb, and the Mega-CD soundtrack just fits more with the PCM Past tracks.
@@AceTrainerX3 It's been a while, can't remember MM8's tunes, but I think golden era mid-late 90s Capcom would be a Sega third-party with a good grasp of the Saturn's stubborn-but-awesome Yamaha sound chip. Sega and Capcom were pretty tight during that era (arcade fighter ports, RAM carts, 2D-powerhouse, etc.) so they probably had great access to the devkit revisions with nice PCM compression techniques.
@@griffgames9538 Agreed. For every MM8 or Super Tempo on the Saturn, you also got Death Crimson...
@@AceTrainerX3 Haha, oh god.
I think that every portable device with rechargeable battery should have tech to bypass the battery and use the charger as a dedicated power supply to run the device without causing the battery to wear down when in use with a power supply.
I think most laptops do that now, my lenovo ideapad laptop has that at least.
I would think by now that if you have the charger cable connected, the device should bypass the battery and get the energy from the cable, it would save on were and tear on the battery as well.
USB-C power banks work too.
@@paul1979uk2000 Most do, right? They tend to toggle into a powered mode correctly (affecting clocks, screen brightness, etc.).
@@griffgames9538 I should hope most do but with the corrupt nature of business, it wouldn't surprise me if they have it going through the battery even when plugged in, anything to do more damage to the battery in the hope of getting us to upgrade sooner rather than later.
The best idea to provide consistent battery life would be to have presets. Optimal power for Varied performance. High power for high fps but 2-3 hours of battery life. Balanced preset for 4-5 hours of battery life. Then low powered mode for 6-8 hours for indie or non graphic intense games.
Instead of relying on just the developers to make these, let the community make game and system setting presets in the same fashion controller settings can be made, shared and edited by the community.
Naturally you can have official ones, but how many devs will go back to their older games and support them like this?
Of course a 1-click solution would be great, but the Steam Deck allows you to change it's TDP, so you can adjust the Steam Decks power to a certain battery life range. Then select an appropriat in-game graphics preset and cap to either 30 or 60fps.
@@izamanaick If it sells well, the devs will put in the effort. Companies literally hire porting companies to complete port their games to switch with improvement tweaks and extra content.
How much effort would a steam deck profile take in comparison??
thanks for answering the question about 16x af, I just couldn't find a good answer online so I thought I'd ask the experts! Thanks for making my weekend too :)
To be honest it wasn't well answered though. John said "there are bottlenecks", Alex said "there are different considerations on consoles", but no mention of what the bottlenecks or considerations are, nor reconciliation to the fact it's near impossible to notice a difference in performance on PC.
@@philth7587 In the past I believe it was a VRAM bottleneck on console, but the new consoles have plenty of memory so I don't see why every game can't run at 16x or at least 8x nowadays. On PC the difference to VRAM is minor normally though, so I'm not really sure if it's something else.
I honestly can't wait to see their Horizon Forbidden West PS4 VS PS5 comparison.
I want to know specifically about the PS4 version, how it runs on the PS5 and if there are elements in graphical settings missing or if it's all included and we are better off with the PS4 version to play it on everything.
@@philth7587 One case where unified APU memory isn't as effective as discrete for offloading AF.
AF is cheap as chips on PC typically.
Thankfully we're seeing better AF on Series and PS5.
@@Games-cj8 The PS5's performance mode is ostensibly running the PS4 Pro presets at locked (tiny cutscene blips aside) 60fps. Which actually looks quite alright.
Horizon 1 did look rather sexy on the Pro, imperfect 30fps aside. Haven't seen Forbidden West on Pro, but apparently the frame-rate is alright and image quality passes.
1:19:50 John is right. "8K gaming" isn't on the map right now. Display adoption is tiny, content is tiny.
The PS5 and Series X will support 8K primarily for 8K video and photo support. That's the idea when you see the "8K" logo on their boxes/ store pages. Not games.
I mean, sure, you could offer a pristine native 8K version of Frogger and call it a "native 8K console game."
Or any game up through OG Xbox, possibly.
But let's be real about native 8K real-time modern AAA game rendering on console (or beefy PC).
Let's just call that... "Sounds good, but maybe next time".
The Toyurist is 8K60 on PS5.
It's not the most impressive looking game, but saying the Consoles could only handle a game like Frogger at 8K is a bit far off the mark (even as a joke).
