Moving from a 1660 Super to a 6700 XT…has it been a bed of roses?

Holy cow, that FSR 2.1 article has proven to be quite a hit. It’s already my third most-viewed article on the entire site. As such I wanted to follow up and actually put FSR 2.1 to the test on Steam Deck, to see whether or not it could live up to the claims I previously brought out. I’m again using Kena: Bridge of Spirits as the test sample. The only other game I have in my library that I can test FSR 2.

About a week-and-a-half ago, Valve opened up Steam Deck repair centers. My close acquaintence, Matthew Anderson (ChimeraOS contributor, based in the US), made good use out of them when the fan in his Deck was making loud grinding sounds. I’m documenting this in case you’re curious how long it takes to get your Deck back or what exactly happens after it’s been sent out, should you decide to send it for repair.

EmuDeck version 0.17.6 just came out a few days ago. For those who aren’t aware, EmuDeck makes it incredibly easy to get emulation of retro to more modern titles set up on the Steam Deck. And what’s nice is combined with the Steam ROM Manager, roms can get added to the Steam Deck UI with nice cover art, and you can launch the game directly through this interface. At any rate, the latest update adds support for the Anbernic Win600 and some other goodies.

Since Vulkan has been merged into the mainline Ryujinx build a few days ago, curiosity got to the better of me and I wanted to do a comparison between this and the older OpenGL API. Vulkan, particularly on AMD – and therefore the Steam Deck – supposedly has a huge number of benefits over OpenGL, including faster shader compilation. I tested the following games: Metroid Dread (please be aware there are spoilers here!

My acquaintance Gardiner Bryant just posted a video going over the differences between the review unit of the Deck he got in February, and the Q3 one he received not too long ago. Mind you, though the differences are subtle, the Q3 Deck is better in just about every way. Here’s what I’ve extracted from the video – the Q3 Deck has the following advantages: it’s a whopping 0.2 ounces lighter it has a more distinct texture on both the chassis and the trackpads.

About a week ago during the Nintendo Direct Mini, Nintendo announced Portal: Companion Collection for the Nintendo Switch, and it came to the eShop the same day. Curious George (that is, me) wanted to do a comparison between running the games on the Steam Deck and on Nintendo’s current-gen console, and see how each platform fares. I couldn’t help but find it ironic that Valve would partner with Nintendo right around the time the Steam Deck embargoes were lifted earlier this year, and I had concocted some theories as to why they were doing this.