The Steam Deck is pretty easy to start while unplugged.

I believe so, but the mic is muted by default. You can set a back button to ctrl+m to toggle the mute I believe.

This is for streaming from a PlayStation to the Steam Deck, there is no SteamOS compatible official streaming software.

My understanding is common practice is for people to log onto the gaming cafe computers with their own account, and then log out of steam when they’re done. So the same computer may have a bunch of different steam accounts log in and get surveyed on the same day.

You might try pinning gpu speed or setting a fixed cpu speed (through powertools if installed). It can fix some games that have drops when they shouldn’t, at the cost of slightly worse battery life.

That makes a lot of sense.

It runs pretty good. I reduced a few of the less noticeable graphical settings (like shadow quality), and locked the frame rate at 40fps. It can hit 60 a lot of the time, but 40 keeps it very consistent.

At default high settings it can probably run at 30fps the whole game.

Sounds good, the crash before would happen between 30 min and 1 hr. It depended on your settings some too, people targeting higher graphical quality at 30fps would crash a lot faster than someone trying to reduce visuals for higher fps.

It’s a really good game. It used to have a memory leak on integrated GPUs (like the Deck and laptops) that would cause full Deck crashes after awhile. Hopefully zRAM has fixed that, if the game didn’t fix the memory leak itself.

I was playing a couple games, but I’ve dropped everything else to focus on playing Sekiro.

Fantastic game, I never got into the regular Dark Souls games that much, so I’ve kinda avoided it. But I find parry focused combat incredibly satisfying, and the streamlining of some of the mechanics is nice too.

A lot depends on the game too. Some games are naturally slower movement, slower to swing a weapon, etc. In those slower paced games, some added input lag can be unnoticeable, while feeling like a major issue in a more twitchy game.

It’s also worth mentioning that the popular lsfg frame gen option doesn’t work this way, unlike baked in frame gen, the game engine’s ability to accept input isn’t delayed at all since the additional frames are added after. This means the generated frame quality is lower, but input lag is much less on most games.

Upscaling tech (DLSS/FSR/etc) is nice as a way to help older/weaker hardware play newer games, and I’ve really appreciated it on the deck. I really don’t like it when games use it as a crutch to avoid having to optimize their game to an acceptable level.

Frame gen is in a worse spot because it usually only works well on hardware that can already hit 60fps. I’ve never found a built in framegen option that was actually usable on the deck without horrendous input lag and/or graphical issues.

Lossless Scaling’s Frame Gen is a sometimes exception, I’ve found a few Deck games that it works really well with. There are still occasional graphical issues/ghosting with it, but it can help out quite a bit. It’s weird to me that 3rd party software from a small dev would work better than integrated FG from the game devs/GPU makers, but it is what it is.

An important note is that this is compared to base wine, not Proton with Esync/Fsync.

There may have still been significant gains, since those were some of the games worst affected by the lack of proper sync, but someone would need to run more benchmarks to find out.

It should still fix minor stuttering that some gets get on Linux, which will be pretty huge.

Cachy is growing in popularity a lot. Negative publicity around Ubuntu is driving people to alternatives, and I’ve heard a lot of people are trying cachy as their first Linux distro.

A lot of really exciting changes here.

The updates to arch Linux base/graphics drivers will hopefully include mesa 26, which is looking like one of the most significant performance boosts we’ll see the deck get. It massively helps with ray tracing performance, so games like Doom the Dark Ages, Indiana Jones, all UE5 games, etc are expected to get significant performance boosts. Basically, the games that the deck currently struggles with the most are expected to benefit the most from this.

Improved support for the screencasts in Game Mode (e.g. OBS/Discord)

Cool

Re-re-enable Bluetooth Wake for Steam Deck LCD

The saga continues

LCD Bios Added “Memory Power Down” setup option Preliminary support for hibernation

This sounds cool, I’ve wondered about why the deck doesn’t have hibernation.

OLED Bios Charging LED now changes color when charge limit is reached, rather than only at 100%

Been waiting for this, ever since they added charge limits.

Overall very exciting update, doesn’t seem available for my deck on the beta update channel yet, but I’m excited to get it and check the mesa version.

Edit: just got the update installed, Mesa is not version 26, still version 25. Very unfortunate".

If recommend reading the quote from unity explaining it:

One thing I can talk about now is that we’re bringing official Steam support into Unity. Now, I know you’ll say “But I already ship games to Steam” and that’s true. Thousands of developers have had success on Steam with Unity. The thing is, prior to Platform Toolkit, we’ve never actually officially supported Steam in the past. It’s always been up to developers to integrate Steamworks themselves, and publish and support their titles on that platform historically.

And on Steam Deck, many of you have been finding success with Proton. But I think we can do better with a native solution. So, as I mentioned before our strength is highly performant native runtimes. So moving forward we’ll provide not just build targets for Steam but also Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. We’ll also look to make targeted enhancements to our Linux runtime to provide native performance increases and remove the need for developers to rely on Windows through Proton.

And look, as great as Proton is, it’s simply something we don’t have any degree of control over or ability to support. And we’ve actually made some native improvements to the Linux player that targets the Steam Deck hardware. Offering a potential improvement in performance over a build running on Proton and that’s actually available today.

My only issue with it is that some people install windows the moment they get the SD out of the box. No interest in even trying SteamOS, they consider it just wasting time before they can get windows installed and have the Deck “ready to use”.

depends, if it’s [continues to describe the most perfect dream phone to ever exist], absolutely.

You can set game resolution to 720p, and then use the Deck’s FSR to upscale to 1080p without much of a performance hit.