I honestly think Alex should dip his toes into Linux gaming. One thing I have found out with Proton, and DXVK in particular (which converts DX9-DX11 API calls to Vulkan) is that it actually has a positive effect on memory bandwidth, and stutters. APUs benefit greatly, since they have a shared memory structure. The reason being that older DirectX games require the CPU to prepare draw calls for the GPU. Hence there's a lot more traffic- and memory transfers going on between them. In Vulkan, the draw calls can be executed on the GPU directly. Proton also establishes a shader cache before running the game, reducing even the famous Unreal stuttering to an absolute minimum. And the binary x64 or x86 game code doesn't need translation at all since it is still running on the same architecture. Games like Dishonored, I have a couple of stress points which won't go past 45fps on my Vega 8 laptop in Windows (most likely due to memory bandwidth). In Linux with Proton. 60fps and no stutters.
People have this perceived notion that Linux gaming will be slower, but in fact. Proton can actually have positive performance impact (except DX12, which has a far less mature translation layer). I really hope the Steam Deck will allow the Linux's user base to skyrocket. Hopefully it will allow for an avenue of choice for gamers, especially when more devs targets Linux as a viable gaming platform.
The dx9 implementation in some older games is so dodgy I find myself increasingly using dxvk even when I'm a Win10 PC user. It doesn't alway work but when it does dxvk can be so transformative, is ridiculous how big of a difference it can make on GTA IV and Dead Space.
Some games actually run better in Linux compared to Windows on the same hardware, it's clearly showing that Proton is doing such a good job that some games that are native to Windows actually runs faster on Linux and I suspect things will only get better as SteamOS and Proton matures.
I also have to admit, I'm not sure I'm I'm more excited about the Steam Deck or SteamOS as both could be a game changer not just for PC gamers but console gamers as well over the long run.
@@paul1979uk2000 lol - apparently you are not understanding why that happens from time to time and why that will neve be more than atypical. Anything for the cause, I guess.
Fanaticism is brain rot - your dream of everyone leaving Windows and go over to a Valve blessed Linux is just trading one devil for another.
@@xBINARYGODx You obviously don't understand what Linux is. Linux is open source operating system, it's not owned by anyone. I have daily driven it on my laptop for 5 years and for the first time in 25 years I feel like I am finally in control of my computer again. No ads, no bloatware, no personal data collection, no online account requirements. Everything within the OS is available to end users. Find something you don't like about how your computer functions? Well in Linux you can change that. I have made my laptop go from 4h of battery life to 6h just by customizing the power profiles and using a CPU scheduler script. Something I was never able to achieve in Windows. In Linux I can change OS-level keyboard shortcuts, I can change how it looks, I can even change the desktop environment if I am not happy with how it functions, I choose myself when I want to update the OS, and I am even in control of which OS kernel I run. In Windows my laptop used 4GB of RAM on boot. My current Linux install uses 0.6GB. Everything quicker, snappier, and more reliable than windows (as long as you have compatible hardware)
I mean, google uses linux for android. And I don't like android due to google's business practices. But that doesn't have anything to do with Linux. Let say that Valve starts being dicks. Well if that's the case then you are fucked by both Microsoft and Valve at the same time. In Linux at least it's only Valve. ;)
Gaming on Linux is not accessible to 80+% of windows users. Dont get me wrong proton and the gaming community on linux are amazing and way better than what we had like even 5 years ago, but really daily driving linux as a gamer is not straightforward and can often be infuriating for the uninitiated. To drive Linux as a whole you need to have a different relationship with your os than most Windows/OSX users have. If you dont get that little kick of dopamine for troubleshooting issues or telling your distro "shut up and do what I am telling you" then I have to imagine Linux would be akin to pulling teeth. To me solving the puzzle is half the fun, but for a whole slew of folks, they want things to work and dont want to spend time and energy making it work themselves. Do i think those users are missing out? Heck yeah, but regardless they are not wrong for having that expectation. They wanna double click a game and be playing, not trying to follow a questionably out of date fourm post to diagnose why they arent. I think linux is great for any gamer who wants to better understand their machine while getting most of the gaming experience they are conditioned for by windows or mac os.
1:18:00 PS5 and Series X are Zen 2 not Zen 3.
Correct. Easy mistake to make since Zen 2 = Ryzen 3xxx.
@@93836 Even more confusing when Ryzen 3000 mobile is Zen+
can't call them out on something AMD doesnt care about, mixing their generations up so stupidly
people worried about what dying light 2 means for the generation shouldn't be. They didnt use mesh shaders / primitive shaders, they didnt use rapid packed math, and they didnt use dynamic resolution scaling. its a game designed around whats possible on PS4 / xbone that is pushing some extras for PS5 / series X.
