Steam Deck VS CS2

Can the Steam Deck run CS2? YES. But how well can it run it? This video investigates.
Using the Steamdeck LCD. OLED model should be roughly the same but according to some of you is much better in practice.

0:00 - CS2 VS Steam Deck
0:34 - External mouse, keyboard and monitor
1:34 - Graphics performance
2:44 - How it feels
4:16 - Improvements since start of year
5:10 - Conclusion
7:05 - Improvements going forward

[anonymousguy]

Not the first time Valve teams have no communication between each other lol

[electricindigoball]

I was really surprised when I saw that CS2 wasn't Steam Deck Verified. You would think that Valve would make sure all of their flagship games and especially new games would be developed with the Steam Deck in mind.

[SeedyZ]

CS2 not being verified while CSGO was pains me. It was awesome to play death match in bed since GO had native Steam Deck controller support. It's been more than a year and they're still missing this feature the old game had.

[DeeJaay]

Valve made the Steam Deck just to fuck with the handheld console industry, and they really succeeded.

[kozakalex]

05:34 - IS THAT... THE... FART MASTER?!?!

[Wheagg]

What's especially insulting about the default layout for Steam Deck is that CS:GO had this down. CS2 is moving backwards

[stolkovandrew]

CS2's Vulkan renderer still has an insane VRAM leak in it. Anything below 8GB VRAM is affected, it seems. It's been there since launch and there are no signs of Valve fixing it any time soon

[Theuniversearch]

Hang on. Is Deathmatch not meant to be who can get the most deaths?
Have I been playing wrong this whole time!?

Next you're gonna tell me the goal of Minesweeper isn't to click on a mine the quickest.

[partypopper]

As someone who plays CS2 *exclusively* on the Steam Deck, I can attest that the experience is not great but it didn't stop me clocking up 100s of hours since the game's launch, which made me unable to play CS on my laptop. It goes without saying that I suffer from a serious skill issue which isn't helped by the fact that I have to try and hit headshots on a 7 inch screen lol. Nevertheless, I'm grateful for being able to play my favorite online multiplayer game at a playable frame rate, even if I might never make it out of silver :')

[jarikjarikson]

I’ve bought my first steam deck one week ago, what a fitting upload by you Phillip

[PINPAL]

Is it only me that noticed the viewmodel is going absolutely crazy? I swear mine doesn't fly around like that

[diztinger]

0:01 Oh shi oh fuсk that's delusional

[MirandaStreeter]

- I'm surprised you didn't mention the OLED models (which have replaced the mid and high range variations) having 90hz screens and (slightly) better performance

- Driving the APU higher than 15W by adding a "turbo" mode post-hoc is harder said than done. Devices that advertise boost speed are just choosing when _not_ to artificially lower their TDPs. 15W is a pretty hard ceiling by design. You can adjust the PPT limits if you really know what you're doing but at a certain point thermals will be an issue, on mains or not.

- I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the community control schemes. It's a shame Valve doesn't provide a decent one by default. But it would be good to bring up the community provided ones for anyone interested (who is likely to stumble across this video). It's also a good opportunity to mention the benefits of touchpad+gyro for aiming precision that really excels past what a joystick can accomplish.

- It would've been helpful to test this out on linux on a powerful desktop. This would narrow down what's Deck specific and what's to do with the platform. Steam Deck's OS is very much a normal linux software stack that you'd find in any distro except it boots right into big picture mode. Installing linux and Steam games doesn't take any command line experience. You basically load up something like "Kubuntu" (24.04 is the latest) or "Fedora KDE" using a decent AMD card, update your system, install Steam from the store (Discover), and you now have what amounts to a beastly Steam Deck.

- Some of the external screen issues should hopefully improve a _lot_ when the Deck updates to KDE 6.1+ and Gamescope no longer has to pipe frames through X compatibility.

(more of my thoughts in the replies)

[dans_ythandle]

Congrats on getting to collab with the one and only fart master!

[SirSicCrusader]

Curious how this would roll on the Oled model with the lower latency higher framerate screen and that slight performance bump.

[Retalak]

I believe many of the issues you are feeling are due to the Linux build of the game rather than the Deck. I get half the FPS and a completely unplayable and buggy experience on my gaming PC when running on Linux vs Windows

[oggybodoggy]

TIL all my premier team mates are playing on Steam Decks, explains both their performance and rage

[travis]

Been watching you since at least 2020. You really have a perfect niche. I love your content and streaming personality and will never stop supporting your content. Thanks man.

[sokhed]

Honestly i feel like part of the issue of performance isnt the steam decks fault but rather the linux port of CS2. I run ubuntu mate, my system is out dated but should be able to run CS2 at 1280x720 low preset at over 60fps (i7 6700k, 16gb ram, 1050ti) but the game runs so rough it is unplayable, similar to how you described in the video.

[prgnify]

Speaking of Valve's priorities; I'm on the latest version of the Linux Kernel (and people say it incurs a much lesser performance penalty than whatever version the Steam Deck is on) but I still have to pay AT LEAST 20% of my FPS as the price to not having to interact with microsoft. Sometimes it is very difficult to keep fps above 200 (on a much, much more powerful computer than the Steam Deck). Of course I won't call it unplayable - but shows that RIGHT NOW valve's priorities are not in giving the best possible experience for linux users in general, which of course means also Steam Deck.

The other issues, of the screen flickering and the game failing to launch at an appropriate resolution or window size or issues with recording etc., I don't suffer from - so that is yet another step below in the priority scale, like this:

Priorities
1. [whatever, we don't know]
2. [whatever as well, VAC? subtick? Skins?
[...]
10. Optimizing the game for Vulkan (performance issues on windows and linux)
11. Optimise the game for Linux in general (performance issues on even latest software and hardware)
12. Optimise the game for specific linux versions (like, distros with the most users, like ubuntu or whatever)
13. Optimise the whole Steam Deck CS2 experience (from performance to UX).