I suspect Valve’s primary goal is giving realistic fps estimates for Steam Deck/Machine/Frame. With those having fixed hardware, it should be a decent way to know if its even possible to run a game at an acceptable frame rate on those devices.

It’s usefulness to other hardware will vary, we’ll have to wait and see how helpful it actually is.

The 2 hour of gameplay / 2 week ownership refund window isn’t going anywhere, which is where almost all refunds happen.

Steam recently started giving people the option to share fps/hardware details for games. So it should be real data from real users who have opted in.

Steam’s fps overlay can show base frames and generated frames separately, so I’m assuming they’ll be able to only show base frames.

They may be able say something like “50% or users run the game at 30fps, 40% at 40fps” or something like that, where you can guess about different settings people are running at.

The biggest thing is just knowing whether it’s possible to run the game on your hardware at the minimum acceptable fps. If average fps for a steam deck game is 25, you know it doesn’t run well. If a significant number of deck users are able to average a higher fps than 30 (40-60), you know the deck can run it decently and you’ll have options besides running everything on the lowest setting.

Yeah, and it makes a ton of sense for Steam Deck/Machine/Frame

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.