Hey guys, Taki here. For the last few days, I
have been having a blast with the OLED Steam Deck, but there is one topic that I have not
addressed which is emulation. Based on my experience with PC gaming, I am dying
to see how this holds up for emulation, and I think it’s a contender to
be my primary emulation handheld. I did a big video like this on
the original Steam Deck last year, and the screen was the only thing lacking from
that experience, but that’s not the case anymore. thankfully we have a lot of good options when it
comes to emulation handhelds on the market and one of the best ones from a visual standpoint is
using the switch OLED if you don't have a modded switch you can use the online service and you'll
get access to a great library of titles but it is kind of limited and you do have to pay a monthly
fee one of the things that I don't like about the Nintendo online service and how it handles
games is you're kind of limited in how the games are displayed on the screen when you have
a platform that is open like the steam deck you can customize things to your liking without even
saying anything you can see a clear difference in how this game is represented we can make the
steam deck look like the switch if we turn turn on color reproduction inside the emulator settings
if we turn that on you'll see the colors are more muted but focus on the black Parts in this image
on the OLED steam deck those are pure black but on the OLED switch those are not this is a small
reason why I still tend to use official Hardware that is modded over more modern offerings from
Nintendo because they just look better in my opinion I have a lot of ground that I want to
cover in this video this is primarily going to be an emulation video but there are some things
that I'm going to address that I didn't get to talk about in my other two videos we're going
to do some visual comparisons between both steam decks as it pertains to emulation and we're going
to take a look at some power consumption data from both of them then we're going to focus on audio
differences between the units before wrapping up with a big showcase on emulation and setting
this thing up for emulation let's get into it I get asked this a few times, so
I’ll just recap the specs of the unit that I have before we get going.
This is the 1TB OLED model with etched glass that goes for $649. I do not have
the cheaper version with glossy screen, but I have addressed these concerns in the last
video that I did comparing this to a Switch OLED. in my last video we did a lot of tests between
the Steam deck OLED screen and other devices including the original deck but I want to do a
few more and tie it into power consumption as it relates to Retro emulation I've been kind
of Blown Away by how good these retro titles look on this screen and I picked out a few titles
that I think exemplify why this screen is so good for emulation first that we're going to look at
is Final Fantasy 1 for the NES and I have these set up right now to show you how they look to
my eye if you focus on the black area over here that's how it looks to my eye but if I adjust
this so it's pointing directly at the camera the difference isn't that obvious to see I pick this
game in particular because a lot of the game is going to focus on this battle UI where you have a
lot of black and white textures on the steam deck OLED those white UI elements really pop and the
black parts of the screen look amazing but let's take a look at the power consumption numbers so
I've gone ahead and set both of these to 3 watt TDP which is enough to be able to play a game
like this if we look over on the original steam deck you can see that it's using 6.3 6.4 watts of
power on the OLED steam deck we use around 4.8 to 5 watts of power for this game which is amazing
and I do just want to point out that this is with the OLED screen at 100% brightness but we're not
turning on that many pixels in this scene let's take a look at another game our next game is super
R type and this is one of the biggest reasons why I'm even doing this video in the first place I
had this game as a kid and I've never played it on an OLED panel that's this big there are a
lot of dark elements on this game as you can see and it looks amazing on this panel this is a
Super Nintendo title and if you look at the power consumption on the original deck we're using 6.5
watts of total power at Max brightness with the TDP set to 3 Watts whereas on the OLED steam deck
we're using 4.7 watts of total power at 3 wat TDP and we have a steady frame time on both of these
but we can't talk about NES without talking about Metroid and I have to tell you if you play this
game on the OLED deck at night with no lights on in your house it looks nuts there's like perfect
character isolation it will just look like it's just floating across the screen in front of
