Hey all!
My main gaming desktop is down for maintenance, which gets me thinking more about my steam deck.
Does anyone have any experience out putting to a monitor? What resolution do you use?
The SD’s strength is still limited, so what kind of resolution/refresh rate can it reasonably output?
Thanks in advance for your insights!
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The default behavior of the Deck in game mode is to output a native resolution signal to the monitor but still run games at 1280x800 and upscale with FSR.
You can alter the resolution the games will run in via the properties for each game. Naturally what resolution you can run a game well at is going to vary wildly by game.
In desktop mode it will behave more like a normal PC and just output at the resolution you select just like on any other desktop PC.
You can set game resolution to 720p, and then use the Deck’s FSR to upscale to 1080p without much of a performance hit.
Depends entirely what you’re running, I’ve done some simple games at 4k 60 fps without issue, but some have to go to 1080p on low settings
Exactly. It’ll probably run Balatro at 4k/120 just fine but Cyberpunk is going to struggle at anything above 720p30/low
I think 1080p/60 is the best you should expect, and depending on the game it might be too much still. I’ve tried connecting it at 4k and even the UI had issues for me.
Edit: you should also be aware that every game has a resolution limit that is set at 800p by default, you need to adjust game properties to allow higher resolutions to be selected in-game
If I see that the game needs some tweaking, I’ll try 720p at 60 or 30 fps.
You can dock your Deck, but I think you should think about it as an underpowered Playstation 4 or a turbocharged Playstation 3.
I also think that the docking experience isn’t so fluid if you dock it to a TV and use a console controller. When it’s docked to a PC monitor and wired keyboard/mouse, it’s smoother as you have less configuration to do.
I could also then double as a computer in desktop mode, which would be kind of cool
Oh yeah the Deck can be a quite powerful desktop computer if you enjoy KDE.
I use it like this from time to time after configuring to behave like Gnome, but I prefer the original flavour.
I never thought about it, I just connected my deck to a dock and the dock to a monitor. It worked, and that is that for me.
What’s your resolution and refresh rate on the monitor?
All I did was connect my deck to it. I have not done anything else with the monitor.
Great, thanks for the input!
I remember trying to run Spider-Man on my 1080p monitor and wondering why it looked like complete shit even at 30fps. You’re right that the strength is limited, and lots of AAA games will need the settings lowered quite a bit to run smoothly.
I played TF2 on it last week with the dock, and it was fine. I did have to wit until the game loaded to plug it in, otherwise it was in a strange state where the big screen was blank, and the SD screen had a static image on it. I’ve had mixed results with a USBC to HDMI adapter, but it was also the cheapest I could find
