DF Direct Weekly: should the next Steam Deck deliver more performance?

Welcome to the latest DF Direct Weekly – and while the year is drawing to a close, there still seems to be enough gaming and technology news to allow us to deliver a packed show. We kick off with discussion on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 – now dated for ‘Fall’ 2023 – while we also share our thoughts on the extent to which Death Stranding’s content would work for its transition to cinema.

The story that caught my eye this week was Sean Hollister’s interview with Valve on The Verge, where the company revealed that any successor to the existing Steam Deck would concentrate on quality of life functions like battery life and an improved screen, as opposed to delivering much in the way of extra performance. Improved performance is always a good thing but in this case, I think the decision is a sound one: it sets a baseline for all Steam Deck users, it keeps the current hardware in the game, and it addresses the key issues have with the existing model. Put simply, the screen redefines ‘mediocre’ while battery life can be poor on the latest games, or even by ramping up settings on older titles.

However, as you’ll see in the show, I had concerns over the extent to which Steam Deck can survive the cross-gen transition. It’s unfair to judge the hardware based on sub-optimal PC ports like The Callisto Protocol – where the Deck struggles – but I was more concerned about whether the hardware has the performance to handle Unreal Engine 5 features like Lumen and Nanite. I actually followed this up after the recording by installing Windows on my Deck and running Fortnite. At 1280×800 resolution with TSR medium on quality mode, I can indeed use the high-end features and performance is in the 30-36fps region (unfortunately, the 30fps cap has frame-pacing issues and there is some shader compilation stutter in traversal). I was genuinely surprised by this bearing in mind how poorly UE5.0 demos ran on the Valve machine.

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