Emulation is very good, but see above: The Steam Deck is a beast when it comes to emulating older consoles.I initially messed around trying to get all manner of non-Steam games to work, but it was hit and miss, and I found I ended up wasting a lot of my spare time. There are launchers that can handle this, but it’s not simple enough for the average person to do and it’s also a bit of a hassle to get going. Don’t bank on using non-Steam games: It’s very possible to get your GoG and Epic Games Store games working on the Deck.

So, changing the refresh rate to 40 in the Performance settings on the Deck itself can give you a nice balance between smooth gameplay and less battery usage. Problem is, the Deck can’t run every game at 60FPS and often doing so can eat the battery like I’d down a pizza. Frame rate matters: In an ideal world you’d run all your games at 60FPS and be laughing, having the most joyous time imaginable.I tend to focus on how much better I can make a handheld game look compared to what it’d be like on a Switch, so every notch above that is a win in my book. You’ll need to make compromises on things like texture detail, shadow quality, and environment detail. Don’t stick all the visual settings to max: Again, maybe obvious, but this isn’t a replacement for your home PC with a modern high-end GPU in it.This isn’t a PS5: This might be obvious, but I think it’s worth stating that while the Deck is more than powerful enough (for a handheld – supremely better than the Switch, for example), it’s not going to run Returnal as well as a PS5.

The steam deck valve