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Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

Wow I’m glad somebody is finally quantifying why the steam deck has terrible CPU performance. I thought it might be the tiny cache.

Many older games struggle to hit a consistent 60 FPS due to CPU limitations. With some testing you can usually figure out which options are mostly bottlenecked by the CPU.

There are some games, like Fallout 3, that will chug down towards 30 FPS in busy areas regardless of settings :/

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I was always interested why Dolphin (wii and GameCube) emulator would chug on the steam deck. Very frequent single digit fps drops. My 2013 MacBook Air on Linux plays with 0 drops.

It is strange one, but try to disable SMT and limit cores to 3 while playing dolphin. Solved all of my issues. Guess linux version have some issues when limiting cores.

I disagree, it is not really terrible, it is on par with i7 4770, i7 7700hq and even 10310u at two-four times less power consumed. 99% games are only needs 4 cores to achieve 60 fps, and apu is only limit for them at these extremely low TDP. AMD put a decent apu for balance, and compare to 6800u with twice more cores and 1.5 more powerful apu, they only lose 10-20% while consuming 2 times less power.

Fallout 3 may have other issues. The Steam Deck CPU should be more than powerful enough to run all areas of that game at 60FPS+.

Two things can be true. Fallout 3 is poorly optimized for sure. The steam deck’s CPU performance also sucks.

I’ve had this issue with plenty of games.

Steam Deck’s CPU is far more powerful than CPUs of the day when those games were released, the issue somewhere else.

Where do you suspect the problem might be? I know that the memory latency is the primary issue for that engine. It sucked on the CPU of that era, it sucks on the steam deck, but it does not suck for most modern CPU because they have way more L3 cache and better latency outside of it (as the article states)

Fallout 3 has massive issues on any new operating system. There are unofficial patches and mods to fix that but Valve does not auto-install anything unofficial, even if it would make things far better.

I recently played through Death Stranding which is more recent, better graphics and seemingly better optimized than Fallout 3. I'm pretty sure if the CPU can handle Death Stranding (and other more complex games) without problem, it could handle Fallout 3 if the programming was on point.

It's interesting because Skyrim on the same engine runs very well.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas both have massive issues. You may be better off using Lutris with the GOG version on the Steam Deck and finding a config that installs the performance fix mods.

I tried performance patches for both FO3/FNV and couldn’t fix it for either. I believe it’s because every prefab that Bethesda renders requires a memory access on every frame. So areas with a ton of prefabs like Mr. House’s penthouse or rivet city market are extremely slow.

It checks out given the articles coverage of just how poor the memory latency is once you exceed the tiny 4MB cache.

There are ways to “fix” it but they tend to suck. You can crank the draw distance of objects to the minimum but if it’s not done dynamically then every other scene becomes terribly ugly/broken. You can also install mods that remove some of the clutter but how do you know which clutter to remove? Some of it is aesthetically important and the tone of the scene can change dramatically by randomly removing stuff.

It's important to not forget that Skyrim has been ported to an insane amount of consoles over the years, which includes engine and optimization updates. It's a very actively maintained game that from what I can tell mostly follows sensible design practices with current hardware.

Fallout 3(& by extension New Vegas) hasn't had that luxury; those games only got two releases (initial & "ultimate edition"), both of which running on an engine where the glue holding things together is duct tape and technical debt going back to Oblivion and it was released for a set of consoles that needed optimization to the degree where it was just easier to dump the entire world state as it changed into a save file instead of just storing the bare minimum[0]. That's the sort of optimization that will lead to bugs down the line as undocumented features and behaviors change (not to mention the already buggy release state of both games.)

[0]: Which in turn caused another infamous bug to pop up where the PS3 would run out of storage to keep individual game saves (the cap was something like 10mb) after playing for long enough.

Yeah pretty early on I realized that I didn’t like playing demanding games on it for a few reasons - screen quality, fan noise, and CPU performance. It’s mostly smaller indie games and emulation for me.

The new God of War is absolutely unplayable, or at least it was when I uninstalled it in January.

yea, uninstalling it would make it unplayable.

You mean the game that is not marked as verified but rather as "playable" (which really means: it starts. Figure out yourself how to make it run well) doesn't run well?

Well that's not entirely surprising now, is it?

Is there a configuration you found that made it run well or did you just want to say something unhelpful?

CryoByte33 on YouTube[0] has videos explaining in details different configuration presets to run games like God of War, Witcher 3, or Breath of the Wild. He's also maintaining an impressive piece of software[1] that helps optimize your Steam Deck. Worst case scenario, if you don't find the game you're looking for in his videos, chances are you will find a decent configuration on SteamDeckHQ[2]

[0]: https://youtube.com/@cryobyte33 [1]: https://github.com/CryoByte33/steam-deck-utilities [2]: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-settings/

For anybody else reading the discussion, knowing that GoW is not advertised as fully supported is important context.

Entirely unhelpful, but considering your original comment was pretty much complaining that <old device> cannot run <very new and demanding software>, I figured it was in the theme.

And unlike the Switch, the Switch doesn't enter a higher performance mode when docked.

Yeah, but Switch doesn't come close to Decks performance in any configuration - there's a staggering amount of games that don't even reach 30fps consistently while looking like a blurry mess.

The performance difference there is stark.

Yeah but the Deck isn't as cool as the Switch

The switch slows itself down when not docked to save battery.

The resolution is lowered in many games too.

My own experience is that it kinda does. Some games run with a noticeably higher frame rate when docked. The fan also gets louder.

That is disappointing to hear. I was actually planning to buy the Steam Deck to play 2010-2016 era action RPGs.

You should give it a shot. HN can be too negative at times. At least the YouTube vids seem to indicate that the deck can handle the games of that era just fine.

(author of the article here) Agreed. I'm just commenting on the hardware architecture. The deck is a pretty competent gaming device, given its ultraportable form factor and tight power constraints. You can find that out on any number of sites that have reviewed the Steam Deck from gaming experience perspective, so I didn't think it was necessary rehash that.

Don't let everyone get you down, I have one and it's extremely performant, even with games from the past few years. It'll work totally fine for stuff from that era.

I’ve been playing through my ARPG backlog on Steam Deck. Is there a particular game you’re curious about?

I’ve been very happy with mine playing games of all vintages and development budgets. Just this weekend I was playing Far Cry 4 and The Division 2 quite smoothly.

I've been playing Midnight Suns on mine, very recent game, and it works extremely well(if you lock to 30fps). I've played a good chunk of Elden Ring also completely locked to 30fps - no problem at all.

Someone said something about it before that makes sense to me - it's a portable PS4. If you are happy with playing games at the level a PS4 would play them, then it's a perfect device for you. If you expect proper next-gen games to run on it(Returnal) then you will be disappointed.

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