Topic: PC Gaming

@JaxonH I usually enjoy setting up emulators on new computers, but being a complete Linux noob, I dunno how difficult it'll be for me to fiddle with it on the Deck. And I'm certainly not going to bother with putting Windows on it.

I anticipated owning one of these by now (and probably would have if there hadn't still been a half year delay when I initially ordered one), but I've been so happy with my SWOLED that I think I'll just wait for Valve to iterate on this design a bit. They've mentioned releasing new hardware with a better screen and superior battery life, so that's probably worth waiting for. No point in grabbing one of these when I'm still knee-deep in unplayed 3DS and Switch games.

Have done my annual buying of game on PC during sales that I probably won't end up playing. Although knowing how often I end up not playing them I restrained myself to just 1. Horizon Zero Dawn..... and I think I might actually beat this one instead of just reverting back to Beat Sabre, Dirt and Civ

What might also help in that regard. I intend to pick up an OLED TV this week and then set up a proper home theatre/gaming room. The LG CS 55" is currently $1100AU off so $1600AU (~$1000US). With all the fun stuff of OLED but also 20-120Hz VRR range. I suspect Horizon is a pretty enough game to take advantage of said shiny new toy

@Ralizah
For sure. I don't "need" the Deck, and as is can't keep up with all my Switch games. But sometimes I feel like playing some Gears 5, some Halo Infinite, some FFVII Remake, etc.

And man, lemme tell ya. Halo Infinite on Deck is a dream. Campaign, obviously. I don't mess with MP. It looks insanely good, gets 2.5 - 3 hrs battery life (that's better than a lot of heavy games like God of War and Spiderman- pretty much any Sony title is gonna be 1.5 - 2 hrs).

But it's the gyro aiming that elevates it. Never in my life have I used gyro that felt so perfectly responsive. So responsive, it literally feels like a mouse. Not "almost" like a mouse. It's exactly like a mouse. Zero drift no matter how crazy with it you get. Zero noise for granular movement. Instant 1:1 response with no perceptible latency. It's my new benchmark for gyro aiming. All other gyro aiming will now be compared to Halo Infinite on Deck.

And tbh, Gears 5 has pretty great gyro too. Nearly just as good. I think gyro just feels best with FPS. In Halo I set it to activate when my thumb is on the analog. Whereas in Gears, I set it to only activate when aiming down sights

I'm starting to realize how much I love Xbox exclusives. I've never felt this way about Sony exclusives. They just don't do it for me. But Gears 5 and Halo Infinite? I think they're my new favorite 3rd person and 1st person shooters. I was already 10+ hours into Gears 5, but it's been a while since I played. But I'd never actually tried Halo Infinite until today. I'm blown away at how good it is in every respect- gameplay, graphics, gyro aiming, story... it's got it all.

@JaxonH I've never been able to get into most of Microsoft's exclusives, unfortunately. Gears 1 was great (I'd go so far as to say it approaches action-horror territory at times), but the series kind of turned into a big, dumb action vehicle after that. At least on the 360. Never got the newer ones. Also REALLY loved the Viva Pinata games, but those unfortunately never got PC ports, afaik. I tried a few of their newer games when I was demo'ing Game Pass, but... eh.

Sony blockbusters are great... in moderation. Once every year or two, I enjoy playing one of their ultra polished cinematic adventure games. In 2021, it was God of War. Next year, it'll likely be Spider-Man. That's about my limit for those sorts of games, though. And probably for Western AAA fare in general, if I'm being honest. Otherwise, I crave my AA Japanese games: the sort of stuff I grew up playing on PS1/PS2/GameCube/etc.

Steam Deck is like Steam on PC where you can configure pretty much anything to have gyro controls, right?

Despite its advanced capabilities, I predict most of the games I play on the Deck won't be entirely dissimilar from Switch games. Just... whatever games that never enjoyed Nintendo ports, for whatever reason. Maybe stuff like Tales of Arise and the next Monster Hunter if they don't come to the successor. I should probably play MH World at some point as well. And Soul Hackers 2. Resident Evil 7/8/etc. Final Fantasy VII Remake/Rebirth.

