I had an old MSI gaming laptop from 2016 which was amazing for me (I always had slow, 2nd hand laptops before) and now I’ve sold it and my PS Vita in order to buy a Steam Deck. I want to play Elden Ring, the Souls series, Sekiro and some indie games like Vampire Survivor. I also want to emulate games (Gameboy gen up to PS2 gen). Would that be a good investment or should I just go for a PC? I travel frequently because of my job.

  • PastaRhythm@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    Steam Deck seems great for you! Most of the games you mentioned work great on Deck.

    Keep in mind that the Steam Deck can struggle with recent AAA releases. You probably won’t be able to hit 60 FPS in Elden Ring, but if you can handle 30 or 40 fps, you would enjoy it on Deck. Do some research on the games you want to play to make sure the Deck can run them well enough for you.

    The Steam Deck is a phenomenal device for emulation. I adore playing retro games on this thing, it’s a spectacular experience. Games with a 4:3 aspect ratio look fantastic on the Steam Deck’s 16:10 screen!

    The Deck can emulate a lot of systems very well. It’s excellent at emulating GameCube and Wii games. I don’t think it does all Wii games perfectly, but all the games I’ve tried work like a charm, even very intense Brawl mods. 3DS runs swimmingly as well, and while I haven’t tried Wii U emulation, it seems to work pretty well from what I’ve seen. The Deck is a monster for retro Nintendo emulation!

    On a downer note, PS2 emulation on Deck is not perfect. A decent amount of PS2 games work fine. Some PS2 games require tinkering on your part to get them working well. Some PS2 games might simply be out of the question depending on how much slowdown you’re willing to tolerate. If you want to do PS2, you might want to look into Powertools, which can let you disable “SMT” to improve performance. I can go into detail on Powertools if you want. (Actually, I’ve heard that Valve is gonna make an update for the Deck that makes this unnecessary, so you might not have to worry about that.) You might want to research the PS2 games you want to play to make sure they work on Deck.