your eyes it looks amazing but just like the last title we're using less power on the new OLED
deck than we are in the old one the difference being that for this title I had to put this at
4 watt TDP where is on the original deck it's still at 3 watt TDP and one other thing that I'm
noticing while we're here at these very low tdps you will see that the fan will just completely
shut off on the OLED steam deck whereas on the original steam deck it will run at a lower RPM
now we can move over to 3D titles this is Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 and I have both
of these running at 1X native resolution for both of these devices I needed to use 5 wat TDP
and if we look at the power consumption on the original deck that's sitting at 7.4 watts and on
the OLED deck that is sitting at around 6 Watts so that's another cool thing to see that we can
emulate a 3D title like this and use less power than the original steam deck our final game for
this section is Majora's Mask again for Nintendo 64 at 1X native resolution both of these are set
to 5 wat TDP and on the original steam deck that gives us a total power consumption of around 7.4
watts and on the OLED deck that gives us around 5.7 Watts there's one thing I want to test let's
try to change this to 2x na solution to see if we still use less power than the original steam deck
so I'm going to go into the settings and then go into the core options and in here I'm going to
go to upscaling factor and I'm going to set that to 2x native resolution and I'm going to restart
then I'm going to load up that Save State again this is kind of amazing to see that we can use
2x native resolution and we still use less power than the original steam deck doing Nintendo 64
emulation that's amazing the next thing that I want to talk about that I didn't address in my
other two videos is the new change that they've made to the speakers Val said that they made
some modifications to have a flatter a sound profile what I want to do is do a series of audio
tests on this steam deck and on my original one and we'll try to evaluate the changes that they
made I've already done extensive testing on this before I started filming this section so I know
the strengths and weaknesses of this new change but I'm going to save my thoughts until after we
go through this section if you want to experience this for yourself now is a good time to wear
headphones I'm going to place a microphone in the middle of the device around where your head would
be to pick up the audio from both of the speakers and I'm going to try to Overlay the waveform in
this video so that we can see the audio that's playing I'll also put a note on screen so you
know which steam deck you're currently listening too he My takeaway from doing these tests and a few
others off-camera is that there are pros and cons to this new DSP configuration for the
speakers in the Deck OLED. For retro titles, I think the added bass in the original
Deck works well for retro titles. It’s punchier and there are noticeable differences
in the maximum volume levels between both units. That being said, The new configuration in the
OLED Deck holds up better in other situations because everything is level. In the last clip
that I had, the original Deck gets muddy when the vocals overlap with background instruments. The
OLED Deck represents how that song should sound. If the speaker component is the same between the
two units, I think it is worth Valve giving us the option of switching between the DSP settings that
we want to use in the same way that we can with the fan configurations. There are retro handhelds
that do stuff like this and it works well. now we're at the point where we can get our
new OLED deck ready for emulation there's a couple of different ways you can go about doing
this you can do the entire thing manually if you want or you can use something like mu deck
this is my Personal Steam deck that I use for emulation and it already has a lot of save files
for a ton of systems I could manually copy those files over to my new steam deck and then just
set that one up for Mu deck or I could try to use their new tool and that's what I'm going
to try to do in this video now obviously the easiest thing that we could do is just take the
SSD from this steam deck and then put it in the new one and I think that will work in the future
it kind of works now if I take this SSD and I put it in my OLED steam deck it will Boot and I'll be
able to play all of these games without having to do any extra work but the hardware isn't fully
supported but I anticipate this will not be an issue in the future so swapping over an old
drive with everything already set up should be a feasible path in the future but anyway here
we are in desktop mode I've already gone ahead and gone over to the muck website and you can
see that they do have the tool that we need to transfer our save files so I'm going to go over
