Valve’s Steam Deck is an excellent portable 720p gaming machine, which packs the performance of a state-of-the-art console into a compact shell. But can we push the system further? With a 4K display as the output target, we want to drag the Deck as much as possible towards the ‘home’ game in a docked version. It may sound absurd but the new second generation reconstruction techniques (FSR 2.0 and TSR) have just arrived on the market and offer a huge performance gain for high resolution rendering. Additionally, there is a large library of older, less technically demanding content that the Steam Deck may be able to accelerate to high resolutions just because of its raw performance. Is it then possible to get a good docked experience with Steam Deck on a modern 4K display, or are the high-resolution gaming demands too high for the low-power, low-bandwidth AMD APU that drives it?
While it is possible to scale 720p to fill a 4K screen, the results are often not flattering. Games at this resolution tend to appear blurry and poorly defined, and resizing technology to preserve sharpness is absent on many TVs. Content at 1080p or higher renders better, so that’s where we’ll be targeting: at a minimum, roughly double the pixels of the Steam Deck’s internal display. True native 4K is out of the question, except for the simplest titles, but we should be able to push image quality a little further.
First, we’ll look at some older, less demanding games – 7th gen console titles are often suitable due to their low performance and solid gamepad support. Half-Life 2 is a good example: it runs at 4K 60fps at maximum settings without MSAA. Likewise, Deus Ex: Human Revolution hits 1440p60 at medium settings, where image quality is reasonable and performance is solid (but you can also go for 4K resolution and 30fps if you prefer). Valkryia Chronicles and Dishonored both have similar performance at 1440p at default settings, although the drop in framerate might lead you to opt for 1080p for a better 60fps lock. Both titles, however, hold up very well and even compare against their eighth generation console versions – a big win for the Deck. Other games of similar vintage are worse off, like Alan Wake, which requires 900p to reach 60fps, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is probably best played on the Deck at 1080p30: on par with PS4 and Xbox One, but not ideal for a 4K television.
Steam Deck offers tools to push image quality a little further on a 4K set, most notably AMD’s FSR 1.0 scaling which produces a small but noticeable improvement in detail over bilinear upscaling without introducing excessive aliasing. Modern console games using AAA also perform well – the Steam Deck is generally capable of operating at 900p30 at default graphics settings. This includes Horizon: Zero Dawn, Tales of Arise, and Grid Legends, although some games, like Dirt 5, are a bit heavier and so the 720p threshold at 30fps is a more suitable target. Image quality, predictably, isn’t great on Steam Deck with these types of games, with most titles featuring a similar resolution to the Xbox One versions. FSR 1.0 can help somewhat and generally has a nicer interaction with TAA-like techniques than older post-processing AA, but it can’t do much here. An interesting case is that of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, released a few weeks ago, which runs on Steam Deck with less compilation stuttering than what was seen on Windows PC.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we have games that use second generation reconstructive techniques that use aggressive temporal upsampling to produce greater image detail, namely Unreal’s TSR and AMD’s FSR 2.0. God of War has an implementation of AMD’s new upsampling technology, but the results are a bit mixed. Image quality in static or slow-moving areas of the screen is good and looks similar to 1080p, despite rendering with less than half the internal pixels. The downside is that the image is covered in disocclusion artifacts that arise when Kratos no longer obscures a screen element or moves rapidly, while artifacts also appear in hair and particle effects. 1080p at 30fps is almost doable with FSR 2.0 in balanced mode, but we ultimately preferred the cleaner presentation at a lower resolution.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is the first game to ship with Epic’s Temporal Super Resolution upsampling technology but it requires some pretty important compromises in resolution and settings to work well on the Deck: an output resolution of 1600×900 with TSR performance mode for an internal resolution of 800×450, with low graphics settings elsewhere. On the bright side, Ghostwire’s rebuilding works much better than God of War’s. Artifacts are minimized in motion, despite the extremely low internal resolution, without the same disocclusion artifacts found with FSR 2.0. Static footage also resolves with image quality close to native resolution, despite rebuilding from a quarter resolution base. It is not perfect from a visual point of view but this technology is a real revolution in terms of performance, which allows a huge improvement in the framerate compared to native rendering.
So, at least in these titles, the results are quite mixed. God of War’s FSR 2.0 reconstruction is not good enough to deliver a convincing 1080p image, while Ghostwire is too demanding to allow us to aim for a 1080p output, even though its reconstruction is very good. We would have liked to show Deathloop as well but this title has long-standing stability issues on the Steam Deck and currently fails to load past the title screen.
While testing Steam Deck in docked mode, several glitches emerged that really dampened the experience, even though the Deck itself is powerful enough to guarantee a good docked experience in many titles. An HDMI 2.0 compatible USB-C adapter is required to enable 4K60, as most common HDMI 1.4 adapters block the system at 30Hz output even at lower resolutions. There are solutions to solve this problem, by entering desktop mode and manually changing the display settings but it is a rather annoying problem that should be solved within the main SteamOS interface.
Gamepad functions are also not well supported. Vibration does not work as expected on external gamepads, often persisting for several seconds or not activating at all. Text input is difficult to handle, as many games require the user to have a software keyboard which is not suitable for gamepads. Additionally, some games that are apparently compatible with controllers require the use of the mouse to navigate the setup menus, which typically means blindly tapping the Steam Deck’s touchscreen when the game is running.
However, updates to support docked play come regularly. For example, it was not initially possible to run games in SteamOS Gaming Mode at resolutions greater than 1280 x 800, even when connected to a 1080p or 4K screen. After the June update, however, it is now possible to set the display resolution to any value between 640×400 and 4K, although this applies to both portable and docked gaming and may need to be changed for each title, such as we had to do for our tests.
So, is Steam Deck able to offer a good docked gaming experience? At the moment, docked play on Steam Deck leaves a lot to be desired but not for the reasons one might think. Older titles and less intense games manage to scale well on a 4K display, and while modern titles don’t fare quite as well typically requiring sub-1080p resolutions, FSR 2.0 and TSR show some promise in squeezing quality. decent image from the more advanced titles. We are still dealing with a system with GPU performance roughly in line with that of a last generation base console but the flexibility of Steam Deck allows us to tune and fine-tune the system to achieve the best possible performance. Conveniences like system-wide scaling output options and framerate throttling are really useful, even for software that doesn’t run particularly well on this hardware.
In our opinion, SteamOS glitches in docked play are the real problem. The operating system is often unresponsive, games can be laggy, gamepad support is mediocre, and there are a number of configuration issues that need to be addressed. A traditional console, or even a decent Windows PC with Steam’s Big Picture Mode, offers a better experience for gaming on TV. Hopefully, these issues can be solved, but for now the Steam Deck is much better as a purely portable system.
#Digital #Foundrys #Guide #Steam #Deck #Docked #Mode