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Hello Steam Deck

Update: A year later.

No GPU upgrade for me

After years of holding off upgrading the GPU in my PC (an old GTX960) I finally gave up on ever upgrading this for any serious gaming. There are multiple reasons for this:

  • I’m not a hardcore gamer. I like the idea of being a gamer, but in reality I don’t have much time for this1.
  • GPUs are getting expensive. While the technical progress is impressive, I’m not ready to pour almost (or even more) then 1k€ into hardware that has not much other use than gaming. One could argue that other software like Adobe Lightroom will also use this power, but I don’t like lying to myself.
  • I’m somewhat of a perfectionist. It would really annoy me to look at low-res pictures on my UWQHD monitor, which makes the cheaper GPU alternatives not that feasible.
  • Those shiny new GPUs draw a lot of power. I’m always looking for ways to save the planet2, and a multi 100W GPU seems counterproductive for this.

Consoles?

Besides my aging PC, I also own a XBox One S. This thing has a multitude of problems3. Given that I rarely find time to play, anything else but a complete shutdown would be a colossal waste of electrical energy. In “Sleep Mode” it is consuming 11(!) Watts.

A typical day where I find some time to play looks like this:

  • Turn on the XBox, wait some minutes for it to boot.
  • Given that some time went by since I played last time, inevitably the XBox will greet me with a message that there’s the most important and required system update available that I need to install now.
  • Downloading and applying a multi-gigabyte update of course takes some time. In the meantime I do anything but gaming until this is completed. I don’t want to stare at a screen while doing updates that take a long time, so I’ll come back a couple of hours later.
  • Now I finally start my game, probably something like “Tomb Raider”. Of course, we cannot proceed until we download an update. It’s just ~30GB.
  • I’ll start the update and call it a day.
  • The next day I probably have other things to do and shutdown the XBox again.
  • Let some time pass.
  • Repeat.

Steam Deck?

So the perfect gaming device costs less than 1k€ and allows me to start a game without preparation. It does not need to run the latest and greatest games. As I had not much time to play for a couple of years, I have a lot of catch up to do and I’m happy with older (and cheaper) games.

I had a chance to get my hands on a Steam Deck of a friend and was sold. A portable console where I can play a big chunk of my ever growing Steam catalog of unplayed games? Count me in.

First impressions

After a couple of days my impressions are still very good. The solid standby mode allows me to jump in and out of a game when I have a couple of minutes to play. I was finally able to complete “Hitman: Absolution”, almost 7 years after I started it. Now that shows what a serious gamer I am.

As a software developer I’m impressed how well all this games developed for Windows actually work on this Linux system. To everybody who was involved in getting this to work: Congratulations, really good work!

Let’s see how this story goes on…

  1. Well, a week has 24x7=168 hours. Substract 60 hours for work and commute, 8 hours of sleep per day, and we end up at 52 hours of free time remaining peer week. So this is not really about “no time”, but about priorities. Which, I guess, is a good thing. ↩︎

  2. OK, mostly as a way to save money. But this sounds more eco-friendly. I do believe that behavior that harms the environment should be expensive though, even if this makes my life more expensive. Society should be designed in a way that rewards doing the right thing. The problem being of course that everybody has a different definition of “right”. ↩︎

  3. My problems, I’m not saying this a bad device. Quite to the contrary, I think Microsoft is doing a lot of things right, especially with backwards compatibility. ↩︎