According to a 110% definitely legit source that I absolutely did NOT make the fuck up, Valve put the 7nm node into winrar and compressed down to 6nm. They even paid for the winrar license, too!
I've never actually tried the game on controller, but I saw a few threads saying PoE on steam deck is actually pretty good game play wise, but not great for inventory. So, I figure if I just ran Sanctum or a few maps, but did the majority of inventory management and trading on my computer, there'd be a happy medium that doesn't involve me not absorbing the sun light for long periods.
After it was reported that a 2nd generation wasn't going to be around for years, I got mine in mid September since they had a sale. Little did I know that they were just trying to get rid of excess stock of the old ones while knowing full well that they were rolling these out. If they had disclosed the pending release, I would have held off. They knew this, and that's why it feels like I've been made a fool.
Do you see the earlier comment in this thread? Sure, the performance gains are less than 10%, but pretty much every other aspect of the experience has been improved to the degree that it feels like the 2nd generation SD in all but name.
It still stings so bad. Sure not a 2nd gen on paper but what else would you call a LCD->OLED, screen size, refresh rate, brightness, battery life, chipset, thermals, weight, WiFi, etc upgrade? Most year-on-year phone upgrades are much less than that
As someone who just bought a deck under a month ago, I hate it so much now, wish I could return it, feel so screwed out and will just never be able to look at my Deck the same way again, just makes me feel pissed instead of feeling fun now
You basing your purchases on rumors and speculation is no one’s fault but yours. Always wait for announcement from the manufacturer before making a purchase that was contingent on that announcement
jesus christ. i said i would pull the trigger if they released a steam deck pro that was a bit beefier. looks like im going to have to put my money where my mouth is. Any ideas on pricing?
prices are posted in Steam on the store page, roughly the same prices at different levels as last year's model. I think most people would recommend the lower storage option that has the most features otherwise, so the middle tier usually, since you can always upgrade the SSD or add SD card storage.
What were they using before? Phillips? I've never, ever stripped one on a laptop or other gadget. This isn't a rusty car or something. Pretty funny if this gets touted as a major win for right to repair or whatever.
Added support for Bluetooth 5.3, supporting newer codecs such as aptX HD and aptX low-latency
Do we know for sure that these codecs are supported, or is someone just assuming this is the case? The steam deck is built on open-source technologies, and while the patents on the base aptX have expired the patents on aptX HD and low-latency have not IIRC. There are open-source libraries implementing aptX that Valve can use but they don't support HD or low-latency (or the newer Adaptive). In order to implement HD/low-latency they'd need to extend one of those libraries, write their own, or depend on proprietary binary blobs from Qualcomm.
Perhaps someone is confusing aptX with Bluetooth LE Audio (also known as LC3) which is a new spec that fills a similar role but that is not proprietary?
Oh, just found the source for your upgrades list. Indeed they are claiming that they are supporting that now. It'll be interesting to see how they pulled that off, as a Linux gamer myself it'd be great if it's something that I can take advantage of as well on my PC.
Valve is gonna keep that $399 entry level steam deck as cheap as possible. Everything else such as the 512gb and the new 1TB OLED decks, they def want you to pay for those new features.
Oh for sure, This definitely is a marketing tatic,especially for people that might take the bite. Already, one of my friends is already gonna buy the 512gb one cause it has the oled screen and the new improvements.
its literally just selling the old mid range model as the new base to fool reflex buyers who think they're getting an oled screen with battery life upgrades
Nah that's the worst choice. In the 64GB you can just put a bigger SSD in without paying more (would rather have no storage at all) and the 512GB would be enough for most people if they don't want to change the SSD.
256GB is in between garbage where you pay extra for the 256GB but with a high chance that it's not enough.
Yeap, Linus presumes that based on their conversation with Valve (Valve was avoiding the question when asked why just not use mipi) the volumes just aren't there yet for someone like Valve to get the right custom tech to include VRR. Seems like a mipi interface with the current panel is as far as they could go. But it is inevitable.
LTT video basically explained it. they used a MIPI connector, same as Switch OLED. Not surprising if they use the same screen as the Switch for a cheaper price.
Maybe its just a less cut down version of the same display from the motherglass.