Exactly. When they play Horizon 2 there jaws will drop.
Everyone: gameplay is king y'all
The same people when a game has slightly bad graphics: "gaming is dead oh my GOD it looks like a PS1 game"
@@ReLapse85 Horizon 2 isnt especially next gen either. Loading times are quite slow and 60fps mode seems like something they started development on 4 months ago. R&C and Demon's Souls are the only truly next gen games. Maybe Ghostwire and GT7 will bring back some interesting tech.
That Crysis story was some early year creepypasta material.
I thought the most interesting aspects of the Deck from Phawx's coverage is the efficiency you can get by parking CPU cores on some games (which diverts more energy to the GPU), and reducing the SoC TDP to 11-12 watts. You can get like 90% of the stock performance in many games for good power savings and more battery life. Plus that system-wide FSR... 540p -> 720p more efficiency gains. Very excited, seems like a tweaker's dream.
+55% battery life in Control just from FSR
This is nuts
@@izamanaick not if the original time is low
@@xBINARYGODx going from 1hr30 to 2hr20 is still impressive
your work is praise worthy guys, one of the best channels out there with some of the best of the best, of the best people working in it.
30:10 I'm excited for the Mario Kart 8 expansion. True it's an old game, but I love playing new content for old games that I love to play. Although it looks like all of the tracks they showed off were copy-pasted from the mobile game Mario Kart Tour. That said, Mario Kart Tour has 39 tracks in total. So I'm expecting each season we'll be getting one "brand new" (remake) track with 7 copied over from MK Tour.
Still, it'll be a blast to have all of these under one game.
Gamexplain did a comparison vid and the new DLC versions clearly have higher quality textures, lighting and particle effects. They just dont at this stage look as good as the MK8D original tracks.
If they had 39 Mario Kart Tour tracks and less than 10 tracks from past games, people will be furious lol. I dont think thatll be the case (hopefully)
Not really sure where you saw most of the tracks being Tour either? I saw 3 tracks for Tour and 5 being confirmed from the actual mainline games (id post a screenshot if I could, but its confirmed already)
Yea man me too
Who here will genuinely play a lot on the Steam Deck?
I expect to play quite a bit on it when I travel, on lunch breaks and on nights before going to sleep
Me 100%. Work at night and after a shift I don't wanna sit on my computer. This is perfect
Me, my "gaming room" only has 1 chair to make space for VR play, being able to play on the couch or in bed with this seems great, will also give it to my wife to try to see if she can get into some PC games as she loves her Switch
Me! Me! Me!
Especially the more ''non-triple A'' titles where the screen size is perfect for and won't demand the absolute max of the system.
Which is like half of my Steam library thankfully :)
Hope this becomes a major hit, but I think it will!
A fully unlocked PC system as powerful as this one, and in the freaking palm of your hand, will have the modding- and emulator scene go crazy ❤
Thumbs up! I am living in USA for an interchange educational program and I couldn´t bring my desktop Pc and it has no sense to buy a big one here since I will have to return in 1 or 2 years so Steam Deck will be a perfect solution... Now I would like to know when I will have it on my hands hahaha I bought it on August so who guess...
1:18:20 This is incorrect. The PS5 and XBOX Series consoles are RDNA 2 and Zen 2 NOT Zen 3... Just wanted to point that out. I'm surprised that none of you caught that! Come on Digital Foundry...
they probably know ;) maybe just a slip of tongue
"There is nothing huge" - Xenoblade 3 and new Mario Strikers after 15 years: am i a joke to you?
So long as we get 60fps options on most games, i’ll continue to be happy with the current gen consoles. Resolution isn’t the sole piece to image quality, so if they sacrifice it a bit to better other visual items or 60 fps, then go for it.
25FPS gaming!
Not joking, max settings at 720p25 would be optimal for me.
This.
Steam seems to have pulled off an Apple-esque hardware creation here. The integration between hardware and software seems quite advantageous over competing products. Most notably, the control over the SoC as a means of milking every ounce of performance vs battery life with a focus on scalability. Interested to see how much Valve works on automatic optimization (eg a game is put up on the Steam store and automatically creates a tailored Steamdeck variant) going forward.
I'm afraid the Apple comparison doesn't help at all. Hope Valve will never pull Apple's stunts or I'm out.
@@Exhumatu I think the comparison to Apple is more in regards to Valve bootstrapping a vertically integrated hardware/software stack, using mostly OSS components on the software side instead of being entirely proprietary like Apple.
