Things you wished you knew before setting up your Deck?

million@lemmy.world to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 73 points –

Got a Steam Deck on the way, anything I should know before I dive in when it arrives?

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if you happen to have a desktop PC and you play while at home, sometimes remote play on the deck is better than installing a game on the deck

I can remote play Elden Ring from my desktop at 60fps with longer battery life vs 40fps if installed on the deck with worse battery life

also make sure you try out reduced TDP and GPU rates on games with simpler graphics, you can get an extra 1-2 hours of battery life and not impact performance in certain cases

Another “if you have a desktop pc” tip is you can now install a game to the SD from the PC without downloading it from the internet again. I haven’t actually had a reason to try this, but I know it’s an option that seems pretty cool.

Oh shit how can you do this?

My internet at home is usually >3mb download, >300kb upload, and rate limited at 100gb a month. Worse up/downs when it rains.

I set up a spare phone to download files to a specific folder, then automatically backup those files over LAN to my desktop at home. When I go to a friend's house with better internet I just leave the phone there overnight. This is working for everything except my steam games, which I don't think I can download to a phone

If I remember correctly, if you go into settings on steam in both your pc and steam deck and set them to share the downloaded games. Then just click install as per normal on your deck and instead of downloading it will automatically drag the game from Your pc. I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly but it was really simple to do and I only did it once some months ago. I only managed 36mbps over my home network but still considerably quicker than my poxy home internet

Also if doing this sometimes remote playing over Sunshine/Moonlight has dramatically better performance than the built in Steam remote play. Seems to vary by game.

On the other hand, streaming from a PC means you'll get massively better battery life since the deck isn't handling the graphics.

Is the game also playing duplicated on pc screen like with steam link or is it just a background process?

yes the game does run on the remote desktop pc and essentially streams the video to the steam deck

I'll admit the use cases can be limited, but if you want the ability to offload processing for graphically intense games it works well

my desktop is hard-wired into my network so I don't have any lag when using remote play on my steam deck

I'm not sure if both machines were wireless how the performance might be impacted

Any good guides to setting up streaming from Desktop to Deck?

It's pretty easy assuming both of your devices are on the same network:

  • install a game on your desktop PC via steam
  • from your steam deck browse to the game in your library
  • instead of Play/Install you click a little arrow next to the button and then select the name of your desktop PC
  • the Play/Install button changes to say Stream, click that and it launches the game on your desktop and streams the video to your steam deck

if you have a good home network it is pretty much indistinguishable from playing it directly on the deck
I can play Elden Ring with no video artifacts or noticeable input lag

here is a guide which has some screenshots

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/remote-play-how-to-stream-games-from-your-pc-to-the-steam-deck

I use Windows with an audio interface on my PC, and I think that caused some audio routing issues when it came to remote play. I haven’t tried it again, might have been fixed