Yes. All reviews I looked up complained about battery life. Some cited figures of 1-2 hours when playing demanding games. Is that wrong?
I assumed it had higher power consumption than the Apple M1 computers since they have a reputation for insane battety life. Not sure exactly how many watts they draw.
> I'd call it borderline unusable for that unless you use a physical keyboard with it
Well, I've written code using my phone... Can't be worse than that, can it?
Yeah, battery life varies greatly. More demanding games are in that ballpark. Sometimes you can squeeze more out by reducing the graphics settings and ensuring you have a set framerate cap. Older and less demanding titles get a lot better battery life. It can get 6 hours in something less demanding IME.
You can also easily use a physical keyboard and mouse with the Steam Deck either through Bluetooth or any old USB C hub. Video out works too and it supports MST so it's possible to do multiple external monitors even though it has a single USB C port (can't be done with M1!). It has a full fledged desktop mode that's basically just a normal distro with KDE. By default you can't use pacman to install Arch packages but you can easily enable it if you want. Flatpaks are easily installable by default though.
I'm not sure M1 would be much more efficient playing AAA games either. Some of the battery life advantage is just the fact that they have more room for more battery.
I also suggest being wary of early reviews of battery life. Later software updates introduced useful features that can improve battery life, such as 40 Hz refresh mode and FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).
Most early reviews wouldn't have taken that into account.
M1 machines do have better battery life (i think the m1 chip itself is 10W?) And a bigger battery by virtue of being in an ipad or a full laptop, as opposed to being crammed in a handheld. There's also the advantage of being an arm64 machine over a bloated x86_64, notorious for the complexity and power draw
But also you have to consider that m1 macs don't offer you 8 zen3 cores and 8 rdna 2 gpu units. Apple device are notorious for being less powerful than the competition, but making it up in software, which you can't really do when the task is gaming, since that is basicaly as close as a full synthetic benchmark you can get.
Disregarding the arm/x86 compat layer that would be needed to play most games and its overhead, getting anywhere as close to steam deck framerate would probably take about 25 W worth of m1 chips. For 20 W, this thing is actually a beast. Like seriously, it runs Elden Ring (almost) well.
Yes. All reviews I looked up complained about battery life. Some cited figures of 1-2 hours when playing demanding games. Is that wrong?
I assumed it had higher power consumption than the Apple M1 computers since they have a reputation for insane battety life. Not sure exactly how many watts they draw.
> I'd call it borderline unusable for that unless you use a physical keyboard with it
Well, I've written code using my phone... Can't be worse than that, can it?