Well, with more and more Steam Decks shipping out, I figure it might be time to setup a thread here dedicated to talking about the platform. I just got my own last week, and I've finally got some free time to start playing around with it. I guess just talk about anything related to the Steam Deck and Dolphin here (FPS performance, max resolution for specific games, battery life, best settings, etc).
I've only played about an hour with Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, but I'm thoroughly impressed with the results so far. At 50% brightness, my Steam Deck reports 5+ hours of expected battery life, so I'm pretty happy about that. I'll be trying out Xenoblade Chronicles next up, preferably with the 60FPS patch. I'm going to be playing so many JRPGs on this thing...
Like I said, anyone else feel free to ask Steam Deck related questions or share any experiences or comments.
Congrats on your Steam Deck arrival! My reserved unit arrived last week too, though sadly my unit has a rubbing left trigger and the whiney delta fan. Eh. Fortunately I have a perfectly good Dev Deck that I've been using for months,
that one, so I'm just going to continue using that for now. I'm too busy working on the Progress Report to tinker on a Steam Deck.
Speaking of the Progress Report, it will be relevant to this thread~
As a weirdo that likes to run Dolphin at non-standard speeds, I don't suppose anyone knows if there's a way to set SteamOS's refresh rate to fractional values (e.g. 58.75Hz) rather than full-integer values? (e.g. 59.00Hz, 58.00Hz, 57.00Hz, etc)
I know on normal Linux you can use the typical xrandr commands for custom resolutions/refresh rates but I don't know if that even works properly on the Steam Deck and/or if there's a more elegant way that also doesn't straight-up require the desktop interface.
EDIT: This is possibly too off-topic but I don't suppose there are any Linux gurus that know how to manually control the fan? According to the following kernel patch from February, fan control apparently exists and I know that ThePhawx demonstrated (though never did explain how before setting the video to private) over 2 months ago that the fan can even be fully shut off:
(05-10-2022, 07:13 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]Well, with more and more Steam Decks shipping out, I figure it might be time to setup a thread here dedicated to talking about the platform. I just got my own last week, and I've finally got some free time to start playing around with it. I guess just talk about anything related to the Steam Deck and Dolphin here (FPS performance, max resolution for specific games, battery life, best settings, etc).
I've only played about an hour with Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, but I'm thoroughly impressed with the results so far. At 50% brightness, my Steam Deck reports 5+ hours of expected battery life, so I'm pretty happy about that. I'll be trying out Xenoblade Chronicles next up, preferably with the 60FPS patch. I'm going to be playing so many JRPGs on this thing...
Like I said, anyone else feel free to ask Steam Deck related questions or share any experiences or comments.
Got mine about a week ago and im also enjoying the long battery life and even tho i got pretty bad fans they are pretty much off when playing gamecube game so thats a win.
i wanted to check if you have the same issue as me tho, I installed dolphin throu emudeck and it does work great with the SteamOS however the linux version of dolphin seem to be giving me some stutter/frame pacing issues.
it will run perfectly fine for 30 seconds but then for 10 seconds it will feel more sluggish and choppy even tho the framerate never leaves 60.
ive tested everything i can think of so im pretty desperate
i recorded a video of it happening which shows it quite well:
https://youtu.be/MovSZWv6JOQ (recorded at 60fps slowed to 30fps, it starts at around 5 seconds and goes away around 14 seconds)
i did download the windows version of dolphin and ran it with proton throu steam and that did seem to eliminated the sluggishness or if it did have any i didnt notice it on the windows version.
Have you been noticing anything similar to this, or am i alone?
Quote:i did download the windows version of dolphin and ran it with proton throu steam and that did seem to eliminated the sluggishness or if it did have any i didnt notice it on the windows version.
You should install Dolphin through the Discover app in desktop mode. Dolphin supports Linux natively, you don't need proton!
Are you using the version that comes through the Steam Deck's Discover app? Only thing I can think of is that something maybe isn't quite right with the Flatpak package. I dunno. I haven't noticed anything myself, but I've yet to sit down with the Steam Deck for more than an hour (busy life...)
Maybe Desktop or Game mode makes a difference? Have you tried that as well?
(05-11-2022, 03:44 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]Are you using the version that comes through the Steam Deck's Discover app? Only thing I can think of is that something maybe isn't quite right with the Flatpak package. I dunno. I haven't noticed anything myself, but I've yet to sit down with the Steam Deck for more than an hour (busy life...)
Maybe Desktop or Game mode makes a difference? Have you tried that as well?
I too have a Steam Deck and use the standard Flatpak install from Discover in Game Mode.
I didn't notice any frame pacing issues (of course there still are the usual shader compilation issues, but these can mostly by mitigated by using Ubershaders...). I run it with 2x resolution which is close to the Deck's native 800p.
Gamecube games work great, Wii games do too, mostly (though I mostly suck at setting up good control schemes... one thing I wish was available on Dolphin (in general, not only on the Deck) would be a per-game control scheme set up, as it's a bit of a pain switching control schemes for each game (for Gamecube it's mostly not necessary, but for Wii games, especially motion emulation is a bit of a pain to set up...)
Before this thread gets locked as well like other related threads, I'd like to mention that EmuDeck does install exactly the same Dolphin version as the Discover store. It just calls "flatpak" to install Dolphin, and it installs the latest beta. It does not install any fork or outdated version.
If you want to make it easier, you can set up profiles in Dolphin for the Wii games, and bind those to hotkeys. Then you can bind a Menu (of whichever type you prefer) to the left trackpad with all of those hotkeys. So any time you swap games, just touch the left trackpad and you're done~
Coming from the Steam Controller I can say with confidence that you should never underestimate the usefulness of that left trackpad!
(05-11-2022, 05:36 PM)Leseratte10 Wrote: [ -> ]Before this thread gets locked as well like other related threads, I'd like to mention that EmuDeck does install exactly the same Dolphin version as the Discover store. It just calls "flatpak" to install Dolphin, and it installs the latest beta. It does not install any fork or outdated version.
Emudeck makes it hard to tell exactly what versions it uses for things, but it has Retroarch all over its page. Can you provide some evidence that it isn't using Retroarch?