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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yup.
    The previous family share was gathering your library of games with the “console” in a single box and giving that entire to your friend. If you want to play anything, you need the box back.
    Steam Families is now a common bookshelf, grab a game if it’s there and play.

    Now we just need a way to use that shelf with the same account so I don’t get booted from my steam deck games just because I left something running on my PC and vice versa.



  • Depends on the game. There is no functionality in Steam for buffering them offline, it’s just that some games run the check for all achievements every time you load a save or gain a new achievement, while others only do it for the one you just gained.

    That’s why I have “complete 40 substories” in Yakuza 4, but not the one for finishing 20 of them - it triggers when you complete the 20th, and never again.
    Meanwhile I imported a complete save to a different game for mod dev debugging purposes, and it unlocked every single achievement the game had the moment I loaded that.










  • That “10W for the screen” includes them all.

    No.

    Taken straight from the LCD deck in front of me: With the screen as dim as possible sitting in the home menu, the total power usage of the deck is 4.9 Watts. The GPU is drawing 0.3 Watts. The CPU is drawing 0.3 Watts.
    With the screen brightness turned to full but the deck idle, the power draw goes to 7.1 Watts, but the screen stops updating the image after 10 seconds. CPU & GPU are both still at 0.3 watts.
    Jiggling the stick every few seconds to keep the screen on, the power draw goes to 9.6 Watts. CPU & GPU are still 0.3W each.

    Result: The “rest” of the Steam Deck, minus SSD and cooling fan activity at full screen brightness, uses 9 Watts, at least 4.7 Watts of it being the screen and backlight alone, though I was not able to test how much the draw would be if the screen could be turned completely off, as that isn’t possible in SteamOS.

    15W + 9W is 24W, we are a watt shy of 25W.


  • That “10W for the screen” includes them all.
    When you reach the 15W TDP limit with the screen at max brightness (on the LCD version), the OSD will show you drawing about 25 watts, and it’s measuring it directly from the battery. This also matches what people have reported for the power pass-through mode measuring from the wall outlet - once the battery is fully charged the Deck can power itself directly from the charger, and at full tilt, it’s about 25 watts.
    Sure if you really want to start separating them all out there are things like bluetooth, wifi, speaker amplifiers, the SSD etc, but compared to how much the backlight & screen controller draw, they are pretty much drops in the bucket. Well, the SSD might take a watt or two.


  • There is no limit to when it will charge, you can use a lower power charger to extend your runtime - I use my 9V 2A (18W) Pixel 4a charger all the time while playing. Anything higher than 25w will keep you playing indefinitely, as that’s pretty much the limit for what the deck can draw - 15W TDP and 10W for the screen, but obviously if you draw more than your charger can output eventually you will run out of battery.

    But for quite a few lighter titles, 18W still gives you a few watts of net positive.



  • I get you.
    Here’s hoping this new thing allows them to make it work better eventually, as the current system is a result of the older family share system - before the owner banning was implemented plenty of games just disabled family sharing entirely as a workaround for ban evasion.

    Right now I believe the only workaround would be to use the parental controls to not share those games you care about enough.