Testing the Steam Deck's Performance with Various Games

One of the key features of the Steam Deck is its ability to run a wide range of games at high frame rates, making it an ideal device for gaming. To test the performance of the Steam Deck, we need to ensure that the system is configured correctly and that the graphics settings are optimized for the best possible experience.

To start with, let's take a look at the settings menu on the Steam Deck. We can see that the sharpness setting is currently set to five, but I've adjusted it to 1600 to see how it affects the overall performance of the device. The ultra settings are turned on, and we're testing the game in 1080p and 900 resolution with high settings enabled.

In this configuration, we can achieve frame rates of over 100 FPS, which is impressive for a device like this. Since we don't need such high frame rates, I've locked the setting to 60 FPS, but it's nice to know that the Steam Deck can handle demanding games at high resolutions. The next game on our list is Project Cars 2, which is one of my favorite racing games.

When set up correctly, this game looks great on the Steam Deck, even at 1080p resolution. We're averaging around 96 FPS with these settings, and since we don't need any anti-aliasing or other graphics enhancements, we can turn off those features to further improve performance. This is another game that will work really well in a setup like this, and I'm excited to see how it performs.

Moving on to Cyberpunk 2077, I've had great luck with this game on Linux, and the Steam Deck is no exception. We're running at 1080p high settings, and we've turned off anti-aliasing to improve performance. With the system-wide FSAA (Fast Spectral Anti-Aliasing) feature enabled, we can achieve frame rates of around 72 FPS, which is impressive for a game that was previously considered demanding on PC hardware.

Next up is Elden Ring, which I was hoping would perform better than it did. We're running at 900p with medium settings and the system-wide FSAA feature enabled. While we're still dipping under 60 FPS, the game is still playable, and we can adjust the settings to achieve higher frame rates if needed.

The final PC game on our list is Doom Eternal, which is a great-looking game that should push the Steam Deck's hardware to its limits. We're running at high settings 1080p, and while we do get some dips in frame rate, the game still looks amazing on this device. Unfortunately, we couldn't achieve ultra settings at 1080p due to the limitations of our graphics card, but the Steam Deck is still capable of handling demanding games at high resolutions.

For emulation, the Steam Deck has been a great experience, and I've found that it handles various emulators with ease. GameCube emulation is particularly smooth on this device, thanks to the Vulkan API used by RPCS3. We're also running Tekken 6 in 1080p with RPCS3 using the Vulcan back-end, which should provide better performance than previous versions of the emulator.

In conclusion, the Steam Deck has been a great testbed for various games and emulators, showcasing its ability to run demanding titles at high frame rates. While it's not a top-of-the-line machine by any means, I believe that this device will be perfect for installing Steam OS on and running a variety of games and emulators.

The only potential issue with the Steam Deck is its use of an NVIDIA GPU, which may limit compatibility with certain games or emulators in the future. However, as more drivers are released and support for these titles improves, I'm confident that this device will become even more capable.

In terms of hardware, I've found that a mid-range to high-end Radeon card works really well on the Steam Deck, providing smooth performance at 1080p and 1440 resolutions. The RX 580, in particular, has been a great performer in our tests, although it may not be able to handle ultra settings at 1080p.