to the download tool and I'm going to select export tool and just very quickly I realize not
everybody watching this is going to have this kind of a problem but I do want to talk about
the script that we have to run here if I were to execute this export saves file it won't work
because this URL right here is blocked in the country that I live in I have a VPN on this deck
but it's mainly meant for routing traffic from chromium I can set it up to be able to work for
something like this but it's really annoying and all we're grabbing right here is just an sh file
that I wish was on the muck website instead of just downloading something that I can get access
to to be blocked by something that I can't get access to but to be fair muck is not the only one
that distributes stuff like this even deck HD does the same process and just to show you there's
the command if I execute it it won't be able to connect to the server because raw. GitHub
user content is blocked in the country that I live in I could get around this with something
like proxy chains but it's annoying to set up so we're just going to go over to GitHub directly
and download that script file that we need With the backup done, now it’s time
to head over to the Emu Deck website on my OLED Deck and grab the installer. I’m
going to go with the custom option so I can select how I want this configured, and I’m
going to install this to my internal drive Then I’m going to uncheck some of the
included emulators and configuration options, before finishing up with the settings that I
want applied to my emulators. There are other options besides the ones shown here
that I will have to change manually, but this will take care of a few of them. The ROM transfering method inside Emu
Deck wouldn’t work for my situation, so I’m just going to select all of the folders
that I have on my SD card and then head into the ROM directory to paste them there. I have a
lot of files, so this is going to take awhile. After that is done, it’s time to use
Steam ROM manager to scrape the ROMs and add them to Steam. I like the normal
skin for this program more than this, but this is a nice way to hide some of
the stuff that isn’t novice-friendly. The only thing left for us to do
is to use the import save tool to transfer over the files that we backed up earlier. so it took a little while to get everything
fully transferred but I do have that all done after I did this the muud deck developer actually
ended up making a special version that works in countries that block the GitHub URL that you
need to use the scripts so it's going to be pretty awesome if I ever have to do this process
again in the future if we had in storage you can see that I basically Tred to do half and half
between Steam games and ROMs for this one terab SSD that I have now before today I never had
a steam Deck with this much storage so this is more than enough space for the ways that
I use a steam deck I'm able to get a decent collection of games with several that are pretty
high in file size and then I have a decent chunk of space dedicated for around 400 or so ROMs
and if we head into a section we should have box art there are some instances where I have
like multiple copies of certain games that I have to go and hide manually but everything here
does work now ready for the big emulation section It’s been a long time since I’ve done a video
on Steam Deck emulation, and I am curious to see how different it will feel to play retro
games on this updated device. For this video, I tested around 80 titles from the NES up
to the PS3 and Switch. For each game tested, I have the full MangoHud screen visible
with the charge drain. During these tests, my screen is at 85% brightness. I will also
point out that there is no checkered pattern visible on this screen. If you see it in
the video, this is aliasing from my camera. I tried my best to work around this, so
you should be able to see it. With that out of the way, let’s jump into the first
big section of handhelds up to the 3DS. Now we are into home consoles. In this section, we will look at NES, PC Engine,
Genesis, 32X, and Super Nintendo. In this section, we have Sega Saturn,
Dreamcast, PlayStation 1, and Nintendo 64. I’m impressed with how this is holding up
so far in terms of power consumption. This OLED Deck was sipping power for most of
the previous systems, but I expect that we will get closer to 20W with these. In this
section, we have Gamecube, Wii, PS2, and Xbox. We only have three systems left
for this video. In this section, we have Wii U and PS3. When it comes to
PS3, it was very easy for me to notice the thermal improvements of this new
model when we need to push up to 15W. There’s one final system for this video,
but it won’t have its own section. Now that we’ve gone through most of the testing,
I want to talk about a few important things that I found while filming this video.