@@Exhumatu I am only referring to Apple's tight integration of hardware and software creating a great deal of efficiency. When compared to competitors like GPD Win, Aya Neo, Valve will be capable of creating performance per watt that those companies will not likely achieve. I'm not saying Valve is adopting how Apple operates.
@@wubdal7262 oops, didn't see your comment before responding to @exhumatu. You took the words right out of my mouth... and then I said them anyway 😅
@@BlacklistBill
Oh, trully sorry in that case! My mistake for not reading your comment as I should have in the first place. I blame it on my extreme allergic reaction to the above mentioned name.
Well, if more routers implemented smart queues other people doing other stuff on the same connection wouldn’t be that much of a problem.
Is this the same as QoS prioritization such as what some nicer ASUS routers have, or is Smart Queues its own thing? I'm always curious about premium router features.
In my anecdotal experience, CPE wise, Ubiquiti Unifi implementation of SQM is not only stupid easy to activate on USG routers but very effective. Just to cite a relatively cheap kind of devices.
1:14:22 - How come Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition runs equally as good on AMD hardware as nvidia hardware? I mean the 6600XT runs the game slightly faster than a RTX3060... 65-90fps in "The Volga" mission using 1440p Normal RT, Very High Settings, 2x VRS 0,8x shading rate + tesselation. Which is basically the normal performance differential between the cards (the 6600XT lies somewhere between the 3060 and 3060Ti in rasterized performance). I don't necessarily believe AMD RT performance to be as bad as you guys make it out to be. It's just that a lot of current RT titles use RTX SDK, which isn't kind to RDNA2.
Doom Eternal, with RT enabled the drop in FPS just a slight bit lower than RTX cards, especially if you don't cherry pick ultra nightmare settings and play at something more reasonable. Like high settings. I know I get around 120fps in 1080p with high settings + RT...
So really, is RDNA2 as bad as you guys make it out to be? Sure the RTX cards are better at RT in most games, but when looking at the more "open implementations" the gap narrows substantially, to a level where I feel like AMD could be easily recommended.
Rich is spot on re: today's GPU prices. Pandemic scarcity and mining and scalping aside, I've been seeing frickin' Rx 580s and GTX 1660s going for straight-up stupid prices lately. Sometimes $150-200 more than pre-2020 prices. Inflated, horseshit prices.
Hell, I've been seeing people selling (or trying to) 8GB Rx570s for $350 USD. Piss off.
Exactly. I bought a 570 for my SO's PC for 85€ in 2020 xD havent upgraded my own 1080ti because of the ridiculous prices and availability AND i absolutely refuse to pay a single dime over the announced original MSRPs.
@@DaimlerStool Yep. It's out of hand. I could maybe allow current gen GPUs the big miner hike, but the rise on prior gens feels exploitative.
@@DaimlerStool dude, 1080 ti is a beast. I have been a budget gamer all my life, and I have been gaming on gtx 1050 2gb then upgraded to RX 570 4gb for the past 5 years. Do you happen to use your pc for productivity that makes you want to upgrade the gpu?
I sold my gtx1070 for £370 on eBay, it retailed at £420 at release, crazy money, took the sting out of buying a rtx 3070 for £650.
Will you guys make a video about cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.5?
Looking forward to the Cyberpunk next gen test video from you guys.
Hope that’s their next upload! Games got a free trial as of today
I LOVE STADIA!! Honestly it's been great since I was apart of Project Stream.
😂 The Spencer Ultimatum
“ _Jesus Christ… that’s Phil Spencer._ “
Hey DF, with your upcoming test for the Steamdeck I would be really interested how the Steamdeck works with a powerbank ( there are banks out there that have an output charge of 45W). Greetings
I can save you the trouble and say it’ll be fine, any battery that outputs at over 15 watt will either keep it going or slow it’s depletion significantly, aim for high mah and other than a slight loss in efficiency due to overhead you’ll have a great semi portable device ( think like a big game gear with its battery pack attached and yes I had one of those as well )
@@SuperMikeKaos You do need at least 30 watts though if you're playing while charging
Steam Deck supports USB PD3.0 so it should be able to charge with the powerbanks max speed (up to 45W) for all standard powerbanks.
From the reviews it looks like if the Steam Deck is running at full tilt (uncapped fps, 100% brightness, wifi etc), the total system power is around 25W, so it should run below that for the most part. I'm guessing 20W on average should cover most games.
Steamdeck will be an emulation monster.
