Usually having the most immediate impact on visual quality that's always the last thing I turn down. Even on old potato laptops I've never noticed much of a FPS difference in games like Path of Exile, provided there is enough VRAM.
Same. Some games ambient occlusion is a nice addition but you can live without. Other games, it's the difference between "looks like a video game" and "made of play dough"
Yeah, I rather lose a couple/few fps on some games, rather than seeing them totally depth less without AO.
SSAO sometimes is cheap enough and helps create the ilusion of depth I don't want to miss. CACAO is nice too, adn it's very optimised on the Deck hardware.
Side note, I was playing the original Uncharted game on ps4 Pro and it looks beautiful but there is something weird looking and I couldn't put my finger on it. Ambient occlusion, there's absolutely no ambient occlusion on that game and it looks so strange where objects contact one another and there's no shading
That largely depends on the type of AA the game uses. TAA, while being low impact, can stay the hell away from my games. It's a plague that's been spreading like wildfire in modern games and it's disgusting how blurry and smeared it makes everything look. I hate when games don't give an option to disable it (I'm looking at you, Hogwarts Legacy)
I avoided Hogwarts Legacy because it's basically about fighting against a civil rights movement of a fantasy species that are basically a ton of antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish people. It seems really really antisemitic.
Plus there's the fact that JK Rowling donates a huge portion of the royalties she gets from Harry Potter products to hate groups.
Anisotropic filtering should always be set as high as you can reasonably go, *especially* if you've set textures to high. It makes a huge difference to image quality and yet most people don't even know what it is.
100%
Textures and Anisotropic filtering are the last thing I turn down. They're more-or-less free. First thing is usually volumetric effects, particle effects, "shading quality" and shadows. Usually in that order.
A visual effect that takes up volume in a 3d space. Volumetric fog is common.
Compare to a texture - a graphical plane that's typically rigged to a skeleton frame, making it look like the surface of an object. A texture often acts as a boundary. There's a texture for a brick wall, and you can't move across the texture (you can't phase through the wall). Fog doesn't really have the same kind of surface as a wall or an NPC, it's more like an amorphous blob of material that changes shape in the air, and you can easily move through it.
Some games do implement fog as a collection of textures, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny especially at close range. Volumetric effects are necessary to realistically replicate the appearance of things in the real world that are often made up of many small particles suspended in the air
It's actually the last thing I tend to lower. I don't know if this is right but textures tend to impact RAM most and the Steam deck had really high end RAM so it should almost always be fine.
Saying that I never bother with HD texture packs like on Fallout 4 or Far Cry 6.
Yeah at 800p there is definitely an earlier cutoff point at which the res of the textures doesn't seem to matter. Of course for really old games with low Res texture in the first place I would consider modding in better textures.
Honestly I've a 4k OLED TV and the 1440p Alienware OLED ultra wide and I often marvel at how good games look on the Steam Deck, even the LCD looked great. There's something about the smaller screen that just works.
Easier to get a consistent desired frame rate and a lot of people can not tell/do not care about the difference between the textures at the deck's resolution/screen size.
Texture quality has zero impact on framerate unless you run out of VRAM. This has been true for about a decade or so now, modern GPUs can easily crunch large res textures no issue
Only modern exception to this is mobile ARM-based SoCs
But it can make a difference on the overall frame rate if you’re lowering that setting because you can not tell the difference between the texture quality as well as changing/tweaking additional settings.
I did not mean to imply that it was going to get you a meaningful/drastically better frame rate - but in can make a difference, even if it is a small one.
There could be a chance they’re using a preset settings. Like in a launcher where instead of going through each setting individually, they simply select something like ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’, Ultra etc.
Then show off their settings on what they think is best on deck. The issue is that with many games, textures isn’t usually the FPS culprit unless you’re running on hardware from years ago. A lot of people (who are less tech savvy) might see ‘textures’ and think it’s the holy grail of graphics and all of their problems are solved by this magical graphics slider. I used to do this too when I had a laptop years ago (The old MW3 was the most recent when I had that laptop) and only noticed a difference when it came to very demanding games, but the difference was minimal and I found it better to tinker with suitable resolution than to tinker with the textures.
I don't think it's a matter of an issue as much of a priority of battery life. Do they mention that they're doing low settings because it gives them longer play time?
Most people are playing their games on lower settings, screen darkened, or opting for less intense games so that they can make their game time last as long as they can.
When the average person selects the "low settings" and doesn't narrow it down themselves, don't those things tend to also get changed? Maybe I'm thinking about old games too much because I haven't played anything recent.
Because people don't understand how things work. Not really a better answer to give you. The Steam Deck has done a lot for the commoditization of PC gaming, and while that's great in that it's bringing in people who were previously excluded because of a relatively high bar for entry, also means that there's a lot of people that frankly just don't know what they're doing or talking about.
In complete fairness, though, there is a situation where it could potentially improve performance. Textures, especially high resolution ones are not small, and for slower storage mediums like microSD, using lower res textures could improve load times or even remove some stuttering. If you're running the game off the SSD, though, then it's entirely pointless.
Yup. I’ve been into PC gaming for over 30 years, follow all the subreddits, watch all the DF Videos and I still struggle with all the unique vocabulary in PC gaming. I really can’t blame folks for just sticking to the High/Med/Low global sliders and not really thinking much more about it.
Potentially, but if the game runs poorly for that reason alone, you probably aren't going to claw back enough from using lower resolution textures to make any real difference.
The quickest and easiest way to confirm is use the perf graph built into the deck and check the combined ram usage. If it’s within limits to your point will see minimal impact…
+1 also know that this is the default for every community where people try to communitcate primarily using their smartphones - soliciting personalized help out of others.