@Ralizah
Steam Deck is like Steam on PC where you can configure pretty much anything to have gyro controls, right?

And yes. Exactly like on PC. And all the community configs make it easy to find something with gyro if needed. But most of the time I just use the default template, hit the Steam button and push right on D-pad to access Controller Settings diagram, and from there you can easily toggle gyro on, and then hit the gyro settings icon to tell it "Activate with Left Trigger Soft Pull" or "When Thumb Is on Right Analog or Right Track Pad" or "Always On", however you want it.

As long as the game accepts mouse input simultaneously with controller input, you're good. Which, most games do. Works in just about every game I have installed that needs it. Though I do recall encountering some games on my desktop that didn't, so they are out there. But ya, super easy to activate, and just below the "Use Gyro" box there's a box for enabling the 4 back buttons, which I always do. Defaults to 4 face buttons which is nice- can play a game without your thumb leaving the analog. But sometimes I'll throw one or both shoulder bumpers on there, just because they're easier to hit than the shoulder bumpers.

They've really made Deck a user-friendly experience. They've locked out most of the complicated settings and just dumbed it down to a level most of us can easily grasp, and made it super easy to access and change.

This is pretty much where I am at with it, too. I contemplated preordering one, but it is pretty clear now it is in the wild that the Deck is a good piece of kit for a first go, but that is about it. Ergonomics, materials, battery life, usability etc all clearly have room for iteration. I have no idea how many years away it might be until they do a new version, but I feel like I can wait.

There aren’t really many games at all right now on PC, that aren’t on the Switch (that I would want to play in a handheld context, I mean). I guess if I didn’t own a PC I’d feel differently about it, but I do, so here we are.

Especially as, based on what I’ve read about it, just because I have a game on Steam I want to play handheld, it isn’t just necessarily guaranteed to work on the Deck. And this isn’t just trying to play big triple AAA games on the Deck, some games even small indies just don’t work. Or even if it can, you might have to do a lot of fiddling both in the Deck’s device settings and the game settings too. That sorta sounds like a nightmare to me just to play a game in handheld, but maybe it has more value to others.

It took me til 4 in the morning, but I finally got PrimeHack working on Deck. With gyro aiming. Finally a legit way of playing Metroid Prime Trilogy on handheld.

It wouldn't recognize the controller it was supposed to so I had to assign a Default Keyboard Mouse config, then manually assign buttons in the Dolphin menu. It was a serious pain I won't get into.

But it works now.

Only thing is, the mouse cursor shows on screen and I can't make it disappear, even despite having the setting checked to never show the cursor. But its locked to the center with the aiming reticule so, eh. I can live with it.

But wow. The game plays seriously well with proper dual analog and gyro. We definitely need a remaster of this. But until that day comes, at least I have a fallback plan now.

Got my PC yesterday. I can't wait to use it for Roblox and Tetris.

I did it! I did it! Metroid Prime Trilogy dream has been fulfilled!

Mouse cursor is gone! All I did was change Audio backend from Pulse to the middle option (there's No Audio, a middle option, and Pulse, I changed to the middle). But it fixed it!

The settings had an option to show the mouse cursor and it was set to "Never", but I also toggled that on and off so maybe that was it.

Either way, it's FLAWLESS now. Full-screen, no mouse cursor, dual analog movement and aiming with a solid sensitivity, and gyro activated when thumb is on the analog. It feels SO good! Now I can play through this whole Trilogy with modern sensibilities.

Could add some texture packs too. Maybe I will. But honestly I think it looks fine. And I want top notch performance at 720p. Texture packs could laden it with performance issues.

@HotGoomba
What kind of PC?

If you only bought for stuff like Roblox and Tetris I suppose you don't need anything that expensive. Unless you got something high end to future proof

@JaxonH I was half kidding with that comment, but also not really.