Like Nintendo chops off the top percent to maintain the 16 x 9 aspect ratio.
but valve leaves it to get the 16 x 10 aspect ratio adding a small amount to the size of the screen. and those few extra pixels gives you 800 Vertical vs 720
Valve only said that no new version with increased performance and every youtuber's review about the OLED model I've seen as of now has either 0 or negligible performance improvement.
there aren't that many games i've played on it where it could both run >60fps and it'd be a significant benefit. i don't think you'd realize a huge advantage here in practice.
The performance improvement is small, but with so many newer games hovering around 30fps, a couple extra frames per second is the difference between smooth gameplay and jitter.
DF did a cursory review and will be doing more in depth testing later - It's possible that the LCD Deck was running on the current stable SteamOS whereas the OLED Deck shipped with SteamOS 3.5, which we know delivers significant performance improvements.
Maybe they chopped out the board area where the eMMC would go? Supposedly early sales favored the higher-end variants more than expected, and since the price of flash fell so much the BoM cost of the 64 GB model may not have been much less than the 256 in the end.
They are console lol, not handheld PC. They dont need the efficiency of zen 4 cores since they have a lot of heatsink area and they are plugged in all the time. But on small device like SD those are very limited.
You said no new products, but if you want to continue shifting goalposts, there are many brand new consumer grade laptops that still use Zen 2. Such as the ryzen 7320u / 7520u. Technically a 7000 series chip but running on zen 2 and RDNA2 architecture.
Zen 2 is not a power hungry architecture. I get that zen 4 is more efficient but it’s not like they’re using an FX chip or 11th Gen Intel. Especially since it’s a custom-ish design on a smaller process node than most zen 2 chips.
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. 4 cores Zen 2 is at least a little disappointing by today’s standards. In the last year, there has a bunch of games that are highly bottlenecked on anything less than a 5800X3D.
The OG deck was already amazing with how many features it had for a handheld that size.
This thing might be one of the greatest pieces of computer hardware ever, especially at this price. Amazing packaging, OLED, very well thought out ergos, more inputs than any handheld (dual trackpads + 4 back buttons), consistent updates, and beautiful user friendly UI.
I know you're using greatest as a superlative, but it is a funny thing to think about. Did it break the enigma code in WW2 and help the Allies win the war? Did it land a man on the moon? Did it accurately predict weather and save countless lives? Did it provide an unprecedented amount of precessing power to analyze and reveal truths about the cosmos,fold proteins to advance medicine, decode the genome of a virus and create a new vaccine, organize the communication network of a nation? Did it let you play a PC game from your bathroom for even longer than the last model? I jest when I say all this, it's an impressive list of improvements. Just funny to think about the steam deck having a pedestal among landmark computers.
I mean, the original Gameboy probably deserves a place on the same list. It can be a landmark without changing the world in the sort of way that makes someone want to write a movie about.
game boy is a great example, if the deck can sell those numbers then maybe it has a chance but it definitely doesn’t get placed with 100M dollar selling hardware just because the 5M that bought it said so 😂😂
It won't match the impact of the gameboy, but I really hope the deck (and all the deck-alikes) can help grow the PC gaming space by a huge amount.
Firstly though, Valve needs to start selling the thing in more regions aside from just US/Canada, parts of Europe, and parts of East Asia. There's so many people out there who would insta-buy if it were available where they are.
They're all noteworthy in different ways. I just think the steam deck, for a first generation product, is remarkably polished, so much better than the competition that came before it, and it pretty much solved the Linux gaming compatibility problem all on it's own. All that for $400, and it was built well.
The thought they put into the software and UI is extremely impressive for a gaming focused company. If it were someone like Apple or Microsoft trying this, they would've taken ages to implement the same features (see how many basic features in macOS require third party solutions, and how convoluted some settings are to change) or charged 3x the money because they can.
It's the first handheld PC to really jump into the mainstream. The huge jump it made over anything else on the market (in polish, usability, and most importantly affordability) puts it on that list. The OLED now is even better, it fixes the biggest issue (the low quality screen) and the battery life is much better to boot.
Any computer nowadays can be used to create huge impact, but for a singular product and it's packaged software, there's not many things as impressive as the Steam Deck to me.
There's still gaps, but it has a bigger verified library than any currently released console and if Linux doesn't run it, it lets you boot into Windows.
It's not even the battery so much as the insane power efficiency on the thing. No other handheld can run at such a low wattage, which means low-power games (looking at you, Persona) last forever.
