The legend of “fuck I can’t find the remaining shrines without resorting to an internet guide, oh well I’m too bored to 100% this game, lets just start TOTK now”
Or maybe the legend of “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten a switch, I didn’t know I could’ve just pirated nintendo games on a SteamDeck”
You have prompted enough key words to trigger a full Steam Deck emulation report (and more!) from user sp3ctr4l.
3DS OoT remake runs great!
The touchscreen even works!
Well, beyond a few slight audio sync hiccups in a few cinematic cutscenese… but I think most of that was/is from the shader render compiler suddenly jumping into overdrive upon seeing something new for the first time…seems to be better on subsequent renders with those shaders now already compiled.
BotW is however… a bit more finnicky.
I would probably have to figure out how to …somehow manually decrease the draw distance in the overworld, or possibly make or acquire some kind of lower res texture pack, to get it to run at at least 30 fps consistently.
And/or just always have half res/rate shading going on… this kinda works, technically, but often looks like ass because of how much of BotW appears to basically be made out of emmisive textures / bloom-like shaders, as opposed to proper lighting sources.
Or maybe run it at like 1/2 or 3/4 res and rely on a huge amount of FSR upscaling?
… I have literally 0 experience modding emulated games… my brain is thinking in pc game modding mode, from about 25 years of experience fucking around with that.
It sure would be neat if there was just an actual graphics option menu in the game…
… But also, afaik, a Switch can also barely maintain BotW at 30 fps, soooo … ?
Other than BotW… literally everything I’ve tried from the PS2/360/GC+Wii era backward runs fine.
(Beyond me realizing how utterly ass many of the control schemes of older games are, hahah!)
For other Switch games… SSBrawl runs well, latest Animal Crossing runs well (55 to 60 fps, generally).
…
The Deck also has something of a neat trick where if you can get a solid 45 fps in anything…well, lock the fps to that, and the screen refresh to 90hz, and it often ends up feeling as visually smooth as actual 90 fps, in everything other than very fast paced games.
(You could also do this with 30/90, as thats a clean 1 to 3 ratio… but 30 fps is still… quite noticeably slow, imo, but it may make sense for some people/in some games),
I’ve managed to fiddle around with Cyberpunk 77 and get it to almost always hold 45 fps, via fucking about with settings, using DeckyFrameGen to get better FrameGen and Upscaling… and also basically by just turning off ambient occlusion and volumetric fog, which allows many other settings I find more impactful to be higher than the graphics preset for Deck… and then using the 45/90 thing, it looks and feels quite smooth.
I’m getting between 3100 and 3200 actually rendered frames in the built in benchmark, and I think the default Deck preset, pre fuckery, I was getting more like 2300 ish… so thats roughly a 30% boost compared to stock… and imo, this also just looks better, and somehow also has a bit less power draw.
I have always fucking hated ambient occlusion, making blob corner shadows that often just do not make physical sense given the actual scene, and also often fuck up badly whenever very thin geometry or mesh/fence like textures are involved…
Volumetric fog on the other hand looks great, but has always been massively compute expensive… and if you can just actually have higher lighting and shadow quality settings, and higher texture res on the rest of the scene… imo thats a good tradeoff.
Apparently the FPS problem is worse for BotW… in docked mode. Dropping down to near 20 fps in the scenarios they described is…exactly what I experienced as well.
… The other Switch games.I’ve messed with tend to be a bit faster and more stable in docked mode.
So… maybe, apparently, I should just emulate BotW in… portable mode?
Idk, never tried because I just assumed it was impossible and already bought legit copies of the games I wanted to play, but recently doing some searching and there are videos of people running Zelda games on SteamDeck so I was kinda sad to find out I probably should’ve tried doing the piracy route first.
Maybe if I find time, I’ll try pirating anyways for shits and giggles. But can’t transfer the save from my legit copies tho (because nintendo doesn’t seem allow saves to be exportable, its either cloud sync or stored on the local device), so I probably would just have to finish the game on the switch.
Btw, I thought the switch allows exporting saves so I could continue the game later on other platforms, but nope. Its cloud backup only and that is a fucking monthly subscription (they delete your saves 180 days after your “nintendo online” subscription expires)
So… yeah… feels like I made a mistake. Never gonna get another nintendo (the only reason I did was because I haven’t really played nintendo games since early childhood like nearly 2 decades ago.)
I think the creativity of TOTK is what ultimately sold me. I ended up just hacking the game to have unlimited resources which just elevated the game for me since it became a fun sandbox building game to try silly things on.
The legend of “fuck I can’t find the remaining shrines without resorting to an internet guide, oh well I’m too bored to 100% this game, lets just start TOTK now”
Or maybe the legend of “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten a switch, I didn’t know I could’ve just pirated nintendo games on a SteamDeck”
Warning!
