Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This was a HUGE mistake…”.
This is the brand new Steam Deck OLED.. Now I have a few questions.. First and foremost, what exactly is new Because it looks pretty similar on the outside.. Does this have the performance to keep up in 2024 and beyond And ultimately is it worth the upgrade over? The original Steam Deck At first glance, the Steam Deck OLED, looks almost the exact same as the original Steam Deck, but the differences go far deeper than just skin deep.. That’S pretty deep.
If you’re deeper than skin deep, some might say: that’s real deep.! No God! Please! No Immediately you’ll notice the difference in the displays., So both of them are 1280 by 800.. However, the OLED, as the name implies, is a far nicer OLED panel.. Not only does it get way: brighter 600 nits in standard definition and a 1000 nits for games that support HDR, but on top of that, the color and especially the contrast and viewing angles. I mean it is a night and day difference. On top of that, the Steam Deck OLED does support a 90 hertz refresh rate, which I didn’t think was gon na be a huge deal, but I’m surprised at how many games I’ve actually been able to push above 60 FPS, unlike the original Steam Deck, where I kind of left things sort of at 30 or 60, most of the time.
These days, the Steam Deck is terrific, but this screen always has felt like a real cost. Cutting move to get this thing out. The door.
And I’m glad that Valve spent the time and the money to have a custom display made specifically for the Steam Deck OLED.. It makes a huge difference. Now beyond just the screen pretty much every other element of the Steam Deck has been updated, especially when you look at the actual internals of these Steam Decks..
What we’ve got here is a substantially different internal layout.. So, on top we have the original Steam Deck, which was a very competent device, but the OLED is improved in pretty much every way., So starting out with from the screen, because it’s not only that higher quality display but because it’s an OLED, it actually means it’s Thinner, which means that, while the actual physical dimensions of these two Steam Decks are very similar, they were able to pack a lot more in the OLED. Starting out with.
Actually, we’ve got the battery., So they went from a 40 watt hour to a 50 watt hour. Battery. So right from the jump we have 20 %. Larger capacity. They’ve also shrunk, the chip., So the original steam deck had a seven nanometer processor, where this has a six nanometer chip., It’s not a huge difference, but it means it’s a little bit smaller and importantly, a little bit more efficient. Between that and the new Display you should expect it to pull a couple fewer watts, while you’re gaming, and that combined with the larger battery according to Valve, will give you between 30 to 50 % more battery life..
It’S an interesting choice, because when you compare this to like some of the Windows handhelds that have the much more powerful Ryzen Z1 Extreme., Those have a lot more sort of theoretical performance and far worse battery life, because they’re much more power hungry chips.. It feels like Valve were very much conservative with the Steam Deck OLED, because it is a difference.. It’S certainly going to give you more battery life, and I’ve noticed that as well, but you guys seeing a lot more performance.. I actually personally think that’s a pretty reasonable trade, because they’ve also paired that, with a lot of other things to make this a more refined, experience. The Steam Deck OLED feels like the last couple of years. They’Ve pretty much entirely been focused on making a fully upgrade Steam Deck and the amount of little tweaks and tuned things and, like the stuff that they’ve done here to improve it is truly impressive.
I mean no. Does it make the LCD completely irrelevant Absolutely not., But there is not a single thing I can say looking at this Steam Deck OLED compared to the original, which is not an improvement. Look literally, everything is different. Everything has been tweaked and tuned in, even if it’s a tiny little difference of like dumb, but look they like color matched the ribbon cables.. It went from white and blue to black.. Does that matter at all No.? Does it show that someone a Valve really cared about every little element of this thing? Yes, it does.
And when you compare that with what Sony did with the PS5 Slim, which, if you haven’t caught that video would highly recommend it, because essentially the PS5 Slim has also done a sort of similar transformation. Going from a seven to a six nanometer processor and they’ve kinda shrink things down, but every element of that PS5 Slim is cheaper: cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper cheaper.. This is technically more expensive, but only by a few bucks. We’ll get into the pricing a little bit.
But it’s clear that, like there was some real love and attention that went into this, that certain other console makers could probably take some notes. On. Valve is not claiming any performance uplifts going from the Steam Deck to the Steam Deck OLED.. However, the OLED does have faster memory., So going from 55 to 6,400 mega transfers a second and with these AMD APU, which are incredibly memory hungry. That actually should make a noticeable difference.. I mean nothing crazy, but maybe a couple extra frames per second going to this new OLED, which, when you combine that, with the cooler quieter fan the better battery life et cetera et cetera., I mean it just – does make it a slightly faster and better overall refinement. Experience., Better overall refinement experience. That’S the quote.! You can put my name on it.
