[Digital Foundry] 'Too Big' For Steam Deck? TLOU Part 1, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4 + More Tested!

Draugoth

Gold Member


Oliver's back with another in his regular analysis of the most demanding PC titles and the extent to which you can get a playable experience from them on Steam Deck. There's no holds barred here as the Valve handheld tries to take on nightmare games like The Last of Us Part 1, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space Remake and even Redfall.
 
They seems playable at 30 FPS, but not sure if it's a great experience, it's being dragged kicking and screaming.
Maybe for Ally or Gen 2 it's better. Still great work on Proton having day 1 AAA games just a few years ago on Linux would be unthinkable.
 
For a gen 1 machine that you could get for 400 bucks it's impressive. Looking forward to seeing what the deck successor can do.
 
It has been almost 20 years since I last played a PC game at 240p :messenger_astonished:. (Riddick on a 64mb Ati 8500 plugged into my tv).
 
Damn, TLOU and Returnal looking like some pixel art demaster here.

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Queue the "why couldn't Nintendo just have better specs on launch" arguments that will then be in favour of this performance.
 
That Hogwarts Legacy performance on the Deck is going to make the Switch release very amusing.

You can only delay it so much, Avalanche, you can't escape its fate.
 
For all the tech shit that DF spouts, all the optimized settings stuff, the fact they don't use CryoUtilities on their deck (they've never mentioned it afaik), means jack shit if they say a game works well or not on Steam Deck.
 
About as well as expected, I think. Steam Deck is, largely, a pocket PS4. Which is honestly pretty amazing, but it certainly has its limits. I love my Steam Deck, and hope we continue to see this space expand :)
 
I like my deck but it really is too far out of its depth with games like that. If it is your only way to play them then sure it is just capable enough to deliver a mostly playable experience, but if you can play them literally anywhere else (other than switch) then you should. The Deck to me is an excellent PC/Console companion, but not a replacement. Just like the PSP wouldn't have been considered a replacement for the PS3 or the Vita for the 4. The fact you can remote play to it from your pc/console is also great if you like portable gaming inside your house.
 
Somehow Dead Space stutters less on my Steam Deck than on my PC.

That should be defacto on Steam deck as it's a known closed piece of hardware. Compiling shaders pre release should be done by any devs worth a damn. So it should match a console for that aspect.
 
That's the same price as a PS5 though. And it runs it pretty bad.
Yes but the PS5 is a console. Not an all in one solution like the deck. You're not going to get PS5 level performance in a deck like device for quite some time. Certainly not for 400.
 
These atrocious ports seem to push the CPU to its brink. IMO the telling of poorly coded games. Hogwarts Legacy is really just being savage to CPU cores despite being a fairly simplistic game. It's a showcase of how disappointing devs have become in actually taking advantage of technology in a positive manner. Instead current-gen horsepower is used to just bypass massive CPU load since they no longer need shit to work on Jaguar cores. It's a sad state of things that tech progress is being used like this. Steam Deck almost becomes a decent test of what these devs are doing to satisfy low end gamers. These aren't Crysis-tier paradigm shifts. They're all fairly standard video games.
 
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