You see, this PC is actually VR capable and that's what I plan on using the PC for.

It's actually from a relative who didn't want it anymore and it's an Alienware Aurora R9 or something with an i7 9th gen and RTX 2080 Super. Personally wouldn't have chosen Alienware, but hey I'm not complaining.

@HotGoomba
Oh right on. That's a pretty good PC actually. I have an i9 with RTX 2080 ti, so it's very comparable to my own setup.

Should be able to do 4k 60fps on high settings for 95% of games. Only AAA games from the last 2 years onward may struggle to hit a full 60, but for those you can just bump it down to 1440p 60fps on high settings and be good for many years to come.

On the other hand, is the 2080 VRR capable? I know my 2080 ti wasn't originally VRR capable, but they patched it in. Just not sure if that was only for the 2080 ti and 2090 or if that actually included the base 2080 also.

If it is VRR compatible, and you have a VRR-compatible screen, you can do 4k 60fps high settings across the board, and VRR will ensure you never notice a frame drop. That's why VRR is so important to have. Whereas you may need to upgrade to a 3xxx or 4xxx series card to ensure you hit that full 60 at 4k across the board, with VRR you don't have to.

Even if you bought it for VR, you can still get a Steam library going and enjoy the benefits of gyro aiming for basically any game. Makes going back to PS/Xbox for those titles very difficult after experiencing them with proper aiming. Especially since you can play both Xbox and PS 1st party titles on Steam now. Gears 5, Halo Infinite, God of War, Spiderman, Uncharted... it's all on Steam. With more on the way.

@JaxonH Don't have a compatible monitor unfortunately, but I assume that the 2080 Super has VRR. Don't have a 4K monitor anyways.

I also might start to prioritize PC more, especially over Xbox since they're so similar now. The prices of PCs and my origins on consoles always turned me off from getting a gaming PC, but I'm glad I know people who don't do bull on their PCs.

All I need to do now is to replace the default-ass Dell keyboard.

@HotGoomba there is a lot of misinformation about the cost and ease of use when it comes to PC gaming, mostly spread around by people who don’t even play games on PC.

Sure, you may struggle to build a PC comparable to say a Series X for the same price, but a PC is going to last you longer than a console is (when it comes to getting the most out of your games, I mean). You could argue hardware is always ticking down, PC or console, but you tend to find stuff in a PC is far more future proofed than a console is,

Plus the ability to slowly upgrade pieces of your PC, rather than needing to buy an entire new machine say every six years or whatever (less if you are a mid version refresh person which is generally just not necessary with a PC), it evens out cost wise. That isn’t to say there isn’t some absurd pricing of parts, or scalpers or other such things, but this isn’t unique to PC gaming, and the same saviness one would use to get a console for a reasonable price can be applied to PC parts.

What helps the cost even further long term is PC gaming doesn’t lock you into costly ecosystems like you are on PlayStation and Nintendo (less so with Xbox thanks to Gamepass). You are likely to find deep, deep, discounts on PC games very quickly. It is something I really struggled with when I got my Switch a couple of years ago and saw five plus year old games still being sold for 60 quid because they were first party and knew I had no choice but to pay the prices. They would maybe getting like a 20 percent discount as part of some legendary once in a lifetime sale, when on PC I can go to a legal 3rd party key seller and get that discount like a month after release on PC, and by six months I can probably get a discount three times that.

The Switch has definitely carved a niche for itself due to it’s hybrid nature, but I don’t really understand people who choose consoles like PS5s or Xboxes over a PC. When they first came out and promised a target of 60 fps and 4K I did kinda get it, because you probably aren’t going to get a 4K 60fps PC for around 500 quid, but we are already only two years into the cycle of these consoles, when they are still making games for past generations, which aren’t delivering on a 4K 60 fps target. If you got the money for a PS5 and you got 70 quid spare every time you wanna play a new game, just get a PC. I guess I get it if you’re deeply entrenched in an ecosystem and all your friends are there, but everything else is just hooey.