You have prompted enough key words to trigger a full Steam Deck emulation report (and more!) from user sp3ctr4l.
3DS OoT remake runs great!
The touchscreen even works!
Well, beyond a few slight audio sync hiccups in a few cinematic cutscenese… but I think most of that was/is from the shader render compiler suddenly jumping into overdrive upon seeing something new for the first time…seems to be better on subsequent renders with those shaders now already compiled.
BotW is however… a bit more finnicky.
I would probably have to figure out how to …somehow manually decrease the draw distance in the overworld, or possibly make or acquire some kind of lower res texture pack, to get it to run at at least 30 fps consistently.
And/or just always have half res/rate shading going on… this kinda works, technically, but often looks like ass because of how much of BotW appears to basically be made out of emmisive textures / bloom-like shaders, as opposed to proper lighting sources.
Or maybe run it at like 1/2 or 3/4 res and rely on a huge amount of FSR upscaling?
… I have literally 0 experience modding emulated games… my brain is thinking in pc game modding mode, from about 25 years of experience fucking around with that.
It sure would be neat if there was just an actual graphics option menu in the game…
… But also, afaik, a Switch can also barely maintain BotW at 30 fps, soooo … ?
Other than BotW… literally everything I’ve tried from the PS2/360/GC+Wii era backward runs fine.
(Beyond me realizing how utterly ass many of the control schemes of older games are, hahah!)
For other Switch games… SSBrawl runs well, latest Animal Crossing runs well (55 to 60 fps, generally).
…
The Deck also has something of a neat trick where if you can get a solid 45 fps in anything…well, lock the fps to that, and the screen refresh to 90hz, and it often ends up feeling as visually smooth as actual 90 fps, in everything other than very fast paced games.
(You could also do this with 30/90, as thats a clean 1 to 3 ratio… but 30 fps is still… quite noticeably slow, imo, but it may make sense for some people/in some games),
I’ve managed to fiddle around with Cyberpunk 77 and get it to almost always hold 45 fps, via fucking about with settings, using DeckyFrameGen to get better FrameGen and Upscaling… and also basically by just turning off ambient occlusion and volumetric fog, which allows many other settings I find more impactful to be higher than the graphics preset for Deck… and then using the 45/90 thing, it looks and feels quite smooth.
I’m getting between 3100 and 3200 actually rendered frames in the built in benchmark, and I think the default Deck preset, pre fuckery, I was getting more like 2300 ish… so thats roughly a 30% boost compared to stock… and imo, this also just looks better, and somehow also has a bit less power draw.
I have always fucking hated ambient occlusion, making blob corner shadows that often just do not make physical sense given the actual scene, and also often fuck up badly whenever very thin geometry or mesh/fence like textures are involved…
Volumetric fog on the other hand looks great, but has always been massively compute expensive… and if you can just actually have higher lighting and shadow quality settings, and higher texture res on the rest of the scene… imo thats a good tradeoff.
…
Whoop, so doubling back a bit:
https://www.shacknews.com/article/99271/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-performance-and-framerate-dips-detailed
Apparently the FPS problem is worse for BotW… in docked mode. Dropping down to near 20 fps in the scenarios they described is…exactly what I experienced as well.
… The other Switch games.I’ve messed with tend to be a bit faster and more stable in docked mode.
So… maybe, apparently, I should just emulate BotW in… portable mode?
???
Can we still pirate those though? I thought those mofos recently shut down the last of the working emulators…
Idk, never tried because I just assumed it was impossible and already bought legit copies of the games I wanted to play, but recently doing some searching and there are videos of people running Zelda games on SteamDeck so I was kinda sad to find out I probably should’ve tried doing the piracy route first.
Maybe if I find time, I’ll try pirating anyways for shits and giggles. But can’t transfer the save from my legit copies tho (because nintendo doesn’t seem allow saves to be exportable, its either cloud sync or stored on the local device), so I probably would just have to finish the game on the switch.
Btw, I thought the switch allows exporting saves so I could continue the game later on other platforms, but nope. Its cloud backup only and that is a fucking monthly subscription (they delete your saves 180 days after your “nintendo online” subscription expires)
So… yeah… feels like I made a mistake. Never gonna get another nintendo (the only reason I did was because I haven’t really played nintendo games since early childhood like nearly 2 decades ago.)
I enjoyed TOTK way more than BOTK.
That’s good to know. I tried BOTW for a while, but didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. Maybe I’ll just skip ahead to TOTK
I think the creativity of TOTK is what ultimately sold me. I ended up just hacking the game to have unlimited resources which just elevated the game for me since it became a fun sandbox building game to try silly things on.