If you're interested in building your own Steam Deck or want to install Hollow ISO on any of your devices, I've left links to some tutorials and resources in the description below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime pack here again today we're going to be taking a look at the next gen steam machine that i recently put together now you might notice that the operating system i'm running here looks just like the operating system on the steam deck and that's because it's actually the same operating system this is steamos 3 i'm using holo iso and it really does offer a nice console experience and speaking of console i wanted to keep this build as small as possible so i actually went with a msi trident that i picked up about two years ago maybe a year and a half ago and with what i've done to this unit here i can actually run some of this stuff at 1440p with steamos 3. it's actually a really nice experience and i've still got access to the desktop and i'll show you that all in a second but first i wanted to give you a look at this pc so i actually picked this up on ebay was refurbished it was actually a pretty decent deal like i mentioned i got it about a year and a half ago it's an msi trident 3 with the 10th gen intel cpu and originally this came with an nvidia gtx 1650 i believe it was the 1650 super and it performs really well with windows but i wanted more of a console experience and since we can install steamos 3 on these devices i figured i'd go ahead and do it so yeah it's actually pretty easy to access everything now the very first time i wanted to change the ssd in this unit did take a little while to get down to it basically the whole bottom of the case slides off but we've got 16 gigabytes of ddr4 ram a 10th gen i5 cpu and i've added this radeon rx 580 4 gigabyte model it's an oem variant and originally it came with this which is a gtx 1650 but yeah i really love the small form factor of this unit and you can add a 2.5 inch drive and a single m.2 ssd to this thing and when it comes to the overall specs we've got that intel i5 10 400 f 6 cores 12 threads it's got a base clock of 2.9 and a turbo up to 4.3 but this will turbo on all cores up to 4 gigahertz and most of the time that's what it's sitting at in linux 16 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 26.66 a radeon rx 584 gigabyte model this does have wi-fi five and bluetooth 4.2 built in and right out of the box it did have an intel card so it works in steam os 3 perfectly but yeah with that i5 and that rx 580 this has been performing really well we still have access to all of the on-screen controls that we can use with the steam deck and real quick i'll just go into the settings here and show you exactly what this thing's running so if we go to system we can scroll down and for some reason this card does show up as an rx 480 in linux no matter what i've done with it but this is for sure an rx 580 it's an oem variant from an hp so yeah nothing super special here and of course i could have just kept windows on this but i really love this interface here it does make it much easier just to navigate with the controller and this is going to be great for the living room it's small form factor we've got an easily accessible operating system that we can navigate with the controller we can access all of those steam deck quick menu items and we do have system wide fsr with this rx 580 it does come in handy when you're trying to go up to like say ultra at 1440p with a few of these games now don't get me wrong this is a 1080p card but there is a lot of this stuff that i was able to run at 1440p here at 60fps and another cool thing we have is the desktop so it's the same operating system that's running on the steam dag we have access to a full desktop operating system along with the kind of steam deck ui interface for steam and when it comes to emulation you could install emu deck you could install emulation station it's really up to you personally i've just been running everything standalone right now and we will take a look at some ps2 and ps3 emulation by the end of this video but yeah i mean it's been functioning really well with this setup and everything just works and it really comes down to having that radeon card so the rx 580 just worked right out of the box now hollow iso does have support for nvidia and intel gpus but i've not had good luck with it so i wanted to stick with radeon and the 580 i have here was the smallest most powerful radeon card that would fit inside of this unit and with the new steam deck updates we can actually change the resolution really easily so from the menu here we're gonna go to properties on each game is a bit cumbersome but it doesn't take much we can set the resolution to 1080 or 1440 in this case this is one of those games that does run at 1440 at high settings on this setup but yeah it's easy enough to put something like this together i've done an install tutorial using hollow iso i'll leave a link for that in the description but now i want to show off a little bit of gameplay here so this is injustice 2 we're at high settings 1440p looking really good here i don't have fsr on right now it's at a true 1440p and i was actually really impressed that the rx 580 especially a four gigabyte version could run this game at a steady 60 fps with these settings what i'm going to do now is just plug this into my game capture device so we can get a better look at everything and we'll test out a few more games and first up we've got the witcher 3 at 1080p ultra settings and i forget how good this game really looks at ultra i mean it is absolutely beautiful and like i mentioned we do have system wide fsr i do want to show that off real quick but uh the first thing i need to do is lower the resolution so we're at 1080p ultra right now and by the way i do have hair works off we'll go to graphics and hairworks is completely off something that really kills these radeon gpus but we'll lower this to 1600 by 900 and it was running well at 1080 so it's going to run even better at 1600 by 900 but i wanted to show fsr so we'll go over here to the settings scaling filter fsr i've got the fsr sharpness set to five and now at 1600 by 900 ultra settings we can get close to 100 fps with this game so we really don't need it and i would just go ahead and lock this at 60fps but it's there if you've got a lower end gpu next up we've got project cars 2. i've got a mix of high and ultra settings here we're at 1080p and i know it's an older one but this is still one of my favorite racing games and when it's set up correctly it looks really really good even at 1080p and we can average around 96 fps with this game so we really don't need any fsr here's cyberpunk 2077 and i'm always really impressed by how well this runs in