Valve's Steam Deck is an excellent portable machine for 720p gaming, packing last-gen console performance in a compact shell - but can we push the system further? With a 4K display as a target output we're going to drag the Deck as far as we can into docked, home theatre gaming. This may seem farcical but new second generation reconstruction techniques - FSR 2.0 and TSR - have just hit commercial games, providing massive performance gains for high-res rendering. Plus, there's a wide library of older and less technically challenging content that the Steam Deck may be able to accelerate to high resolutions on raw performance alone. So can we actually achieve a good docked TV experience with the Steam Deck on a modern 4K display - or are the demands of high-res gaming just too much to ask from the low-power, low-bandwidth AMD APU at its heart?
However, updates to aid docked play are arriving regularly. For example, it was originally impossible to run games in SteamOS's gaming mode at resolutions higher than 1280 x 800 for instance, even when connected to a 1080p or 4K display. After a June update however, it's now possible to set the display resolution to anything between 640x400 and a full 4K, although this applies to both portable and docked play and may need to be changed per title, which I had to do for our testing.
Dishonored [portable]
SteamOS's technical issues in docked play are the real problem here in my view. The operating system is often unresponsive, games can be laggy, gamepad support is mediocre, and there are a variety of configuration issues that need to be addressed. A traditional console, or even a decent Windows PC running in Steam's Big Picture mode, provides a better experience for television play. Hopefully these issues can be resolved, but for now the Steam Deck simply fares much better as a portable-only system. 2ff7e9595c
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