Long rambling 3am post follows.
TLDR: oled Deck is excellent. Possibly good enough to ignore buying a full-fledged gaming PC for awhile.
Mostly playing the Switch oled this past week (still on my first playthroughs of Zelda BotW and Luigi's Mansion 3), but in between I've toyed with Valve's new shiny. Man this thing is awesome. It fixes most of the things that kept me from following through with my original Deck preorder from 2022. Going back and forth between the two, the ergonomics are miles better than the Switch imo. Switch joy cons are severely cramped for my average-sized hands.
The pre-Xmas timing of oled Deck's arrival has also been near-perfect. The day before Valve's announcement, I jumped on a smokin' hot deal for a loaded Lenovo Legion 7i laptop w/ a mobile rtx 4080. It sold out fast. Was a little bummed I missed out on the rtx 4090 version (roughly a desktop 4070ti w/ 16gb of ram), but otherwise, what I bought is an impressively well-built metal-chassis laptop. 32gb ram, 2TB ssd, top Intel chip, good 2560x1600 500 nits ips screen (thank gawd 16x10 ratios are finally coming back!).
Next day, I see a Digital Foundry video about the oled Deck, and was already 90% confident I'd be returning the laptop.
Until the Lenovo, my current gaming pc has been a gtx 1660ti Alienware laptop. Bought in 2019 (seems longer), I don't really like gaming laptops, preferring a quiet full-fledged desktop with huge screen. Credit where it's due though, because the Alienware has been a surprisingly great experience overall. It was meant as a ~1-2 year stopgap solution since I had been traveling so much, and I've wanted to upgrade my gaming rig for the past ~2-3years. Unfortunately, sky high GPU pricing convinced me to splurge on other things like vacations, a dog, new TV, etc.
It's not that I can't afford a $1000+ video card; it's that I've been very turned off by the price-gouging versus actual product cost. I know and chatter with people who work for Nvidia (and TSMC). Off-the-record they'll tell you straight up that whatever makes the company the most money is what matters, period. These days that ain't consumer gpus, so what's a PC gamer to do? Wait for Intel Battlemage? lol. AMD is seemingly happy with the status quo so they ain't budging, either.
Instead of feeding the gpu duopoly, back in May I bought a Playstation 5 and 1yr Premium Plus catalog subscription to subdue my 60fps hardware cravings. The console + our lg c1 oled tv have been a damn good time. In some ways, the ease-of-use is even more enjoyable than PC gaming. But, the indie scene sucks on consoles (or is stupidly overpriced on Nintendo Switch to the point that I could almost break even paying Nvidia for an on-sale rtx 4080 and buying my games on GoG/Steam/Epic freebies.
Anyhow, long rambling fuggin' post here I know, but oled Switch, oled TV, oled Deck, and eventually, PC using OLED (or at least mini-LED). This is how I want my games; preferably with hdr and vrr 120Hz+. Deck and ps5 have satiated my hardware appetite in 2023. Maybe in 2024 We will get a slightly faster rtx 4080 Super for $999, but that probably won't make me budge. At this point, I'd rather wait and see where we are in 2025. By then we'll see a Playstation 5 Pro, Intel's 2nd gen gpus matured (or not), and rtx 5000/radeon 8000.
Back to the Deck, it's perfect for what I expect my main use case to be; clearing out my backlog of older games and enjoying indies. IIRC Deck gpu is ballpark gtx 1050ti level, which is plenty of graphical oomph for most AAA games prior to ~2018 or so. Games played so far:
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Looked so good right from the start, I played 5 mins and then set it aside. The first Ori was amazing, and I love metroidvanias. I'll be saving this tasty treat for later.
- Telltale's The Walking Dead. Back when it was newish, I never made it out of the intro. It somehow felt like I should be playing on my tablet, but sure as heck not on my (then speedy) PC. On Deck? I've played for hours and enjoyed it. Was surprised this game features Glenn, Herschel, etc! I had no idea.
- Gorogoa. Absolutely stellar puzzle game. It had been sitting in my Steam backlog for a few years. Finished it in a couple sittings. Touchpads aren't as good as a mouse, but perfectly serviceable. Thank you for not locking us into joysticks Valve!
- Half-Life 2 Lost Coast. I think I booted this up years ago, but says it includes HDR lighting now. I dabbled, but meh. Wasn't feeling it at the time. Will check back in with this later.
- Wattam. Messed around for 24 minutes. Perfect handheld game (and enabling half-rate shading, framerate caps, etc = big battery life savings)
- Post Void. Simple slide-shoot gameplay makes me feel like I'm one of Serious Sam's maniacal enemies frantically rushing to the end of the level. Game is like a double espresso.
Next up: a few more graphically intensive games that have sat untouched in my backlog like Metal Gear the Phantom Pain, Prey, Bayonetta, and the first Dishonored's expansions. Also still haven't finished Elden Ring (supposedly I'm 3/4 done), Alien Isolation, nor Witcher 3 (about 1/2 complete + expansions), so will give those a peek while saving them largely for the big screen.