In performance yes, but the screen isn’t up to the task of displaying the full range of colours of the systems it’s emulating, except some old handhelds (reminder that DS Lite was capable of displaying a wider colour gamut than Steam Deck)
@@mikeuk666 Why do you think that? It should be great for emulation on a handheld device. It'll be able to run any emulator completely fine, other than RPCS3 (PS3) and Xenia (XBox 360). Even the Switch emulator Yuzu, should run completely fine on it, since that also runs OK on the other recent PC based handhelds, like the AYA NEO, Win3 and OneXPlayer.
There's no other handheld device out there at the moment, that's capable of emulating so many systems and running those emulated games on it, any better.
Bear in mind it's also a fully bloated PC, unlike many of the Chinese "Handheld emulators", handheld consoles, Smartphones and Pads, so obviously it's also capable of running hell a lot of PC titles (both new and old)
A very expensive monster. Totally out of most people's price range.
Has anyone looked in to how the Steam Deck performs plugged in to a monitor and treated as a portable gaming PC (like a Mac mini?) It would be a good budget option to get in to PC gaming.
Interesting to see how it could play indie games in higher resolutions and older PC games.
I have a 3080ti desktop but would still connect the Deck into my TV to play less demanding games
Cyberpunk has been updated and has MASSIVE performance changes especially to those of us with AMD CPUs.
Would really appreciate an updated reccomended settings/performance video if you guys aren't already working on it
I don't get the point of "those options should not show up on my 3090 pc"
How are those options any different from having a frame limiter that's allowed to go down to 30 (which most games have) or setting textures to low? Should those options also be hidden if you're running a 3090?
1:07:10 yeah there's plenty of us (DOZENS :D) still with a 970 ! It STILL works WONDERS even in 2022, still playing Warframe maxed out (or almost) in 1440p, FFXIV also maxed out 1440p !
Honestly even Forza Horizon 4 worked beautifully, although at 30fps at 1440p. It's only been since 2019-2020 that... yeah, forget about AAA gaming. I tried AC Valhalla through a friends Ubi account and, even at 1080p, it wasn't great, between 25-45 fps wildly varying.
But I agree it was a legendary card. And the Radeon 9700 Pro as well absolutely, still have that card too !
Been using 16x Anisotropic Filtering for over 20+ years now, not a single time have i EVER been able to see any performance impact whatsover.
Great discussion as usual. LOL @ 1:27:25
Sourcing OLED screens for a handheld is actually very hard today. The reason is aspect ratios. You cant source a 16:9 OLED for a handheld today. Nintendo must have ordered a huge batch of screens to get them to cut the OLED panels differently for them.
This is true. You wouldn’t be able to place the order with LG without really large batches
That's nonsense lol most screens are 16:9. Wtf you talking about
Is this because most phones have moved to much wider screens?
@@HugoStiglitz88 high end smartphones moved away from 16:9 4 years ago. Mid range phones soon followed.
@@HugoStiglitz88 Do you know how screens are made and cut? There’s a reason that 55 inch TVs are easy to get and can be reasonably cheap but 65+ have massive price increases because of the way the screens are manufactured and how much of a yield they can get. If the 7 inches that Valve needs doesn’t play nice with current manufacturers requirements, it will be hard for them to order any for a reasonable price on top of the normal price difference of older LCD vs OLED.
I just lost everything in a flood here in petropolis, RJ, Brazil... At least i can have a little confort whatching you guys... Life is hard...
I'm sorry friend, sometimes life really sucks. I pray things get better for you soon🙏🏾
I sometimes fell that I'm the one person who loves the Wii u. Still got that bad boy hooked up to my TV 😂
what about DirectML for a dlss type implementation on xbox SX, we haven't really heard much about DirectML outside of the Forza demo?
You're still taking the general CU bank hostage for that ML API, which isn't as elegant as dedicated cores (Nvidia) handling the engine/frame data parsing for deep reconstruction.
@@griffgames9538 Thankyou for the reply and explanation, did i read something a while ago that MS waited to finalize the system to add the extra CU's for ML, i cant recall where but if memory serves me i'm sure i read something about it when the final specs were released
Best part of my week!
I do agree the battery is kinda small but they don’t have a lot space for bigger battery. Should be option to connect bigger external battery imo.. but Steam deck looks like it’s going be a hit. I hope it helps push Linux forward, along with vulkan api. We need another os that will challenge bloated windows for gaming. Linux could be that os. But we need get all hardware vender onboard along with all dev for both indie and AAA gaming. Linux is the future. Heck. Even ms does NOT trust there own os. As they use custom Linux for their cloud and servers. Which proof how much better Linux is.
