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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody here have experience using a Deck booted into Windows with VR headset connected for playing Beat Saber? How well does it work for this purpose? Not finding too much info on that particular setup online.

This revision appears to fix my main gripes with the original model so I’d like to buy one, but if I could use it as an ultraportable Beat Saber machine it’d make the purchase more justifiable. While my Quest 2 can technically run Beat Saber natively, the Steam version is vastly more mod-friendly and PCs generally don’t choke as badly on complex custom maps as the middling smartphone hardware in the Quest 2 does.

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i don’t understand why you want a portable beat saber setup that requires hauling around an entire VR setup + a steam deck + all of the peripherals that requires? imo you might as well buy a little laptop with a proper video card if you’re going that route. the deck’s video capabilities aren’t intended to drive VR or run windows, you’ll almost certainly have issues of a million varieties.

Mainly, it’s about maximizing usage of my devices.

At home most gaming (including Beat Saber) is done on a nice custom tower that outguns any reasonably priced gaming laptop, meaning that if I bought a gaming laptop it’d only get used when traveling and would collect dust the rest of the time. Unless of course I sell the desktop and go laptop-exclusive for games, but that comes with some notable tradeoffs (fan noise and longevity primarily).

The Deck’s form factor makes it attractive for at-home use scenarios that a desktop and laptop don’t fit as well, and a such has a better chance of getting consistent usage compared to a laptop.

Could you not just run Best Saber on a Quest?

It’s possible, but as noted in my other comment, the Quest version is notoriously unfriendly to modding and can chug with more complex custom maps due to weak hardware, which is problematic because I play modded/custom exclusively.

It's certainly possible, I've managed to make the game run playably on a base model 2019 macbook, but that was completely vanilla on the lowest settings I could manage. Beat Saber (especially with mods) can get pretty damn hard to run (it often lags pretty badly on my 3700X/RTX 3070), especially if you're playing noodle maps or with high poly custom sabres.

I haven't tried it but I expect you'd have a very bad time running a quest due to the encoding step, and also probably wouldn't have fun on anything newer than a vive/cv1 because the resolution is too high.

>While my Quest 2 can technically run Beat Saber natively, the Steam version is vastly more mod-friendly and PCs generally don’t choke as badly on complex custom maps as the middling smartphone hardware in the Quest 2 does.

The Steam version is not more mod friendly.

>PCs generally don’t choke as badly on complex custom maps as the middling smartphone hardware in the Quest 2 does.

The Steamdeck targets 720p 30 fps gaming. The Quest 2 useded the latest generation mobile processors when it released. Similarly the Quest 3 is using the top of the line mobile processors.

> The Steam version is not more mod friendly.

One doesn’t need to mess around with sideloading and PC mods get updates more frequently, which in my book would qualify as more mod friendly.

It sounds like the Deck can’t handle Beat Saber better than the Quest 2 though so I guess it’s moot.

>One doesn’t need to mess around with sideloading and PC mods get updates more frequently

Sideloading is how you install any new software on android, so requiring it for installing modded beatsaber does not make it less mod friendly. PC updating more often is not because the PC version is more mod friendly. The reason it is slow to update on Quest right now is because modders are investing into making the next generation modding software instead of updating the coremods.

Steam deck runs beat saber very poorly

There's a VR girl on YouTube who has a video running VR on a ROG Ally (like a Steam Deck, but with Windows and better hardware).

As I recall, Beat Saber was okay, but more demanding games were not.

I don't think the SD would be very useful for VR.

My understanding is that Windows is very buggy to boot into.

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