Now when it comes to actually buying a Steam Deck OLED, a question I think a lot of people are gon na have is that if you already have a Steam Deck, is it worth the upgrade Now? This is, by all accounts, a classic mid-cycle slim style refresh, and I think, for most people, your existing Steam Deck is great, but if you’ve got the disposable capital, it actually is a pretty solid update even over the original Steam Deck.. Yes, of course, it is not gon na be a significantly more powerful console, but that screen and even like little details like I’m sitting here, just like scrolling around on a webpage and the preciseness I can get with the touch pads and whatnot like there are. So many little updates across the board, not only, of course, counting the better Wi-Fi and the better battery life and the screen and whatnot..
It’S actually not a completely crazy thing to trade, your old Steam Deck in and buy an OLED. But I wan na be clear. No one has to do that or really should do it, but it’s a lot better than going from like a PS5 to PS5 Slim, which makes sense for literally no one.
Where things get a little bit more complicated is, if you don’t already have a Steam Deck And are looking to buy one because there are actually now five Steam Decks to choose from. So going on the Valve site. Here, first of all, you’ll see the three options., So the LCD, which comes in at 399 with a 256 gig SSD, but keep in mind that this is completely unchanged. This is the original steam that they’re continuing to sell.. On top of that, you’ve got the 512 gig OLED model, which is 549., And you can go up to the one terabyte OLED for 649, and that also – which is the model I have here – has the anti-glare display.. Now, between the three of these, I would actually lean a little bit more toward the 512 gig OLED..
It’S nice, of course, to have the one terabyte of capacity, but I’m not a huge fan of the anti-glare coating. That anti-glare coating to me makes the screen a little bit less sharp and also kind of mutes some of the colors.. I think this looks phenomenal, as is, but I guarantee you that if I had the OLED with the glossy panel in front of me, I would think it would look even better. A matter of personal taste.
But to me the 549 model is where it’s at. Or if you want the more budget alternative, getting a 64 gig steam deck, either new or used refurbished and putting a little bit of money into the upgrades gives you almost the same experience. You know it’s not quite as nice, but a very similar experience for less than 350 bucks. Look that is crazy to me. My number one question about the Steam Deck OLED is performance related.. When the Steam Deck first came out, it was quite powerful, but that was a couple of years ago and the goalposts have certainly moved. And I’ll say in my own personal experience with the Steam Deck there’s. Certainly, some AAA titles that are starting to push the envelope on what the Steam Deck can really run.
Comfortably. There’s a lot of settings that you have to turn down farther and farther so does the Steam Deck OLED fix this Well in short, answer no., While that memory is slightly faster, if a game ran poorly on the Steam Deck is gon na run poorly on The Steam Deck OLED. Now, that’s not always true., So take Baldur’s Gate. For example. Not only has the game seen a number of patches as well as Steam OS, but also the performance is just so much better. Like originally. I was struggling to hit 30 FPS. Now on this Steam Deck.
I’Ve been operating it with a 45 FPS cap and it holds fairly well.. You can see in these outdoor areas. We are dipping into the 30s, but for most of the game I can’t actually lock it at 45 FPS. 45 Hertz works well for a lot of games that are a little bit more demanding because it is half of 90 hertz..
So you get very nice smooth frame pacing, so you can actually can hit 45 FPS, but for some games like I’ll show you in a minute you actually can hit 90 FPS or at least well above 60, which does show off that fluidity.. Something else I wan na show is the HDR brightness., So you can see there’s a little tab here for Baldur’s Gate, which shows HDR.. If I turn this brightness up, it hits a ridiculous 1000 nits.. It is so bright.
Like honestly, I mean it looks terrific, but it is brighter than I would want to play with any kind of regularity. It is just oh I’m on fire now this is just so so bright.. This just goes to show that Valve made a good call in getting a fully custom OLED display for the Steam Deck’cause. It looks terrific.
Like I would say that this is more impactful than having a more powerful processor, and especially if we switch over to a game that can take advantage of the full 90 hertz. As I get stuck, you’ll really see what this thing can do. I’ll, be honest, running Forza, Horizon 5 on this is kind of impressive..
So here I’m running with a mix of medium settings and FSR turned on, and I am seeing 70 to 80 FPS, which really flexes the capability of this display.. Now sure it’s not going to be the HDR showcase that Baldur’s Gate is.. The HDR does not work in Forza Horizon 5 at the moment, but even running an SDR at the lower peak brightness, I’m legitimately impressed like it looks terrific..
While these examples are, I would say, generally pretty impressive.. I can’t deny that there are other titles that are still going to struggle to run on the Steam Deck. And when you look at the other competition out there, the ROG Ally, you’ve got the Legion Go none of do. They have roughly double the performance, just raw power with the Z1 Extreme chips., But on top of that they don’t have the added overhead of Steam OS..
Look. I love Steam OS, there’s a ton of advantages there, but it’s pretty much always running games through a compatibility layer with Proton.. It’S a damn miracle that Proton works at all I’ll.
