It’s no secret that I love Steam bridge. Damn, I’m obsessed with this. I admit that this whirlwind romance is still relatively new. This is also something I offer to my wonderful colleague Tony Polanco all credit to it, as it encouraged me to adopt the Deck and its LCD screen, knowing full well that I am an unapologetic OLED snob. After a few weeks of using the device, I don’t feel like my passion for Valve’s laptop is going to wane anytime soon.
My experience with Steam Deck has been transformative in terms of my perspective on PC gaming and how wonderfully malleable it can be. So much so that it finally eradicated a deep-rooted pet peeve that I’ve been harboring for far too long.
Before I became a Steam Deck disciple, I was absolutely obsessed with frame rates. This was my commitment to maintaining a locked speed of 60fps, or even 120fps, in some of the best PC gamesit has arrived at an unbalanced state.
Thanks to software like Fraps, I can constantly monitor frame rate readings and my relationship with said app has been toxic for some time. Even though I’ve owned several FreeSync and G-Sync monitors over the years, which largely mitigates major fps drops, I was still absolutely addicted to Fraps.
If the Fraps on-screen HUD showed one of the best steam games went from 60fps to 56fps, I immediately jumped into the graphics settings and started reducing individual presets to get back to that magical 60.
After several GPU upgrades over the past few years, I expect my Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090-the powered rig should be capable of running any modern triple-A game at 4K/120fps. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons (mostly related to the issue of shader compilation stuttering), PC ports are often disappointing, no matter what level of hardware you put into a game. I’m looking at you, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.
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Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that the majority of PS5 And Xbox Series games now run at 60 fps. The reduction in input lag thanks to the increase in frame rate is immediately appreciable in the vast majority of titles, and I would choose a game running at 1440p at 60fps rather than a 4K effort at 30fps all day. That said (and to completely contradict my previous sentence), becoming intimately familiar with the Steam Deck has allowed me to be pretty okay with frame rates below 60.
My favorite experience on Steam Deck involves manually lowering the machine’s refresh rate settings to 40Hz, which provides noticeably smoother gameplay than playing at 30fps. Most games I play on the Deck can run at 40 frames per second with a juggling act involving medium to high settings running at the handheld’s ~720p resolution.
And honestly, it feels good. I became obsessed with reenacting the underrated crime Batman: Arkham Knight – folks, the Batmobile is nowhere near as bad as the general talk on the interwebs would have you believe – and I’m having a wonderful time playing the game locked at 40fps.
Okay, it’s true that I still care about frame rates to some extent. Still, Steam Deck showed me that I can still have fun playing games that can’t lock at 60fps.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like one OLED Steam Bridge model that can accommodate 1080p/60fps experiences. But for now, I’m head over heels for Valve’s current version of the bypass device.