It was the low key "Your scientists were so preoccupied…" realization that drove the rest of my testing time with the Steam Deck. I'd say the two hours of battery at max brightness I could get in a game like Resi 2 is acceptable, but once I got over being impressed by how well the Deck could run the game, I realized it wasn't really how I wanted to experience it. Max brightness in the dark is eyeball-melting. At night, expect to be able to comfortably play the Steam Deck at ~50% brightness. Resident Evil 2 is a dark game and made for an extreme test case-generally I had no problem playing indoors in daylight and was even able to play the 512GB model, with its anti-glare coating, outdoors on a sunny day. It's vibrant for an IPS panel even when you're looking at it from off-axis, and about as good as I'd expect from a non-OLED panel. This isn't a knock against the Steam Deck's display, though, which I think is very good. There was a drawback though: I had to play at max brightness in the afternoon and crank up the in-game brightness setting to clearly see the screen in my brightly lit living room, so the game looked a tad washed out and the battery dropped from full to 44% in an hour. The superb Resident Evil 2 Remake is a notable exception: With a mix of low and mid settings I was able to run it at 60 fps, which was a genuine 'wow, this really works?' moment for such a relatively new and gorgeous game. GTA 5 could actually run at 60 fps with high settings and squeeze out two hours of battery life, but dropping to a 30 fps lock nearly doubled the battery estimate to 214 minutes. At an average 51 fps and 50% brightness, God of War would chew through the battery in 83 minutes, according to our calculations during testing with a 30 fps lock, that time jumped to around 200 minutes. Our other battery life tests had similar results. With the framerate capped at 60, Deathloop drained the battery from full to 20% in an hour and 10 minutes at about 60% brightness. Price: $399 (64GB) / $529 (256GB) / $649 (512GB)įor most new big budget games, locking the framerate to 30 fps is going to be mandatory for stable performance and practical battery life. Storage: 64GB eMMC / 256GB or 512GB NVMe SSDĭisplay: 1280x800, 60Hz 7-inch IPS LCD touchscreenĬonnectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB Type-C w/ DisplayPort 1.4 RAM: 16GB LPDDR5 5,500MT/s 32-bit quad-channel GPU: 8 compute unit AMD RDNA 2 (1–1.6GHz) And the Steam Deck isn't completely immune to that jack-of-all-trades problem-after two weeks with it, it's not a replacement for my desktop PC or as portable as a Nintendo Switch. The problem I've always had with Leathermans (please don't be mad at me, Leatherman guys) is that the miniature scissors and other doodads are never as good as the proper tools they replace. It was quite possibly designed by Leatherman guys at Valve, who decided that a handheld gaming PC would only work if it had a big screen, two big analog sticks, trackpads, and access to a proper Linux desktop underneath its friendly UI. The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming system a Leatherman guy would love. A Leatherman guy will give you one for Christmas the year you turn 16, and hand you their own, tiny knife blade extended, to slice through the gift wrap. With all those tools (and more!) a Leatherman is too big for a pocket, so they wear it-proudly-on a little holster clipped to their belt. Bottle opener? Oh, you ain't ever going thirsty while Doug's around. Tiny scissors for some twine? Ready to snip. You probably know a Leatherman guy: a friend or (more likely) an uncle who loves to bust out a Leatherman multitool to solve any problem.
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