I’d like see steam deck but in console like box but with updated stats. 6 c /12 thread version with zen 2 or 3+ with RDNA 3 would nice system. Running Vavle custom steam os. Would also good.
Hmmm. Rich was talking about throwing more bandwidth at game streaming. This is like talking about framerate purely in FPS without talking about frame timing at all.
Cloud stream could probably be done with a lot less bandwitdth than people think but the most important aspects around a solid cloud gaming experience would be a discussion around Latency (The average time it takes a packet to get from point A to point B) and jitter (The consistency in which that average latency is)
Unfortunately, everyone only seems to talk about internet speeds in terms of bandwidth and that conversation itself is going to need to change for ISPs to focus more on latency and jitter.
I've always been slightly curious about what you termed jitter. I've lived in a lot of places and noticed some ISP's with equal bandwidth had a lot less lag time between the packets being sent and performed better. Figured that had to be an important aspect to cloud gaming.
What are you talking about regarding Nintendo Direct backlash?? From what I have seen this was one of the best received directs they had in ages. Also, I can't believe you talked about this direct without even mentioning the new "wii" Sports at all.
I love it when people take terribly optimized console ports and say the console is weak.
Guardians of the Galaxy shouldn’t be 60 fps @1080p, that is ridiculous.
It is an issue of the engine and optimization.
If you wanna take a look at what the dream of optimization is look at Ori and the will of the whisps on Switch.
If you wanna have an idea what a certain hardware is capable of you need to take a look at the best looking and best performing titles and then make an assessment.
I mean Last of US 2 2 on PS4 looks and runs phenomenal despite the old ass hardware.
TLoU 2 still the best game I've ever seen 💯
57:30 It's true. My workmate still runs an i7 7700k with a Gtx 1080 and swears by it (at 1440p). It's an older 4 core-8 thread that still punches above its age/weight. He lucked out on a motherboard with decent m.2 slot & DDR4 bandwidth, so he's also fast-ish SSD/Ram equipped. A proper multithreaded/SMT older CPU can still perform well in today's multicore-intelligent engines.
Of course he's hitting a brickwall now for future upgrades, though.
I wouldn't advise anyone to jump at a second hand gaming PC from that gen now, in 2022. It was workable up until like 2020.
Edit: also, the nm and TDPs make them rather power-inefficient vs today's CPUs, and can necessitate hardcore cooling/power supplies.
7700k is 5 years old cpu its not that much for high end processor. Imo it will still deliver decent gaming performance for another 2 years or so however it gets hammered hard in games like cyberpunk and it gets obliterated in battlefield 2042.
@@h1tzzYT Yep. General architecture efficiency of new CPUs makes a significant difference, but it can still perform alright today.
No mention of Front Mission remake? I was disappointed with the visuals, but fucking hell, that was an amazing announcement.
As someone who already has a gaming pc with a great screen my planned use case for the steam deck is not to play the AAA games. I want to play those on my bigger screen and more powerful setup. I want the stream deck for playing things like Hades and isometric RPGs or shooters and games like slay the spire. That type of game I think feels really good on a hand held device and doesn't feel good on bigger screens.
I would guess that most steam deck early adopters are in the same boat on that. Playing a AAA game on it might be fun on the go occasionally but usually when I want that big budget experience I also want it on a big budget setup if possible
Call of Duty won't be staying on playstation for long after the deal is final.
Valve should implement shareable game profiles if they haven't already. Like the controller profiles in Big Picture mode but for GFX settings, like Max Performance, Max Battery and Balanced.
Thank you for all the content you make. My husband watches every video and it really brightens his day. If you guys ever do Cameo, I know he'd be over the moon to get a message from you guys.
Do the new version of Cyberpunk please.
Q6600 gang! Still have my one in my retro PC paired with 4GB DDR2 1066mhz and an 8800GTX. It had issues with 2011 titles like BF3, Crysis 3 and interestingly Black Ops 1 (which for some reason was very CPU limited on PC, 2600k almost tripled the framerate).
Would love to see that back in the day DX10 test Alex! Would be a great video!
i don't think you should skip to the 8800 gt for your next gpu video. for me the most impressive graphical leap i saw in my lifetime was the year 2004 and some of the games pushing rendering in that era. specifically half life 2 and doom 3 were absolutely mind blowing and felt like a sneak peak at the way games would look in the HD era. The lighting, shadows, high poly models, the hugely improved animations (source engines facial tech was a revelation) etc. were all so ahead of what was possible on consoles of the time. that being said the card to cover would probably be the radeon 9700 although my personal experience was with the x850
I think the reason Nintendo is still so successful is they rejected the move to realism and even avoided politics and stuck to entertainment and escaping reality and given the state of the world right now its appealing to those who buy a game and don't want a woke lecture. In such a crowded industry they are the only ones to stick to games as a priority.