Like the old chestnut of games being more complicated to run on a PC, sure you may run into more complications than you would on a console, but generally issues run from people trying to run old or incompatible titles that wouldn’t work on a console for the same reason. Or because a game has a known issue, which needs to be fixed by the dev, like it would on a console. For the rare times there is something wrong, Google exists, and whatever the solution is, it won’t be a fraction of the complexity you’ve probably been told to expect by console only fearmongerers. And on the off chance it is that complicated, generally if you purchase from Steam or something like that, you are going to have a much easier time getting a refund than you would if you tried to get one from Sony’s store for example.

@Pizzamorg @HotGoomba
The other thing about PCs is that they aren't locked down. If some component dies on a console then you're kinda out of luck. If you want to upgrade a console you have to wait for a hardware revision and buy the entire thing again. If you want a hardware feature you have to hope they include it. And for PCs when you build a new one you can choose to carry over some components (i.e. I'll upgrade my GPU later or keep my case)

Same deal with the software. I generally build myself a new PC every 5 years or so although I did break that rule this year buy building a second PC exclusively as a TV/VR gaming PC. So right now I have three PCs that have some value. A 2014 build with an i5-4560 and 16GB of DDR3, a 2019 build with a Ryzen 3600X, a crappy Radeon paperweight I emergency brought when my R9 285 died and 32GB of DDR4 and a 2021 build with an i3-10105F, 16GB DDR4 and a 1660Ti. The 10th Gen i3 I use for games, the old i5 I'm currently not using but I intend to at some point turn it into a Plex server. The Ryzen I use for work (so it has a lot of bloat just from that), ripping BluRays and some strategy games

Compare that to my Wii U which once the Switch launched it found itself in a box

@skywake
That's true.

But it's never been a selling point for me personally. I bought a pre-built, and got it in a smaller sized desktop case to keep a small footprint. And my 2080 ti barely, and I mean barely, fits inside. The newer GPUs would never fit in this case. And I'm not into tearing it all down to swap cases. So my plan is, use it until I can't get 1440p 60fps anymore, and then do a full console-like upgrade buying a new pre-built of whatever is out at the time. RTX 7xxx or 8xxx series cards, probably.

My last PC was home built, and I remember upgrading the GPU to an AMD 5600X, and it kept shutting off. Had all kinds of problems. Sent it back, and that's when I bought a pre-built. Just don't have the time or patience for dealing with that sort of thing at this point in my life. I prefer the simplicity of a single large jump every 5 years or so. Longer if I can stretch it.

But it's definitely an option some can take advantage of. And is certainly cheaper. If you have a larger case where any GPU can fit, and you're not changing from Nvidia to AMD (which is what I did- on my next PC I may get full sized so I can buy new Nvidia GPUs to upgrade, since at least that is fairly simple), it's a great way to prolong longevity.

It's that gyro aiming though. And getting PS/Xbox games with gyro all on one system. That's what makes PC so great. I was never into mods even in the slightest, so that too just isn't a factor for me. But gyro aiming? That is worth climbing mountains for.

@HotGoomba
Are you hooking up to a monitor or your TV? I don't have a monitor. Never liked sitting at a desk to game. My PC is connected directly to my 4KTV like all my other consoles. And that TV has VRR. As long as you use an HDMI 2.1 cable and activate it you'll be good.

Unless you're gaming at a desk with a monitor, which it sounds like you are.

If so, are you actually going to use a keyboard and mouse? Or just game with a controller (tbh I got a lapboard all set up for KB/M in the recliner while gaming on the TV, even got an Azeron Cyborg, but I never use it- typically just grab a Switch Pro Controller or Dualsense).

If you use a Switch Pro controller, you'll want a Bluetooth 4.0 dongle. Specifically BT4.0. Which is an older spec, but it's the only one Switch Pro works properly with. They sell the dongles for like $10 on Amazon.

