Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Damn, that's kinda a holy grail of game storefronts
Yeah, and it makes a ton of sense for Steam Deck/Machine/Frame
I remember seeing someone play a Steam Deck in an airport awhile ago and the 3D game had a HORRIBLE frame rate.
To the person playing to their credit they didn't seem bothered but I couldn't look away for a couple of seconds it was so shockingly bad. It made me think that a lot of people may have not really had the importance of framerate explained to them and what the relevant numbers are (film is 25, 30 is generally minimum for games and 60 is best).
Almost by definition we aren't going to know those people but that is because if you are here you are probably a nerd, so this is good for all those blindspots. No one deserves a poor framerate if they don't have to, unless you are Mitch McConnell.
in my case, i would play on potato graphics to get good fps, 60 is the minimum, 30 is an exception. i can FEEL it in my play if its below 100. like not only see it but it feels progressively bad the lower it is
Serious question: does the difference between 60 and 100 even matter if your monitor is capped to 60Hz?
It will ensure the frame being sent to your display is more recent and represent the game state the best.
It depends on the game. If the game doesn't tie input handling to framerate, then yes, because your inputs will feel better.
Lowest I can go is 20fps, anything below is too nauseating. I learned to cope because I modded Skyrim to the point of no return, and I could only get max 20fps with a decent rig and a ton of optimising. Hair physics and 4k trees definitely worth it 👍
I grew up playing RuneScape at 15 frames per second on the crappy school computers, so I'm used to it.
Yeah, I started gaming when games were bought on cassette tape. Pretty much anything is an improvement. Though TBF some stuff back then was pretty cool at the time.
I played first the Wing Commander + special operations with 8088XT 10MHz, 768kB RAM system. FPS was 20 when things were quiet, but when the shit hit the fan it was below 10.
A neat trick you can do with heavier games on ... at least an OLED Deck (not sure if this is doable on the LCD version)...
You target 45 fps, min, lock the max frame rate at something like 45-50, then, use VRR set at a 1:2 ratio, so you get 45 fps at 90hz.
In many games, this generally, at least imo, ends you up with a smoother and potentially graphically higher quality than just targeting 60 fps / 60 hz.
You can also use Optiscaler / DeckyFrameGen to basically hack different/better ability to do upscaling and framegen into a fair number of games that otherwise don't normally support it.
For instance, the OptiScaler people recently, successfully managed to get FSR 4 working on RX 6000 and 7000 cards, which also works on a Deck.
They essentially reverse engineered the previously leaked FSR4 driver to work on INT 8.
I didn't think Deck supported VRR? If you have VRR you just cap your frame rate at 37 FPS or whatever and the screen syncs to that and refreshes at 37 Hz. What you're describing sounds like old school vsync.
setsubyou got it more correct, my terminology is a bit off.
Yeah, you can lock the refresh rate at basically 15hz intervals (i think, last time i checked?), which is not true VRR, but, if you take the time to configure profiles and graphics settings per game, get stable and consistent frame rates, and then match the configurable refresh rate to that...
... this is sorta close to the ... idea/performance of what true VRR is going for, it just doesn't all work 'automagically'.
I have an OLED, not an LCD, so yeah it looks like the LCD tops out at 60hz.
So with an LCD, you could aim for basically 'always a bit above 30 fps' and then 60hz, for that 1:2 ratio, and with an OLED, aim for 'always a bit above 45 fps', and then 90hz, for the same 1:2 ratio.
Its not the same, of course, as actually having 60 or 90 fps, but, as long as your fps never dips below the screen refresh rate, it looks/feels smoother than doing a 30fps or 45fps traditional vsync.
But of course, you'll probably only need to do this for... significantly graphically heavy games... tons of less graphically intense / better optimized games will not need this level of tinkering min maxxing.
It doesn’t have VRR but it does have a configurable refresh rate. So e.g. if a game runs at a stable 40 fps you can run the display at 40 Hz too (or 80 Hz for the OLED model) and then you don’t get the uneven frame spacing you’d get from vsync with 40 fps on a 60 Hz display. With VRR the screen would also adjust to whatever frame rate the game produces even if it’s not stable, and the Deck doesn’t do that. But being able to get 40 fps with uniform frame timing instead of the 30 fps you’d have to use if the display was locked to 60 Hz (LCD model) or 90 Hz (OLED model) is a huge difference.
I don't have a PC. My only way to play PC games is through a Deck. I'm at the point where I'm just happy to be able to play these games, period, let alone on the go.
shit, was that me? that sounds like me. cyberpunk runs pretty bad on the deck, bg3 is pretty choppy… but older games like DS1 and DS2 seem to run pretty smooth for me, but I’ve always been bad at noticing quality.
But but but the 30% cut is too high it's not justified and the epic game store takes only 12%!!!!!!111
Also note that nobody was saying this before Tim Swiney started trying to break into the marlet
You can agree that this is great without being stupid. 12% would be great for developers. This is great for consumers. They're different things. It'd be nice for Steam to take less of the developer's money. I hope you can agree with that.
As long as Steam can give at least 25.8 percent more sales than Epic (or other place that offers 12%), it's a better deal for developers as well.
(math: (1-0.12)/(1-0.30)=1.2571=1+25.71%)
By that logic valve would be justified with even 95% cut if network efect was even stronger. That's stupid logic that only thinks in terms of working with what you have. Valve already takes a cut and not a hard value. It's in their very business to increase sales and they shouldn't be additionally rewarded for such because by increased sales they already get the money.
Fair enough - I was thinking in terms of choice rather than justification. A better question, then, would be: what is a fair percentage given Steam's services both developer-side and player-side (more satisfied players are also a perk for developers)?
Plus, their investment into Linux gaming and FOSS in general are preventing PC gaming from being locked down to a singled OS that becomes a walled garden.
Only if we assume a sale not made on Steam is a sale lost. If Steam didn't get the sale and the purchase was made somewhere with a higher return instead, the dev would make more from the sale. Odds are, if Valve didn't have almost full market control, people would still buy games, they'd just buy them somewhere else.
I've had a long-winded discussion about that a few days ago. Yes, 12% would be great for devs, but guess what, 0% would be even better.
Steam takes care of the entire e-commerce and distribution side, which is very expensive. Just look up what publishers used to take back in the day for taking over game distribution, that was like 70%. Not exactly a time you want to go back to as indie dev.
If you think a 12% cut would be viable, idk. However, epic just recently laid off 1000 people so idk how financially successful that company currently is.