You forgot about Front Mission 1&2 getting a remake. Can’t wait.
1:19:00 I recall the very well sourced rumor that big push for the pro consoles was that Sony was told they would have to move off of the chip used due to the process node going offline. So they made the pro consoles instead of paying to keep up an old process.
God, Alex is so boring in these Direct Weekly videos. He needs to expand his taste on gaming. Otherwise bring someone else on that can actually be apart of the discussion.
36:14 that look Alex made. Why'd you cut away?!😂
I think in this era games should focus on SCALABILITY first: chip shortage, GPUs not available, old gen consoles still extremely popular for the next years, cheaper consoles like Xbox Series S, Steam Deck, gaming laptops ever more popular, also with lower specs, and even ultrabook APUs significantly more powerful that can now run AAA games are all factors that should point game developers to focus on scalability!
Supported hardware should range from GTX 1050 level performance for 1080p 30, to RTX 3090Ti for Ray Tracing at 4K 120hz
Also, if the game is not too demanding porting it on Switch could also be a great opportunity considering the popularity and the very large installed base.
Also, having CROSS PLAY is crucial for every multiplayer game!
1:27:28 Alex, watcha looking at below Rich's desk? 🥺👉👈
man... one and a half hour battery when playing s demanding game. Not sure if i really want one now.
The Wii/PS2 Version of the Force Unleashed actually has more content than the 360/Ps3/PC Version. The fighting wasnt that great on that PS2/Wii Version, if I remember correctly!
I was also fascinated by Steam Deck’s performance versus Aya Neo Next. I think it reveals this to be more than a simple integration job, but more deeply tuned and possible more semi-custom microcode/silicon than we all anticipated. I’m very curious about Oculus Quest 2 link cable performance, or other inside-out VR workloads.
Haven’t thought about that use case, interesting one.
Currently using airlink for games like Half-life Alyx and superhot without any issue, however for games like beat saber native app is much less latency.
Edit: spelling error
@@oleost “HF Alex”? Does that stand for “Ha Flife Alex”? Or maybe you meant “HL Alex”?
it's simply the generational progress - AMD didnt' release a properly new GPU architecture for APUs/SOCs for quite some time and the old one was already slow when it was new
@@oleost It's Half-Life Alyx
@45:00 I've gamed happily over 4g connecting with moonlight to my home machine , on a normal cable line here (like a 300mbit/50mbit homeline ).
Moonlight has options to fix frame pacing of the stream (uses proper frame pacing on the client side ). No heaps of bandwidth of required at all.
How dare they not let DF do review as other outlets??? Unacceptable!
Are Valve worried that DF's in depth analysis might scare people away?
@@afropovic Why did they give it to gamers nexus then
DF has way more credibility than any other outlet. That's what pisses me off. I like Linus but that dudes knowledge on games performance is a joke compared to the digital foundry. DF is A.B.A.P.
@@WayStedYou cuz gamers nexus ain't A.B.A.P. like digital foundry and the ps triple.
The people that got them are PC channels, it's a PC like Valve have constantly said and as much as I love Digital Foundry it's very much console orientated.
Plus Gamers nexus will go into far deeper analysis than DF ever will. Linus has close to 10 times the reach of DF on youtube, it doesn't take much thought to realise why those channels were chosen to showcase a new PC
Not just steam games, I think Emulation on this device is gonna be amazing
Omg that end edit 💀
Audi you're killing me, keep up the great work.
I would like to see the Deck get an update every 4 or so years. I wouldn't mind an update around the same time as new gpu line's launch. The thing about the steam deck that troubles mee less about refresh's than other hardware is that it is running PC software, so you won't have to worry so much about exclusive games. Oculus Quest 2 was barely out before RE4 was exclusive, even though it ran fine side-loaded onto a Quest 1, or when a new iPhone comes out and there are games or apps you can't use. the people with the old steam deck will still be able to play games at lower settings, or sell them on the used market and buy the new one how the gpu market works.
I loved the Bourne joke, Rich looked so proud :)
The ps2/wii version of the force unleashed is better than the 360/ps3 version IMO (aside from the visuals)
1:18:27 Correction the xbox series x and PS5 are on Zen 2 for the cpu not Zen 3 .