linux i've just had really good luck with it 1080p high settings and i've got fsr from the game settings at quality and i do get a few dips here under 60 so we can always go into the settings and change that fsr to balance still looks pretty good and with it set up like this we can get an average of 72 fps out of it so yeah this is another one that will work really well in a setup like this in the living room not bad at all here's eldon ring and i was really hoping to get a little better performance out of this but we're at 900p i've got the system-wide fsr turned on and we're at medium settings we're still dipping under 60 so i might need to turn some of those settings from medium to low but i mean it's definitely playable like this and at low settings 1080 you can get an average of around 55 fps and the final pc game i wanted to test here was doom eternal unfortunately i forgot to turn on my game capture sound so i didn't capture it but uh we're at high settings 1080p and we can get well over 60 with it looks great like this and i was really hoping we could do ultra at 1080 but unfortunately with that rx 580 it's just not going to be possible and of course this thing's going to handle emulation very well now you could always go through and install emu deck to set everything up for you but i find that you know all of my controller configurations and everything aren't the way i like so i still really have to go through each of these emulators and redo all of the controller mapping so at least for right now i just been launching these individual emulators through the steam deck ui so you can add them as a non-steam game and that's how i've been playing them and right now we've got gamecube at 1440p we could even go up to 4k but my monitor is limited to 1440p so there's really no point and it'll even handle ps3 emulation here we have tekken 6 1080p with rpcs3 using the vulcan back in here and that rx 580 could probably upscale this game a little more but overall it's kind of an all-around little gaming machine i mean we can do some awesome emulation on it some great 1080p gaming some of the games can be run at 1440p it's not a top of the line machine by any means but i wasn't going for that i wanted a small form factor unit that i can install steam os on and i think something like this would be perfect initially i was gonna go with a much larger machine but then i remembered that i had this laying around and i found a card that would fit in it so with that gtx 1650 i just really can't get gamescope working properly with hollow iso at least at the time i'm making this video but down the road i'm sure drivers will be updated and hopefully valve puts this out for everybody to use on basically any pc and by then we should have really good support for nvidia cards but if you're looking to do this right now i would highly suggest using a radeon card be it from the 4000 series up to the 6000 series i've had pretty good luck right there in the mid range and as you saw with this video the rx 580 which is readily available on ebay works really well at 1080p and with some of this stuff we can go up to 1440 with it but that's gonna wrap it up for this video if you're interested in putting something like this together i will leave a few links in the description and if you want to install hollow iso on any of your devices right now link to the tutorial video i created is also in the description but that's going to wrap it up for this one and like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime pack here again today we're going to be taking a look at the next gen steam machine that i recently put together now you might notice that the operating system i'm running here looks just like the operating system on the steam deck and that's because it's actually the same operating system this is steamos 3 i'm using holo iso and it really does offer a nice console experience and speaking of console i wanted to keep this build as small as possible so i actually went with a msi trident that i picked up about two years ago maybe a year and a half ago and with what i've done to this unit here i can actually run some of this stuff at 1440p with steamos 3. it's actually a really nice experience and i've still got access to the desktop and i'll show you that all in a second but first i wanted to give you a look at this pc so i actually picked this up on ebay was refurbished it was actually a pretty decent deal like i mentioned i got it about a year and a half ago it's an msi trident 3 with the 10th gen intel cpu and originally this came with an nvidia gtx 1650 i believe it was the 1650 super and it performs really well with windows but i wanted more of a console experience and since we can install steamos 3 on these devices i figured i'd go ahead and do it so yeah it's actually pretty easy to access everything now the very first time i wanted to change the ssd in this unit did take a little while to get down to it basically the whole bottom of the case slides off but we've got 16 gigabytes of ddr4 ram a 10th gen i5 cpu and i've added this radeon rx 580 4 gigabyte model it's an oem variant and originally it came with this which is a gtx 1650 but yeah i really love the small form factor of this unit and you can add a 2.5 inch drive and a single m.2 ssd to this thing and when it comes to the overall specs we've got that intel i5 10 400 f 6 cores 12 threads it's got a base clock of 2.9 and a turbo up to 4.3 but this will turbo on all cores up to 4 gigahertz and most of the time that's what it's sitting at in linux 16 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 26.66 a radeon rx 584 gigabyte model this does have wi-fi five and bluetooth 4.2 built in and right out of the box it did have an intel card so it works in steam os 3 perfectly but yeah with that i5 and that rx 580 this has been performing really well we still have access to all of the on-screen controls that we can use with the steam deck and real quick i'll just go into the settings here and show you exactly what this thing's running so if we go to system we can scroll down and for some reason this card does show up as an rx 480 in linux no matter what i've done with it but this is for sure an rx 580 it's an oem variant from an hp so yeah nothing super special here and of course i could have just kept windows on this but i really love this interface here it does make it much easier just to navigate with the controller and this is going to be great for the living room it's small form factor we've got an easily accessible operating system that we can navigate with the controller we can access all of those steam deck quick menu items and we do have system wide fsr with this rx 580 it does come in handy when you're trying to go up to like say ultra at 1440p with a few of these