this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Steam Deck
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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
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Why don't tech reviewers every talk about gamescope? Gaming on PCs has always been finicky because PCs have to serve so many use cases at once and games often have to compete for resources. Gamescope completely circumvents all of this overhead by being solely meant for the purpose of gaming. It's the closest you can get to a "PC Console". Third parties can never make something like gamescope for Windows, Microsoft themselves would have to ship it and maintain it.
I don't get it. I'm not a gamer but I played tons of video games in my life and never owned a video game console. For me video game is just software: you install it, you run it. Why would it be finicky on PC? Why would I need dedicated machine to run it? I don't need dedicated hardware for any other software I run. If anything it's the consoles that are upgraded only every couple of years so there's always some new games that push their limits and are 'finicky'. I've been told that the new Zelda doesn't run great on Switch for example. For me consoles are a limited machine people put close to their TVs that make playing games a bit easier (UX wise) and more comfortable . They are like DVD players for games: I can watch movies on my PC just fine, having dedicated player close to my TV just makes it a bit more comfortable (well, now I just use Netflix but you get the point).
I think a good point on this actually came up in some of the ROG Ally reviews.
I remember one of the reviews compared Stardew valley on deck vs Stardew valley on the Ally, with identical settings. The Deck used around 7-8w, and the Ally used 17-18w, with spikes over 20w.
The reviewer ended up opening task manager on the Ally, and by force closing a bunch of background processes they were able to get the Ally down to 12-14w. But even with manually closes processes (which is unreasonable to expect users to do), he is wasn't able to get close to the power draw of the deck. This isn't even considering that people tuning gamescope and power tool settings on the deck can get it's power usage way lower, down into the 4-5w range.
Some of this power draw disparity may be the hardware, I've heard the deck hardware is more power efficient at low power than the Ally's. But it's undeniable that running windows seriously hurts battery life, and makes windows handhelds inferior to the deck for low power games.