What I live about DF, aside from the in depth content etc, is they don't involve politics. At least, not that I've seen. It's all about games and that's how it should be.
1:08:00 The 3080 and PS5 were difficult to pre-order in the US.
Waiting for you guys to take a look at Cyberpunk 2077 on XSX/PS5.
You can bet it's all hands on deck (no, not that Deck) at DF today to cover the new gen CP2077 upgrades.
The good news is that unlike i.e., Dying Light 2, they've implemented DRS here. That should help.
I'm going to dig in tonight.
@@griffgames9538 Yeah. Going to reinstall it later. Too bad I already 100 percented it more or less, but I still want to see the improvements.
Edit - Played it last night. It was... Fine. HDR is slightly better, seems the whether is dynamic more often, it is slightly sharper, slightly smoother. The crowd density seems to be greater. It still has a few issues, and I would not say it's hugely improved over what was already on XSX, but it's good. It annoyingly reset perks automatically, but I couldn't tell if it was broken because it didn't seem to change my abilities in gameplay.
The three amigos 😎 quality as always guys 🙌🏼
I loved the 8800GT. I remember walking in to best buy on that day back when it was supposed to launch in 2007 and had seen a BFG 8800GT SC for $379. That card was fantastic and was the first card that blew me away. I had upgraded from a 8600GT XXX and it was a huge leap.
Cyberpunk hype babyyyyyyyy, we need content
In regards to the SD, I understand being critical of specs, especially when competition is involved, but we're a little jaded aren't we? Maybe steam is just like "look, we made steam deck to offer your library on the go with full, intuitive function. We didn't build the show stopper device for the uptight gamer. You want that? Well now it costs more."
Too bad it only supports 1% of my Steam library so far
I thought the Nintendo Direct was quite solid. I really wish the average player would just appreciate what's on offer rather than getting butt-hurt that a particular game hasn't been covered. Lots of strong content on display in the presentation as-is even without games like BOTW2 or Prime 4. Kirby in particular looks amazing--it really gives me Mario 3D World vibes.
Funniest outro gag you've ever done, you would be insane to not do something with that lol
OK, I can't read the title. John, what is the schmup on the TV behind you?
Thats one thing i find interesting is how not all fields of tech advance the same like battery tech hasnt really changed much since the 90s but chipsets power draw and usage is like night and day.
The steam deck ideally should have a battery save mode which automatically switches the games preset to a little lower settings, maybe dials down the resolution. But that would be very hard to implement on a game by game basis. That’s where a platform like the switch has the edge
We’ll need to keep the Steam Deck plugged to the wall for a long gaming session. When are they going to create nuclear batteries for handheld devices?
To be fair, would you really want to hold any portable gaming device for longer then a hour and half? I suspect that would hurt my hand even on a mobile phone which is lighter than the Steam Deck or Switch lol.
Batteries are one of the techs, that are in dire need a technical breakthrough going forward. It's not just mobile and wireless devices that are suffering with short battery life and long re-charge times, but also other things like electric cars. There is some hope though, there has been a few advancements been made lately. However, I doubt we see those come into effect, for a few more years yet.
It would be great if the developers add an option for presets, so anyone can make a preset and post somewhere so others can use it as well and you just have to copy the file
Console users now focus way too much on output resolution rather than visual fidelity. Making a game native 4k/60 fps just to hit some arbitrary benchmark isn't better than lowering the resolution and pushing the fidelity.
When UE5 comes out 1080p or 1440p is gonna be the standard for 60 fps modes, but it'll still look better than games we have now.
Jim Power sound track is the intro song!
I remember when Shadow of Mordor came out there was an HD texture pack you could install and it recommended more than 4GB of VRAM which was the most any card had at the time aside from a Titan. There was a mild freakout everywhere about it.
Man I would've loved DLSS in the consoles but it's of course impossible.
I do often wonder what the consoles would look like if PS had gone with Nvidia.
Would have probably made back compatibility harder but it would have been sweet.
Should I get a Switch OLED or wait it out for another iteration (4k / Pro / 2)?
Can't wait for the cyberpunk next gen update video!
When I saw Portal I thought it was the orange box at first, then realized it was a Portal Collection. Really cool stuff but still wish it was the orange box tbh.
The people still buying GTA 5 are the kids that weren't old enough or allowed to play GTA within the past 10 years.
Plus, don't you get some GTA Online currency bullshit with every purchase? So people are skimming CDkey sites for super cheap GTAV keys to milk those credits.
/facepalm.
Edit: But hey, if people enjoy it, have at it.
John attempts to write a creepypasta: 50:33