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Comment by rlex | Hacker News Reader

There was interview with valve [1], and i'm pretty sure there will be no "steam deck 2" anytime soon. They want better battery and screen (tbh, my deck have pretty noticeable IPS glow in dark scenes), but that's it. So i expect "steam deck pro" to be like switch OLED compared to switch v1/v2 - better battery, better screen, same performance.

Also, keeping current deck hw specs will allow developers to focus on single device when optimizing game for deck. Some games (i.e. cyberpunk 2077) already have dedicated "steam deck" graphics preset. Some (i.e. sons of the forest) have steamdeck: true/false variable in debug window. Maybe we'll see dedicated deck support in some game engines? Who knows.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/23499215/valve-steam-deck-interview...

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I am more amazed that Cyberpunk can work at all on the deck. I thought it had such horrible performance optimization out the gate, that it was pulled from the Playstation. Surprised that any amount of patching could make it workable on a portable device.

Playstation version was worse probably than Windows one to begin with, that's why it was pulled. Windows version didn't have those issues.

What's interesting is that Proton (or more specifically vkd3d-proton) allows it to perform well even on Steam Deck.

Some major work also went into radv for that to happen.

Cyberpunk just have awful optimization. Sure, it's pretty (when it works) but even 4090 can't pull it on max settings at 4k@60fps after all the patches. People will say "it's 2 GPU generations ahead" but why would you release such game. It's just excuse to justify horrible optimization.

> Sure, it's pretty (when it works) but even 4090 can't pull it on max settings at 4k@60fps

That sounds strange, I'm using a 3090ti and can play it on 4K with more than 60fps (with DLSS). Maybe something else is the bottleneck in your setup? Or maybe you haven't tried it since the initial launch? Initially the performance was shit for me as well.

With DLSS, yeah. I expected game to run without DLSS on 4090. But it still can't hit 60fps even in desert. And nope, it's GPU bottleneck, it just uses all 100% of gpu power.

DLSS is nice, but you still can notice some flickering on neon stuff, hair, etc in cyberpunk with DLSS enabled.

It did but the game runs surprisingly smooth now on my Geforce 1080, when it used to stutter and frame dip a lot

The base PS4 and Xbox one are essentially two netbook cpus taped together with a GPU on top. The cpu in Steamdeck is about 2x-4x faster than the one in those consoles.

There is more to it than just that two netbook cpus taped together.

5nm zen4 can probably beat 7nm zen2 on efficiency, which would help battery life. Perhaps it isn’t a big enough factor to matter, however.

probably?? A 3-4 year newer CPU architecture, and a 2 generation improvement on FAB. Yes.

Why wouldn't newer APU help for lower battery drain though?

> keeping current deck hw specs will allow developers to focus on single device when optimizing game for deck

That argument is used by incumbent console makers to refresh their hardware once in 5 years which results in it being horribly behind and holding games back as well. So I don't really buy this logic.

Then you can get into a situation where the refresh Xbox plays games better than the original release. That confusion about, "Is this game compatible" is not great for consumers.

Isn't it exactly how it's on PC now? You get newer generation hardware and performance would be better. Except you can get it way more frequently than with consoles.

> holding games back as well

We're talking about portable games here. There will always be some drawback due to power limit and other issues. While i can relate to your sentence about games being horribly behind due to "platform parity", that probably won't work for portable platform.

Well, if it can run Cyberpunk 2077 which can be super demanding on even the most high end desktop, I'd say it's really up to developers to make their games scalable according to available resources, instead of thinking in terms of "I target this low end device only".

With such approach there is no need to stagnate available hardware on any platform.

Deckard VR headset comes first, and then the component will transfer to Deck production, is … how I’m speculating.

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