games now don't get me wrong this is a 1080p card but there is a lot of this stuff that i was able to run at 1440p here at 60fps and another cool thing we have is the desktop so it's the same operating system that's running on the steam dag we have access to a full desktop operating system along with the kind of steam deck ui interface for steam and when it comes to emulation you could install emu deck you could install emulation station it's really up to you personally i've just been running everything standalone right now and we will take a look at some ps2 and ps3 emulation by the end of this video but yeah i mean it's been functioning really well with this setup and everything just works and it really comes down to having that radeon card so the rx 580 just worked right out of the box now hollow iso does have support for nvidia and intel gpus but i've not had good luck with it so i wanted to stick with radeon and the 580 i have here was the smallest most powerful radeon card that would fit inside of this unit and with the new steam deck updates we can actually change the resolution really easily so from the menu here we're gonna go to properties on each game is a bit cumbersome but it doesn't take much we can set the resolution to 1080 or 1440 in this case this is one of those games that does run at 1440 at high settings on this setup but yeah it's easy enough to put something like this together i've done an install tutorial using hollow iso i'll leave a link for that in the description but now i want to show off a little bit of gameplay here so this is injustice 2 we're at high settings 1440p looking really good here i don't have fsr on right now it's at a true 1440p and i was actually really impressed that the rx 580 especially a four gigabyte version could run this game at a steady 60 fps with these settings what i'm going to do now is just plug this into my game capture device so we can get a better look at everything and we'll test out a few more games and first up we've got the witcher 3 at 1080p ultra settings and i forget how good this game really looks at ultra i mean it is absolutely beautiful and like i mentioned we do have system wide fsr i do want to show that off real quick but uh the first thing i need to do is lower the resolution so we're at 1080p ultra right now and by the way i do have hair works off we'll go to graphics and hairworks is completely off something that really kills these radeon gpus but we'll lower this to 1600 by 900 and it was running well at 1080 so it's going to run even better at 1600 by 900 but i wanted to show fsr so we'll go over here to the settings scaling filter fsr i've got the fsr sharpness set to five and now at 1600 by 900 ultra settings we can get close to 100 fps with this game so we really don't need it and i would just go ahead and lock this at 60fps but it's there if you've got a lower end gpu next up we've got project cars 2. i've got a mix of high and ultra settings here we're at 1080p and i know it's an older one but this is still one of my favorite racing games and when it's set up correctly it looks really really good even at 1080p and we can average around 96 fps with this game so we really don't need any fsr here's cyberpunk 2077 and i'm always really impressed by how well this runs in linux i've just had really good luck with it 1080p high settings and i've got fsr from the game settings at quality and i do get a few dips here under 60 so we can always go into the settings and change that fsr to balance still looks pretty good and with it set up like this we can get an average of 72 fps out of it so yeah this is another one that will work really well in a setup like this in the living room not bad at all here's eldon ring and i was really hoping to get a little better performance out of this but we're at 900p i've got the system-wide fsr turned on and we're at medium settings we're still dipping under 60 so i might need to turn some of those settings from medium to low but i mean it's definitely playable like this and at low settings 1080 you can get an average of around 55 fps and the final pc game i wanted to test here was doom eternal unfortunately i forgot to turn on my game capture sound so i didn't capture it but uh we're at high settings 1080p and we can get well over 60 with it looks great like this and i was really hoping we could do ultra at 1080 but unfortunately with that rx 580 it's just not going to be possible and of course this thing's going to handle emulation very well now you could always go through and install emu deck to set everything up for you but i find that you know all of my controller configurations and everything aren't the way i like so i still really have to go through each of these emulators and redo all of the controller mapping so at least for right now i just been launching these individual emulators through the steam deck ui so you can add them as a non-steam game and that's how i've been playing them and right now we've got gamecube at 1440p we could even go up to 4k but my monitor is limited to 1440p so there's really no point and it'll even handle ps3 emulation here we have tekken 6 1080p with rpcs3 using the vulcan back in here and that rx 580 could probably upscale this game a little more but overall it's kind of an all-around little gaming machine i mean we can do some awesome emulation on it some great 1080p gaming some of the games can be run at 1440p it's not a top of the line machine by any means but i wasn't going for that i wanted a small form factor unit that i can install steam os on and i think something like this would be perfect initially i was gonna go with a much larger machine but then i remembered that i had this laying around and i found a card that would fit in it so with that gtx 1650 i just really can't get gamescope working properly with hollow iso at least at the time i'm making this video but down the road i'm sure drivers will be updated and hopefully valve puts this out for everybody to use on basically any pc and by then we should have really good support for nvidia cards but if you're looking to do this right now i would highly suggest using a radeon card be it from the 4000 series up to the 6000 series i've had pretty good luck right there in the mid range and as you saw with this video the rx 580 which is readily available on ebay works really well at 1080p and with some of this stuff we can go up to 1440 with it but that's gonna wrap it up for this video if you're interested in putting something like this together i will leave a few links in the description and if you want to install hollow iso on any of your devices right now link to the tutorial video i created is also in the description but that's going to wrap it up for this one and like always thanks for watching you\n"