Steam Deck Docked: Can Valve’s Portable Produce Visuals Fit for a 4K TV?

The Steam Deck is the premiere handheld gaming PC, but can Valve's design - and AMD's low-power APU - produce visuals suitable for a 4K TV in docked mode? Oliver Mackenzie investigates how up-scaling tech and careful game selection can produce impressive results - and reveals a few issues that can hamper the docked experience.

[FoxbatStargazer]

Current beta updates now disable the screen when docked and allow you to render the Steam UI at a lower resolution, which helps greatly with hitching/freezing while outputting 4k. I think Valve will mostly have the software ready by the time their official dock is available.

[mechanicalmonk]

One thing the deck needs is dock specific settings. We need to be able to set external resolution, TDP and whatnot based on if the Deck is docked and powered. Otherwise docking the deck means changing a bunch of shit in menus for every damn game only to change it back once you're undocked.

[Games-txzc]

Remember that all of this is happening at less than 30 watts. Absolute monster of a device.

[chickenpasta]

Valve probably delayed the dock to work out the software kinks before it gets to users hands, which I can agree with. Steam Deck should be as seamless as possible for casual users so the adoption rate picks up.

[cloudcultdev]

@DigitalFoundry - Deathloop will load, but there's a trick to it. Turn off the FPS cap, and it will play. Use the in-game frame limiter instead. I've verified this workaround myself.

[ANeMzero]

13:45 You can bring up an emulated mouse by holding down the Steam/PS/Xbox/Home button on your controller and using the right joystick, with the triggers functioning as your primary mouse buttons (right is left and left is right though, ) which will get you through the vast majority of mouse menus without having to touch the screen,

[Jmcinally]

Just in case someone is watching this later, a lot of the HDMI issues were resolved in update 3.2.2.

[shizzywizzy]

One thing that really surprised me was Forza Horizon 5 on steam Deck.
I was able to run the game on the high preset at 1152p at a locked 30 fps.
Extremely impressive stuff

[LinuxGamingAlchemy]

Too bad you didn't test the other scaling filters techniques from SteamOS and compare them to FSR for 1080p/4K.
for the docked experience, I'm pretty sure we will get all the SteamOS updates with the official dock release.

[thomasbryans]

I’ve had a Steam Controller sitting around collecting dust for like eight years now. I’ve never really had a time when I felt it was appropriate to use. Now I finally feel like I can get the most out of it, and I am very excited.

[AustinTroth]

I really appreciate this video and this is the first time I’ve seen anyone else touch on the frustrating docked experience. I’ve found a couple things myself:

1. For controller use (especially Xbox) where a mouse screen pops up, if you hold the Xbox button the right stick becomes a mouse cursor and right bumper becomes left click

2. If you have a 1.4 USB-C dock like me, an mClassic will allow you to do 1080p 60 on games instead of 4k30, even with current firmware.

3. The colorspace is always Full RGB 0-255. Not sure if that’s a toggle in the beta firmware but it really should be.

[cakeisamadeupdrug]

It seems that every time you cover the Steam Deck you find some case shader compilation stutter that exists in Windows being eliminated by Valve's Proton implementation, but then simultaneously run into hardware limitations that cause other issues. I'd be interested in seeing some comparative Linux and Windows benchmarks on the same high end hardware to see how the two operating systems stack up when hardware is not limiting them.

[mandrews]

Finally got my Deck last week. It really is an impressive piece of tech.

[SoumyadeepChanda]

Why are there so many troll comments and hate towards the deck? its a game changer for me when it comes to PC gaming. People expecting 3080 perf from a mobile device?

[LGuilhas]

I highly doubt people buy the deck to play 4k 60 on a tv. Got mine last week and i’m thrilled with it. Being able to play portable AAA at 30 or 40 FPS made me play more in the last week than in the past 6 months. The only issues are battery life and noise fan but both are minor and beareable. What a great piece of hardware.

[sergeysiminyuk]

For docked play, Steam Deck needs to be able to run its APU at 25w at the least, 30w would be more ideal. The GPU can easily pick up 30-50% in perf that way, which can help run the upscalers and 1080p natively.

[drdroop]

I love the Steam deck! I'd love to see a Steam box that uses a really powerful custom SOC but in a desktop setup that's not as constrained. The actual OS/features are nice and it'd make a great TV-connected PC just for gaming.

[CaptainWheelies]

Back in the day when my GeForce 2 was struggling to play half life 2, I never imagined one day I'll be playing that game at 4k 60fps on a handheld.

[Pruflas-Watts]

Since most TVs lack the capability of giving good upscaling for 720P content, I think it's worth you guys doing a analysis on each consoles internal upscaler and how each consoles hardware scaling compares to TV, especially with so many backwards compatible 720p content on Xbox One, and since PS5 is backwards compatible with a wide library now, maybe it's worth looking at PS5 and Series consoles hardware upscaling across a variety of digital content and then stack it up against TVs Since monitors have no upscaling capabilities.

[aeris]

The official dock is out, we need a new video