Many people have, like me, realized that they use their deck more than their main rig.
For the last few years I’ve gone from 1080p to 1440p to 4k to 800p and don’t think my main box will need to get beefier until the next big VR advancement. My machine is already three years old. I may rock it for another three at this pace.
How many of you will be laying off of CPU/GPU upgrades since handheld are so compelling?
I got the steam deck recently because I have a 9 month old son, so it’s currently the only way to get a little gaming in here and there. Will probably not upgrade my main rig in until it’s where i primarily game again.
Frankly, between the deck and the rising energy prices here in .de, I haven’t booted the rig in months. I game on the deck, I work on the laptop (docked with three displays). That’s 40W vs 200W, definitely makes a difference on the invoice from my energy supplier.
I find the difference hard to believe, do you count your displays to that power consumption? With my desktop the overall power draw is something like 220W (when not gaming) and about 150W of that are just my displays.
Absolutely! I just enjoy tech, so buying the latest tech and building the best PC I can is a lot of fun. I think I find the tech aspect of gaming more interesting than the games themselves lol. What I am happy about is that the Steam Deck has helped to push Linux gaming forward, and since I run Linux on my desktop and laptop PCs as well as my Deck, everything benefits.
I also preordered a ROG Ally, because while I love my Deck, I want to try out Linux on AMD’s latest handheld chips.
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If you haven’t seen it already, ETA PRIME did a ROG Ally Linux video already since he has a review unit. He ran ChimeraOS on it and performance looked quite good on a lot of games.
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I think I will still upgrade my rig in the future, but with the skyrocketing price of components, I don’t see myself upgrading soon.
Honestly, the age of gaming laptops is here IMO. Most gaming laptops come with insanely good specs for $1500-2000 and with the advent of eGPUs you dont sacrifice on AAA game gfx when at home.
I got a lenovo legion 2 years ago for $1750, and have been able to play every AAA game release on it without issues without an eGPU. Some of them I have had to run one step down from Ultra, but I am still able to play an amazing looking game without problems.
True, how funny that prebuilt PCs became a better deal lol.
Depending on the Hardware you’re rocking, you may need not to do so anyway. At least I believe so, I think we’re slowly re-entering the timeline of massively optimizing games to be playable on more systems.
Again, this is all my assumption, but because of the rising prices of PC Hardware, a huge divide has been made in what is basically possible on an average Gamers hardware. Thus I believe that Developers would be fools to create the most beautiful unoptimized mess for the RTX 5090 TI + Ryzen 9 9800X3D, but focus more on what everyone has to get more sales in.
Hope you’re right. I hate the trend of half-assed releases.
I’ve got a good configuration, so I’m not interested in upgrading right now, but even then, the bad optimization of games makes it a bad experience.
AAA titles released recently are mostly unoptimized messes, I don’t see that changing soon, they rely on things like DLSS to have a “decent” experience, what a shame what gaming has become, there’s still many good indie games tho.
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Got myself a refurbished 11th gen Framework earlier this year, and while it’s (mostly) not an option for gaming it’s a joy to work with! And the fact that long term I can just pop in a new mobo and possibly add an egpu as well is the icing on the cake!
I will always upgrade my PC as it is a sort of Basestation of my Gaming Sphere.
My Steam Deck is more my trusty travel companion when I am on the go and still have the itch to play one of my games every now and then! (Also a complete sanity lifesaver when you are waiting for layovers! :D)
I don’t have a Deck, but if I did, my use case for it vs my rig would be significantly different, and my pc would likely continue to follow my current upgrade plans.
VR sim racing fwiw.
I have an index and HOTAS for VR flight sims, but I think a foviated headset will make my 3080s > performance good for a couple more generations.
Someone has to deliver beer to the outer planet miners in Elite Dangerous!
It really depends on if I get VR in the future and how my system handles that. For now I enjoy my Steam Deck a whole lot and it is definitely a reason for me to postpone upgrades to my main rig.
I use my Steam Deck daily, but more often than not I am streaming from my PC upstairs to my Deck. I get way better battery life, can play non-Steam things like Emulation with nicer outputs, and for graphic intensive games it’s pretty good.
Having said that, I don’t see myself upgrading for the next few cycles. The games I do play natively are running fine on Deck, and when streaming I don’t need 4K 9388647832 frames so I think my current rig will be satisfactory for longer because of my Steam Deck usage.
I do this a lot too, have a steam link I used to use all the time before my deck. The latency is not noticable on the same network but there’s a lot of little things that taint the streaming experience for me, never seems to go smoothly. I’m curious if others have that same experience.
I’ve mainly had issues with either the controls not getting passed through, or an issue where the frame rate jumps really high (like 2500) then drops and gets stuck around 20 until I force the deck to update the display’s framerate.
Once I’m in game things are usually fine but getting it goong can be a headache.
That used to be a problem for me when I had a Steam link in Australia. I have not experienced that issue with the Deck at all. Are you using the Steam streaming service, or something like Moonlight?
A lot of people talk bad about the Steam service, but it has always worked fine for me. I just use Moonlight for things off other services like EA Origin, or for when I want to play some emulation stuff on my PC.
No issues for me on my end, I could just be lucky though!
I’m using the steam service, even for emulated games. I’ve just added the exe for yuzu (or whatever else I want to stream) as a non-steam game. Sometimes it does just work but the majority of the time I have to fiddle to get it going. It’s definitely better than the steam link days though so hopefully it’ll keep getting smoother over time.
I would consider moonlight for Yuzu specifically. Has made TOTK on my TV a flawless experience!
TOTK is exactly what I’ve been using it for recently, I’ll definitely give that a shot
Yeah, definitely try it! Setup is a little bit of a pain, but once it is working I have had 0 issues streaming Yuzu to my Deck, plugged into my TV.
I tend to only upgrade the PC when I start to feel it, but I don’t see the deck changing that. I’m a kbd+mouse gamer at heart and there’s too many games I’d just prefer to play that way, in front of a bigger screen.
My computer is a Frankenstein of components from the past 15 years or so. I probably won’t stop upgrading, simply because when something goes bad, replacing it with something better is usually reasonable enough to make sense.
Also because whatever gremlin lives in there causes crashes around 9 months after every upgrade. At this point, the entire thing has been ship of theseus’d at least once (usually 2-3 times), so I have no idea what it could be. But each time, I can narrow it to a specific part, which I replace and then it goes away for another 9-ish months.
Edit: I got distracted and didn’t answer the question. Tl;Dr: No, because using the deck for something intensive or performance dependent like competitive or AAA titles is insane to me.
Not really for me. I still use my main rig more. But I use my deck more for indies and emulation. For new games I still want to use my desktop. If handheld PCs keep improving I could see this changing for me however. I’m kind of obsessed with handheld gaming devices and if they could reliably play all newer titles I would make the full switch over
My steam deck is wonderful, but a long way away from my gaming rig. KB/M and a comfy chair is king.
I use the two pretty differently, so I think I’ll continue upgrading/refreshing my PC for a while.
Of course I will. I’d rather play with a keyboard and mouse for most of my games, plus I use my desktop for a lot more than gaming. I already upgraded from 1080p to 1440p monitors and I have no desire to go higher than that, but more hard drive space is always a boon. It may be longer in between full desktop upgrades though, used to be roughly every 4 years but I’ve had this machine for 4 years already with a GPU upgrade about half-way through and I could go for another couple of years (barring some catastrophe) on it.