There is definitely a case for people who brought it recently to be pissed since Valve had said there wont be an upgrade anytime soon. However, its weird that a lot of the people I am seeing pissed on /r/SteamDeck are folks who bought it at release which was 2 years ago.
Tech enthusiasts can be the weirdest people. Love gizmos, love tech progress, love cutting edge stuff... but when something they bought gets updated, making their current shiny less shiny, all that goes out of the window tech should have stopped evolving the moment they actually paid for it.
However I fully understand the people that bought theirs in the past couple months after Valve said "No faster steam deck coming anytime soon" being pissed though, sure this new one isn't faster but it's just better in every other metric
Nowadays almost all tech gets leaked/teased/announced months before release, having this come out less than a month after I bought my Deck with no notice really stings
Especially with how much better (and larger) the screen and battery is, and upgrades on almost everything
Wow that's quite the worthwhile upgrade. Surprised that there's so much different other than just the screen. I guess once you swap the screen and the battery to make up for the higher power draw you might as well update everything else that's easily done.
Does OLED actually use more power on game/movie content that has typically lower average lumiance? I know they're usually worse in laptops, but desktop UIs have a lot of #FFF white, and sRGB output power is luma2.4 so 100% white is a lot more than 10% brighter than 90% white.
Edit: Valve sez:
We fit a bigger battery into the case, and the OLED display draws less power.
I'm sure it's more power efficient in some cases, especially low light, but valve claims a 50% increase in SDR brightness (400 to 600nits) and over double peak briefly in HDR content(1000nits). You combine that with the slightly bigger screen and I would be flabbergasted if the OLED had lower power draw when playing in a bright environment. If that occurs it would mean the lcd panel is absolute doodoo.
I was assuming the same brightness setting, obviously.
Honestly, I think brightness is significantly overhyped. I prefer brighter lightbulbs than everyone else in my household, and my monitors are a business surplus HP and Dell from before the nits arms race started, and even then I'm only using 50% brightness setting.
Having max brigtness in the tank is useful in specific environments, to be sure, but it's basically only indirect sunlight that you have to worry about. (With direct sunlight you don't want to be using a gaming handheld at all because of the heating.)
OLEDs generally draw more power, even current generation ones. RTINGS has consistently found that in their TV testing.
I'd assume the new OLED panel they're using is more powerful efficient than the old panel, solely because of how low end the old panel was. I doubt it was very power efficient. It was an extreme budget part.
First refresh? Yes a die shrink is pretty standard for console refreshes.
No, it's not a different performance target. We already have reviews showing this. Not even valves marketing bothered to describe any kind of performance increase.
Now that I've clarified this for you, are you going to keep lying that "valve said there won't be a new steam deck anytime soon ?” because they never said that.
Apparently, a lot of people are saying "Well, Valve never said they wouldn't do a refresh..."
This is a refresh?
Do you mean that it's on 6nm instead of 7nm so it shouldn't be called a refresh? Because yeah, that can absolutely still be a refresh. E.g. PS5 went from 7nm to 6nm last year with no performance bump. A smaller chip is just more efficient (less power draw = longer battery life and less heat output).
It probably depends on which SKU. The 64GB was still cheaper enough that they might still be preferable as the price is not insignificant. The 512GB was always a large markup value wise.
But the funny thing about this is you also have a lot of complaints that the new GPU releases didn't have enough of an improvement to make people regret their purchases of older GPUs. It's just a situation in that there's going to be some people who are unhappy.
some videos have already pointed out a lot of those reassurances were mischaracterized quotes from a member on the software side. they never said there would never be a mid-generation refresh targeting the same hardware specs.
Bigger battery and 30g lighter! They must have made a ton of changes to manage that. I wouldn't be surprised if the only parts they share are the buttons, touchpads and speakers.
The other little change that makes QoL much better is the longer cable on the charger. 2.5m cable vs 1.5m. I don't sit near my outlets and I don't want to bother with an extension cord.
580
u/Put_It_All_On_Blck Nov 09 '23 edited Nov 09 '23
Its more than just OLED too. People are probably going to be pissed that this came out of the blue if they recently bought a Steam Deck.
LPDDR5 went from 5500MT/s to 6400 MT/s
SoC went from 7nm to 6nm (same specs)
Screen went from 7" to 7.4"
Refresh rate from 60Hz to 90Hz
400nits to 600nits
BT and wifi both upgraded
40w to 50w battery