Modern Gaming Feels Like a Chore
They are selling the SKUs they're discontinuing at a discount, so the very lowest end at the moment is a little bit down.
But in general, the 256Gb model got a spec bump without taking a price bump. That is very, very rare these days.
My hands-on experience with both is that the Deck sings in the 12-15 range and the stock 6800 wants to be 15-20. After that the extra heat and noise doesn't justify the gains unless you really want to play something that is just at the edge.
That would make more sense if you couldn't set the old LCD panel to 45 already. There's still an advantage to doubling each frame, especially in reducing latency on frame drops, but I don't think there are any refresh targets under 60 the old panel couldn't match after they introduced the manual refresh control feature.
The battery life seems much, much better, though. There are already some preview benchmarks that say at minimum TDP you can get to double digit hours on this thing. That's nuts for a x64 handheld device.
Well, I mean...
Does THAT count, or...?
FWIW, LTT seems to have asked about VRR and they hypothesize, based on the answer, that they're sourcing from the same place as Nintendo and that is limiting the VRR option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCVXqoVi6RE
But my point stands in that you're thinking about the target spec of the display, not the games. There IS a difference between 20-40 and 100-144 fps. First, because it's a lot harder to keep a steady rate at 7ms frame budgets and second because the sense of stability doesn't have the same demands.
And yes, it's a perceptual thing. Some people will be more sensitive than others, but I would feel comfortable showing a 28-30 fps clip to people on a 144Hz vsync and a VRR display and asking them to spot which is which. Simply put the gaps in miliseconds between those two things are going to be too similar to tell apart. I know because I've tried. I have 100, 120, 144 and 165 fps displays, both VRR and vsynced. I've messed around with this for a long time for fun and profit.
I have no question that VRR would be a slight improvement, but I'm also not surprised that at these levels of speed and size both Lenovo and Valve decided that it wasn't worth to chase VRR compared to the high refresh alternative. That gels with my own experience.
Anecdotally, the last time I checked my dormant Facebook feed it was deserted. I wonder how many people hit that message and just decide they can just nope out and not lose much of value.
I mean, that's what I did the first time it popped up. I only ever logged into that in case somebody was trying to reach me for work stuff, and that never actually happens, so...
As for whether this is GDPR compliant, it seems that FB was convinced it would get them past the newer post-GDPR regulations and the EU has strongly signalled that it really won't, so it's gonna be fun to watch from the sidelines.
I don't know what VRR windows you get on handheld displays these days, but at 30fps it shouldn't be super useful compared to vsynced 90Hz. 90 is 11ms intervals for your next frame, and if you're pushing the hardware at 30fps you may have bigger swings between frames in VRR (e.g. you could have 8ms between two frames and 28ms between the next two), which still reads as stutter, with or without VRR.
So it's not as much of a no-brainer as you may think. That's basically the same reason Lenovo insiders gave for why the 1600p 144Hz panel in the Lenovo Legion GO is also not VRR. In that case it makes a bit more sense because that's just 7ms between refreshes, so you may genuinely struggle telling the difference between that and VRR if you're rendering less than 60fps.
I think Digital Foundry does a lot of good advocacy and educational content, but sometimes they get hung up on pet peeves and give people the wrong impression about which buzzwords are important on which contexts.
Yeah, they made the SoC run cooler and at lower power, so I wonder why they didn't just let it push to 20W instead of keeping it at a max TDP of 15W.
Maybe their custom APU just can't yield any more performance at all and just flattens out above that? I know the 6800U and 7800U handhelds tend to flatten out above 25-30W. I've moved on from my Deck to a Windows handheld, but I still really like the tweaks they've made to this.
This is a really nice mid-gen refresh, IMO. It drives the entry point prices down (when was the last time you saw THAT in tech?) and it makes some really nice improvements to the newer SKUs.
I don't think it's a must-buy if you already own one, but if I was still using a Deck as a daily driver I would certainly consider it. The idea of a 10 hour battery on a handheld PC is super appealing for me, considering how often I'm playing stuff at 5W.
You're not driving the display at 90fps, so a 90 fps container for 30-45 fps content is actually not bad at all, and it should feel pretty smooth even with minor fps drops.
People think VRR is magic sometimes, but it doesn't work well with all types of content. For handheld you're often going to be driving at low fps a high refresh rate can be more relevant sometimes. VRR on top of everything else would be nice, but it's definitely not a must.
I mean... how significant is significant? I've had OLED phones and tablets for years and I have an OLED Switch, I've yet to see any burn-in issues.
I have no idea if they have any screen care tools in there, but these days you can use a 7 inch OLED screen just fine for the types of things you do on a handheld.
Maybe don't use the desktop as an always-on night light, but it should be fine.
They still sell the LCD model if anybody's worried, though.
If it's any consolation, LinkedIn is notoriously terrible at this, so your data was probably out there as early as 2016 and almost certainly after 2021, when they managed to get hit with similar breaches twice in the same year.
Okay, look, I'm being mildly facetious here, but the genuine, serious point is that the differences interoperability introduces aren't that big of a deal in common use, they're not a selling point to average users and there are plenty of readily available resources to catch up after the fact.
The selling points should be about the features and content. You seriously don't need a tutorial on interoperability before making an account, just perhaps a suggestion of a good default instance to join on the service of your choice.
Oh, wait until you hear what I think of the name "Fediverse".
Constantly, through obtuse similes that only make sense if you already understand what is being explained to you and mostly to each other, rather than to anybody who wouldn't know.
But still, by that point you have an account, so you're already set.
This is the tamest version of this meme possible. I do have to say, despite the lack of sex stuff it is not inaccurate.
Yes, but crucially I've passed the job to someone else who is a) already doing that full time in excruciating, obnoxious detail, and b) who is behind the massive barrier to entry that is making an account and starting to use the service.
By that point the people asking the question already know the basics and are engaged. At that point the problem is stopping people from scaring them away by overexlpaining federation, not getting them to understand how it works. It's not the same.
Literally saying nothing.
The wonders of interoperability are a small anecdotal thing for techheads. You don't need to think about that at all, barring some edge cases or being lightly confused by somebody posting more than 500 characters on Mastodon.
You just... tell people Mastodon is like Twitter or Kbin is like Reddit and let them have at it. A million federation evangelists will answer their questions in three months when they ask how come they got a notification from being quoted on a different platform or something.
Seriously, though? Everybody goes to the email analogy. The email analogy really doesn't work.
Not only does it raise more questions than it answers, but it is also not a way people conceptualize social media and it generates the false assumption that the posts themselves exist as the component units of the entire thing as opposed to being tied to the format of the instance.
The thing is you don't even need to bring up interoperability for somebody curious about a specific federated app. In practice, most of the experience doesn't require wrapping your head around that part and somebody can explain the details the first time you get a weirdly formatted posts in your streams.
Yeeeeah. No padding in old games. None at all.
Somebody hasn't gone back to play mainstream games on the PS2 era recently, when large developers had a fraction of the money and any game below 30 hours was ruthlessly slammed online for being "too short" and "not good value".
I swear, people use the term "triple-A" just to refer to bits of gaming they don't like, regardless of who made them or for how much money. The term is meaningless by now.