@JaxonH
Even so, you can still repurpose hardware. My i5 went from 8GB to 16GB of DDR3, then from the R9 285 to that cheap Radeon when the 285 died. My Ryzen build went from that cheap Radeon card to a 1660Ti and then later 16GB of DDR4 to 32GB of faster memory when COVID hit and I needed to WFH. I've also dropped in a BluRay drive that can rip UHD discs. And when I built my VR/HTPC the 1660Ti was moved across and the 16GB of DDR was reused. And my main machine still has a 1TB HDD I've had for a good decade

I honestly don't think I've ever bothered with a CPU upgrade to be fair. And usually I've waited too long for RAM to carry. But storage and GPUs? There's some flexibility in not having to upgrade them on the same cycle. Eg probably a couple of years from now I expect I'll upgrade my 1660Ti to whatever mid range card at the time is. And I can do that without having to build an entirely new PC

But probably more importantly, that old hardware can be put to work for some other task

Oh wow I got a lot of notifications. It's gonna take a bit to read them all but I can't wait to see what everyone said.

Alright I read it all. Thank you everyone. Replying time.

@Pizzamorg @Cotillion @skywake I grew up with console gaming, which is why I stayed with it for YEARS, but me enjoying my Oculus Quest 2, my Xbox Series S becoming a room decoration after I got bored of it, and my PS5 being used like twice a month, I decided to finally get a PC. The price of games rising wasn't actually my reason, but I did realize that I claimed multiple games through bundles on Humble and Itch.io and deals on Epic Games Store, plus Game Pass, so those were a deciding factor. And I did notice after I decided to get the PC but before I actually got it that games on the Oculus store (for the Quest, not Rift) were generally more expensive than on Steam, especially with the winter sales for both platforms. I probably wouldn't have gotten a gaming PC if it wasn't my obsession with VR growing for nearing a decade, but now that I have one, I'm considering changing up my gaming environment, and taking advantage of PC gaming's strengths like modding and emulations of older games from a company that'll probably DMCA me if I say their name.

Since I have almost no reason to keep it, I'll probably just sell or get rid of my Series S next year, or at least keep it in storage for entirety, my PS5 I will keep though since I still plan on playing PlayStation exclusives on it, at least for the time being, and I'm not completely counting out the PSVR2 yet, and I could never abandon Nintendo. They could release the Virtual Boy 2 and I'd still buy it.

And I have noticed the nice bonus of PCs never truly becoming paperweights. I have two laptops that I currently have, one barely kicking that I may put Linux on to pump some life back into it, and another a modular laptop that I love (Framework Laptop if you're wondering). Meanwhile my PS4 Pro has been rotting in a plastic bin ever since I got my PS5, my 3DS I barely use, the Wii I still have hooked up but rarely play on, and the Wii U.

Can't say for certain I'll have multiple PCs or not, but we'll see.

@JaxonH Funny enough, modding was actually a huge factor into my PC path. I just downloaded and bought Skyrim VR, and I probably would have never bought it if it wasn't for the mods. Better to get a PC for Skyrim than to buy the PSVR version an cry. Another game that's big with mod support is Bonelab, which I do hope to use to make some of my own abominations. I don't need a PC to play Bonelab, but that seems to be the best experience compared to Quest.

Didn't consider gyro aiming, but I assume that'll be a big plus. I expect to use a controller for most games on PC though. My PC controller is an 8bitdo Switch controller I already had that was easy to connect to the PC thanks to the connector switch at the back.

And I do expect to at least attempt to upgrade my own PC. Hopefully LTT mentally prepared me for the upcoming doom. Gonna have to get a new computer case though because ew, Dell.

Oh and my monitor is a 1080p 165hz display, so VRR support is unlikely to impossible. I did think about connecting the PC to TV, but it only has displayports, and besides I wanted to feel like a true gamer. I think I do actually like the monitor more than my TV for my PC and Switch though.

Other than not looking forward to having to figure out what the hell an AMD Radeon RX12345 is, I'm looking forward to this new world of gaming.

_{^{I'm gonna go play Microsoft Solitaire now.}}