u/qupada — qupada

Fair point. Games clearly need to start decoupling the UI scale/resolution from the general screen resolution.

In a somewhat parallel issue, I've found that playing games on the couch (usually with Steam in-home streaming, from a PC elsewhere in the house) I have to reduce the resolution because the game's UI is far too small at TV-watching differences.

There are two kinds of people who would like a refreshed Steam Deck, in my experience:

1) People who seem to think it needs to be faster. Since it _appears_ to be crafted to provide _suitable_ performance for the 720p display it has (which I don't personally think needs to be changed, considering the whole "portable" use case), this seems to just be a "bigger number better" argument and those people should probably go out and buy a Lenovo Legion / ROG Ally / whatever.

2) People who are otherwise happy, but think it should have a newer, more _efficient_ processor to get longer battery life, and make less heat/noise in the process. There's a measurable gulf between the current Zen2/RDNA2 CPU and a theoretical modern Zen5/RDNA3.5 (or even RDNA4) model in that regard; it could be tuned to deliver roughly the same performance as the original (or a little more, for the handful of games that tend to miss their performance target slightly) but deliver longer battery life.

We got a hint at 2) with the OLED model's CPU using a newer manufacturing process improving thermals and battery life (of course it did _also_ have a bigger battery). I think the number of people willing to pay a bit extra for what could be an even larger improvement in that area is probably more than some would like to admit.

(I personally fit in that latter category. Considering a full work day including a public transport commute and lunch break, not a whole lot of extra battery could well be the difference between having to carry a charger and not)