When I moved away from the US to Germany six months ago, I sold my gaming PC. It was too big to bring along, let alone the monitor and peripherals I’d have to lug halfway across the world. But I did bring my Steam Deck. In that time, I’ve come to love Valve’s portable console, limitations and all. If you’re considering giving up your gaming PC (or more likely, buying a Steam Deck instead of a gaming PC), though, there are definitely some things worth knowing going in.

Replacing a gaming PC with a Steam Deck is kind of like replacing a Cadillac Escalade with a Vespa scooter. In all truth, it doesn’t make much sense — you’re giving up so much for the sake of packaging and mobility. You can’t upgrade a Steam Deck meaningfully, you can’t credibly use it as a desktop computer, and your choice of the games themselves is limited. But like that Vespa, the Steam Deck opens up new avenues, and many people seem quite content to build their gaming lives around it.

Steam Deck performance vs gaming PC

The first question any prospective Steam Deck owner will have is probably something in the neighborhood of: “What kind of frame rate will [GAME] run at on a Steam Deck?” The short answer is: Google it. The longer answer is: It really depends.

If your goal with the Steam Deck is maximum visual fidelity in minimal packaging, it’s not even the best product on the market. Other, Windows-powered gaming handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally offer considerably more horsepower. The Steam Deck’s AMD GPU is still surprisingly capable, though — especially when titles are properly optimized and support AMD FSR upscaling, like Death Stranding or The Witcher 3.

On the Deck’s built-in display, very few titles have disappointed me in terms of visual fidelity relative to performance. Perhaps one exception is Fallout 4, which was notorious for its poor optimization even on ultra-powerful desktops at the time it was released (granted, that was almost 10 years ago). But with some Googling and a bit of tweaking one afternoon (including manually enabling FSR), I managed to even get that game to a place I was largely happy with, around 60FPS indoors and 40-55FPS outdoors.

Some commenters online have compared the Steam Deck to an NVIDIA 1050 or 1060 GPU — very entry-level cards, to be sure, but that can play most modern games provided you’re willing to crank the settings down far enough. I think that comparison largely tracks, though in games that have CPU-bound performance, I’d have a much harder time giving an analog.

Steam Deck on TV / monitor vs gaming PC (or console)

Where the Steam Deck consistently falls flat for me is when it’s pumped out to a TV or monitor (which is quite easy with the Steam Deck Dock). Older titles like Skyrim look and play pretty well on the big screen, because they’re being pushed nearly to the max by the Deck anyway. But when you’re upscaling a title like Fallout 4 that’s rendering at 600p natively on the Deck, that’s not going to look great on a 55-inch panel. This isn’t to say the frame rates are any worse, but the visual fidelity, to me, can be a dealbreaker when the Deck is used this way.

Using the Steam Deck with a Bluetooth controller also introduces input lag you wouldn’t have on a proper game console or when using a Wi-Fi dongle with a gamepad on a PC (let alone a wired connection). This is another major drawback, from my perspective, of the big screen experience with the Steam Deck. I own a Steam Deck Dock, and in the past I paired the Deck with an Xbox controller with this setup. The latency was simply too annoying (and the Xbox gamepad’s wireless USB dongle does not work with the Deck). I ended up buying a super long USB-C extension cable to use the Deck as its own controller while “docked,” which you can read about here.

Steam Deck vs game streaming

It’s been a minute since I spent much time with a game streaming service, but even the lowest of latency among those platforms can’t sidestep the fact that you are sending commands to a computer many miles away that must then be reflected back to you from that computer via a video stream. Latency is an unavoidable reality of streaming, and the Steam Deck effectively has none.

For pure visual fidelity, the answer is trickier. On something the size of a smartphone and up to a 9-inch tablet, I think the Steam Deck is going to be the better visual experience simply because it won’t introduce artifacting or suddenly start chugging out of nowhere — something every game streaming service I’ve tried has done, if only occasionally. The difference between Cyberpunk 2077 running at everything-ultra-max-4K and highly-upscaled-720p on a screen the size of a Steam Deck is going to be marginal simply because you don’t have the space to peep those pixels very closely. Is it different? Sure. Does it matter? I say no. When it comes to blowing up things for the big screen, game streaming easily comes out on top with its higher native resolution and frame rates — no contest there.

But hey, you can play a Steam Deck anywhere, no Wi-Fi or mobile data required. That limitation is never going away with streaming, and it’s one we don’t seem meaningfully closer to solving than we were when game streaming debuted years ago.

Steam Deck vs iPad with controller

One word: Ergonomics. You will never have an iPad light enough or a controller well-integrated enough to make gaming on a tablet as enjoyable as a dedicated handheld like the Steam Deck. I don’t care what someone marketing some crappy, Kickstarter-hyped monstrosity says, you simply can’t turn an iPad into a controller. The Deck’s joysticks are wonderful, precise, and smooth. Its triggers are responsive, its buttons extremely well-placed and accessible. It feels like something that’s meant to go in your hands.

iPads with external Bluetooth gamepads also introduce latency, you have to have somewhere stable to put the tablet, and they’re just not nearly as performant as the Deck with their puny, passively-cooled mobile chipsets. Maybe in 10 years, mobile GPUs will be efficient and powerful enough to meaningfully challenge purpose-built silicon, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The Steam Deck’s fan works pretty damn hard when the GPU is nearing 100% utilization, and that’s because it’s drawing serious power to push those pixels. This kind of workload is well outside the iPad’s design parameters, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps the only big win for the iPad is in the realm of touchscreen-first games. They exist! I’d far rather play Slay The Spire on my iPad than on my Steam Deck, but I’d hardly say that makes my Deck feel any less valuable. It’s just that the iPad happens to be a more pleasant UX for flinging cards around, which is a pretty rare gameplay paradigm for me in the first place. In general, I think you already know if an iPad is going to be better for the kinds of games you play — because they’re overwhelmingly the exception, not the rule.

Steam Deck LCD vs OLED in 2024

On a final note, the biggest question for anyone considering a Steam Deck right now is whether to buy the new OLED model or save on the previous-generation LCD.

The short answer is: Buy the OLED. I have the LCD model, and the OLED’s much better and slightly larger 90Hz display, improved battery life (I still recommend a power bank) and thermal management, and minor quality of life improvements like wake on Bluetooth (for use with the Dock) just make it a superior system. But, if you’re on a tight budget and can find the LCD model at a good price (not hard, Valve sells refurbs), the experience difference is by no means “night and day.”

The LCD and OLED Steam Decks offer extremely similar performance profiles, the same hardware controls, and use the same software stack. The OLED is a great upgrade if you can justify the spend, but it’s not the kind of generational difference you might see in the console world. And given the OLED Deck just launched in late 2023, the prospect of a proper “gen 2” Steam Deck dropping in the next year or two seems pretty low.