I’m curious to other peoples experiences? I used my deck with the out of the box OS for ages and my first experience with Windows before wasn’t great but coming back to it now… I’ve played a lot of AAA titles and some mid-tier games too. Especially for games that people complain a lot about on this sub and in other places about performance issues, when using windows on the deck it seems like a completely different experience?
Games run a lot smoother/faster, less FPS drops, less intensive on CPU etc.
There were a couple of things I had to adjust but for factors that didn’t affect much the actual smoothness of gameplay:
- For online games, definitely find out how to revert to the Windows base wifi driver and do not at any point use the recommended steam driver, it is awful and you’ll have bad experiences on most online games
- Download and configure Handheld Companion. This is a life saver and changed the game for me
I’ve been running Windows for a few months now and the difference to SteamOS is insane!
My most recent experience (what I’m currently playing) is Cities Skylines 2, and whilst all I see is it being dogged on (in all fairness from everyone on the internet), it seems unplayable on SteamOS but even though it doesn’t look great and still has quite a bit of FPS drop, I’m on a 100k pop and it’s quite smooth? Even CS:1 gets shat on for performing awfully on SteamOS but I’ve been playing it on windows and I don’t see what everyone’s talking about?? I get 40-60 FPS, have experienced no lag at all and it does make my deck a bit hot but at 700k pop, I don’t expect anything less. It’s a great experience!
The thought of having to go back to SteamOS actually irks me and puts me off ever touching my deck again, considering how a lot of the games ran on there for me and the hoops to playing non SteamOS games through running stuff on Linux.
How have you guys faired with the Windows vs SteamOS?
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The problem with Windows wasn’t really running games per se, it was the fact that Windows as an OS is designed for a full monitor, mouse, and keyboard setup and has very few allowances to play in a device like this, plus the need to install (and keep updated) a bunch of third party tools to make the user experience not suck.
GTAV, Forza*, Assassins Creed, Hitman 3… Loads of games run better on Windows.
Cyberpunk, TLOU, Hogwarts, Doom Eternal… Loads of games also run better on SteamOS.
It is entirely down to the game you are playing. The only logical solution is to dual boot.
may i ask, is the sleep / wake experience same / similar in windows compared to the steam os?
It’s mostly the same but some games I can put it to sleep and it’ll have no effect and then other games will completely need a full restart or force shutdown of the game
you are talking single player only games, right? multiplayer games all need to restart or at least reconnection, obviously. in short: the sleep / wake is clearly inferior in windows ‘mode’