Give you that, but there’s a little bit of an overhead. You lose a little bit of your peak performance because you are doing that translation and when you have half the performance of those Windows, handhelds you’re inevitably going to have to make some compromises, which really got me thinking. What happens if you install Windows on a Steam Deck? Does that magically give you a performance benefit and is it remotely worth it? Here’S the thing I actually started working on this video a few weeks ago before the Steam Deck OLED had even been announced.
So I’ve got some thoughts. ( upbeat music ). The first thing to know is that if you install Windows on your Steam Deck, it requires you to reformat the drive and completely get rid of Steam OS. And same thing.
If you want to switch back to Steam OS, you got ta reformat and get rid of Windows.. So as of right now, we’ve recording this video there’s. No dual boot support for Steam, OS and Windows.
Valves say they’re working on it, but they’ve been to be fair. Working on it for quite some time., So first impressions with the Steam Deck running Windows have been very mixed.. The Windows-y bits are annoying. Now this is not really a Steam Deck specific thing, but dealing with the onscreen keyboard is not good. And I’ve had multiple issues with the Steam Deck where it didn’t want to pop up..
I had to at one point I couldn’t log in I couldn’t get past the lock screen, because the keyboard would not pop up, so I had to restart. It’s really really finicky. I’ll say that I have these problems with most Windows handhelds, but it does seem like It’S a little bit worse on the Steam Deck.. That being said, there are of course advantages., One of which is the compatibility., So you’re no longer bound to generally just Steam games.. Actually, one of the big things for me is taking advantage of Game Pass games.
So because I already pay for Game Pass Ultimate. I can’t install those natively on Steam OS, but I can install those natively on a Windows device.. The problem, though, coming back to our janky discussion, is that, for some reason, out of the box Windows thinks that the Steam Deck controllers is a mouse and keyboard, and so in something like Forza, it doesn’t work..
What I will say has been actually really impressive is playing Baldur’s Gate 3.. Now this is a game that I’ve played fairly extensively on the Steam Deck running Steam OS, and I know that while it doesn’t run well, it is playable there, but this is kind of what I was hoping for., Even though there are certainly a lot of disadvantages To running Windows on your Steam Deck, the advantage is well theoretically in games that aren’t Steam working, which I haven’t, got that fully up and running yet, but on top of that games that are not really optimized for Steam. Os that are optimized for Windows should deliver far better performance.. So it’s still very much early days.
There’S a lot more tweaking and tuning I want to do, but the gist of it is this Windows does work on the Steam Deck, but it’s kind of janky and there’s going to be a lot more tweaking and tuning. I’M gon na have to do to get this to be a playable state., Whereas of course, if I was running on Steam OS everything would just kind of work.. Look if Valve turns on the ability to dual boot tomorrow. I would strongly consider it on my Steam Deck, but as of right now it is too drastic of a change..
It is just not worth it. When you compare the Steam Deck OLED with the other handheld PCs out there price is a major factor., So, on the lower end, the Steam Deck LCD, I think, is a terrific deal. Again when you’re talking about this thing at $ 350 to last, with a little bit of upgrading terrific value. Now at $ 550, the Steam Deck OLED is fairly priced.
I will say.. It is certainly a little bit harder to justify than you know. Maybe the older 400 model, where you could just throw an SSD in but 550, I think, is very fair for the 512 gig version. When you consider that it’s competition is about $ 700 technically, you could actually get the Ally for slightly less, but generally speaking, we’re talking about $ 700 over here versus 550 for the Steam Deck., And I will say that I will take the Steam Deck OLED over Either of these., It’s not too much of a competition..
Yes, there’s more performance here, but Windows is janky right, It’s just not as seamless of an experience.. Now, if I had the ability to load up Steam OS on these devices, I think it’s a much more compelling setup or assuming that Windows ever gets their ( beep ) together and actually designs an OS that feels good on a small touchscreen. That’S a different story, but I can only evaluate what I have today and the Steam Deck OLED is done.
Terrifically well., So ultimately is the Steam Deck OLED worth it In a word yes.. Is it perfect? No, of course not. No product, is. And the performance does give me a slight bit of pause on a full full glowing recommendation because it is very usable today. Don’T get me wrong. Like I have found that, especially with the 90 hertz and the ability to adjust your frame rate targets. It is still very competent., But as time goes on and as more games demand more and more power, it is going to start falling behind.. That’S fine and I think that’s a reasonable trade-off, considering that this has far better battery life than the other options out there. It is cheaper. It has even though it’s not quite as high resolution and high frame rate of a display. Ultimately, the OLED absolutely carries this display to being the best on any handheld. Console. Like it is rare to see a device get so much better in so many ways from one generation like it just Valve have done something special with the Steam Deck OLED..
I’M sure you’ve seen other videos talking about why it’s great I tried to go into it being a little bit more skeptical, but I’m completely sold. Like it is the move. If you were looking for a handheld PC.. Thank you very much for watching. Make sure to subscribe to the website and ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling button..
If you’ll excuse me, I’m gon na go grab my deck and have a great time. ( team, laughing ) [ Alex ] We’re gon na get demonetized .