The first thing that I saw is that the power consumption listed on the OSD
doesn’t seem to be that consistent. For example, here is Neutopia from the emulation
section, and you’ll see that it shows a charge drain of over 6W. At the time, this seemed
high to me based on testing that we did at the start of the video. I went back to retest
that game again after another title showed a 1W drop and I got my expected value of 5W. Some
of this difference could be due to the higher charge that we have, so I retested Pokemon red and
compared it to my normal Deck. I got around 5W, which is what I expected, but I filmed
this game in GBC mode 12 hours before this, and I was pulling 6.5W with
a 90% charge on my battery. Very strange, but we will talk more
about battery life in just a bit. The next thing that I discovered
is that certain emulators do not play well with the new refresh rate options
that we have for this panel. For example, here’s Evolution running in RA. It
has cutscenes that play at 60 FPS, while the rest of the game runs at 30 FPS. If
we set the frame limit option to 60 FPS / 60Hz, we have smooth frame times during FMVs,
but after the game loads, it’s choppy. To fix that, we need to set the frame limit
to 30 FPS / 90 Hz. The problem is that our FMVs will chug. If we use 90 FPS / 90Hz so we can
vsync to 30 and 60 FPS, our frame times go crazy. These frame time jumps are easy to see
in town as I run back and forth. They go away completely after I set a 30 FPS
limit. If we do 60 or 90, it’s garbage. From the testing that I did for this video, RA
seems to be the only emulator that has this issue. Other systems that mix 30 and 60 FPS
content work fine with a 60 FPS cap. Now it’s time to go over the battery
life expectations for emulation when it comes to this new Steam Deck.
There are two parts to this section, but I want to start by talking about how
I collected this data. This first section is estimated battery life, and we will place
each system within one of these four boxes. For each system, I took the average power
consumption of all the titles that I tested for the given system. These measurements were
taken while actually playing the games- I was not sitting idle. I also included more games
in my averages than I filmed in this video, with a minimum of three games per system. This is
not the best way to get a battery life reading, so there is a margin of error with this. It is
possible for a game to be more demanding or less demanding than my sample, but you should
be within a one band from my reference. With that out of the way, here are
our standings. Kind of interesting to see the data laid out like this. On
the high end, we cap out at 10 hours, with PS1 and Super Nintendo scoring
higher than I expected. On the low end, we have a floor of 3 hours of battery life,
but there are more demanding PS3 games that I could have used in my sample size to
bring that bottom number to 2 hours. So this is the estimated data, and I
don’t really like doing stuff like this, because spot checks on battery life are kind of
useless in the grand scheme of things. I followed up this with actual full drain battery life tests.
Given the numbers that we are working with, this takes a ton of time to manage, so I limited this
to two of the systems from the previous section. Like the other screen, this data
was taken while actually playing, or simulating play on the device.
This was not taken while idling. Anyway, here’s the data. For Super Mario 64, I was able to clock in at just under 9 and
half hours of battery life on the OLED Deck, where as the LCD Deck came in at 6 hours and 40
minutes. To get a bitch extra juice out of this, I set the resolution to 1x native and I
manually limited the system to 2 thread, while also downclocking the memory. This saved
less than a watt of power, but every bit counts. On the high-end. I tested Pokemon Sword at 1x
native resolution with the Yuzu emulator. On the LCD Deck, I got 3 hours and 19 minutes of battery
life. On the OLED Deck, we get a significant bump up to 5 hours and 13 minutes. Not bad.
that being said I'm very impressed with how this OLED deck holds up for emulation it is a
significant improvement over my Gundam deck that you saw in this video I use that thing almost
exclusively for emulation and I'm Blown Away by how much better the gaming experience is on this
OLED screen given that we were sipping power for a lot of what I covered in this video I think this
is easily the best handheld for emulation at this point when you factor in the controls the power
consumption the new visual experience and the improved cooling for the systems that require
all of the power that we have to offer this is probably very obvious to all of you but this is
not the most powerful PC handheld for emulation by a long shot other handhelds can handle a lot
more PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 and increase rendering resolutions for switch but you could make the
argument for streaming those titles over to the steam deck to bridge the gap assuming you already
have a powerful PC the overall experience will be a lot better I also want to point out that having
a steam Deck with a 50w hour battery is a bigger deal than I thought it would be for emulation for
the Retro systems that I care about the most this gives me over 2 hours of extra battery life
compared to my normal deck and this is going to be awesome for long flights or road trips
like many of you I am eager to see how valve raises the bar with the steam deck 2 but this guy
is going to be my go-to handheld for emulation for the foreseeable future if you enjoyed this
video and you want to see another take a look at the Deep dive that I did on the OLED screen in
the new steam deck happy gaming everyone Taki out