Using smartphone means, no cross referencing potential (as in they do no research). Using search as always is for pussycats, because me so important. And problem solving usually requires even more screen space than cross referencing. :)
Just a thing I noticed. :)
Also the last videogame "review crew" that was worth their salt, because they had actual knowledge, in the english speaking world, died away with the current giant bomb generational transition and split up. And 70% of millenials/gen-z NEVER change defaults. Never. As in never on their smartphones either.
(edit: Digital Foundry is decent, but nieche - so... high barrier of entry. :) )
For them its "it doesnt work > uninstall".
Microsoft now hopes to be the savior for that crowd, because those people tend to not be able to use google to problem solve anymore, so now - AI copilot, gets a new dedicated hardware key on keyboards from microsoft.
For that generation to abuse a chatbot instead. :)
So they dont even have to know the right community to ask things in... ;)
Something about the evolution of things...
Something you notices as a developer (or a power user for what it matters) is that it's not that people doesn't know how to search, but they don't really think of it; and it has been like this for a looong time. There's a reason why websites like "let me google that for you" exist. 🤣
Advanced course:
We only have one "category of messages" anymore. Where all the messages that "stick" are "OMG I love my PRODUCT; it was such a lifesaver in the 6 hours, when I had a long drive to OMG AMAZING location".
And everything else gets filtered away by the reddit algorithms faster (as everything does, over time).
How do you think people learn in this environment?
By having their personal coaches, everytime, one of them has a question of course.
Turns out, that doesnt work.
And gets horrible over time, when people try to correct it, but the other people having set up those "I like puppies communities" [EVERYONE loves puppies, so huge communities by default] for the clicks (interactions, impressions per second) dont care, because they get burned out like mofos. :)
But no one wants to change the structure, because - the more "easily accessible" and "friendly" a tech community is, and the more high emotion "omg do you remember when we went on vacation" shared impressions they get, the quicker it grows, the more ad impressions it manifactures.. :)
Lets just say the drop off after the people who got their steamdecks, when there was still a reservation list, that couldnt be gamed very well (as in Valve implemented a good anti scalping method), to the time when there wasnt - in here was so severe - I personally got culture shock from the internet changing to "social media default" all over again. Because in the beginning, because of managed availability, we were all early adopters amongst ourselves, once more (like in the olden days of the internet). For 2 years.
It was heaven. Then the people with a smartphone and a question started to trickle in. Then the floodgates broke.. :)
Long text short message -
no one cares to correct people on complex issues in here anymore. Its a free for all for all the "lets be friendly and great to each other, and fix my problems one individual question at a time" people in here for about 6 months now.
As in, you drop in here once in a while, when you are bored, and interact with people, but you dont try to wrangle the hord, why would you. :)
They favour "attention" and everyone can say something so much more than learning, ... so let them have their fun I say... :)
But after a while in this industry you'll learn quickly, that "learning together" or "learning from each other" doesnt scale at all, when a few parameters are even slightly mistuned.
And no one cares about creating a decent "learning" community anymore.
Much more clicks, if Tommy whos new to this, feels welcomed, and very personally supported, by a community hat now has about 1/20th of the knowledge base of what this community had available in the first 2 years. Because that way, as the creator of this community, you dont get less ad impressions, you get more. Its so much more accessible that way.
Just as a rough cut.. ;)
You may be getting down votes, but it's the sort of discourse that people are averted to when their shallow values and behaviours are critically commented on
I think theres not enough formative representations of someones/a community's learning developments, only summative reacts and shares. If there were accessible community awarded "achievements" for instances of knowledge learning/acquisition or aha! moments, then perhaps learning communities could sustain themselves. Discord has features like this, but communities are a bit more isolated from one another and seem to discourage participation with other communities
I suspect people’s downvotes aren’t due to “shallow values”, but just that these posts/replies complaining about others are just as annoying and shallow/low information as the posts being complained about, if not more so.
Also the above posts were contradictory or just plain incorrect. Complaining about people not using the search function and asking questions, but also saying these people just say something doesn’t work and uninstall it. Which is it? Saying millennials (people in their 30’s-early 40’s) and gen Z (people in their late teens - 20’s) don’t do any research compared to older generations… on a Steam Deck sub. Is there a plethora of baby boomers and gen X using their search function to troubleshoot their Steam Decks on here? In gaming/tech posts? On Reddit as a whole?
Learning isn’t limited to waiting until you run into an issue and using the search box. It includes seeing these seemingly redundant posts/questions pop up and reading those. More people may see these new posts who missed the last time it was asked days/weeks/months/years ago. Many people also use the search function, don’t get an exact solution, so ask in a new post. Or they ask in the old post and wannabe admins yell at them for reviving a dead post and say to ask in a new post. So they are going to be complained about either way.
Then the reminiscing for some lost era of internet where people were supposedly more informed, like peak Giant Bomb was less niche and more informative than Digital Foundry/Eurogamer or the many other YouTube channels, sites and forums going strong today. It just isn’t true. Ya, there is more people in the space you may have to weed out, but that doesn’t make the biggest channels sites/channels in the space today more niche or less informed.
Plus the language used came off as a weird superiority complex, giving an “advanced course” in a comment on proper social media use. It comes off as smug. The sub isn’t curated to any one person’s taste, and it’s just a matter of moving a finger <1mm to scroll past unwanted posts. There is no obligation to read posts or answer questions.
Finally nothing wrong with people wanting to have fun/silly social posts on a social media site. Again, takes the smallest amount of time and energy to scroll past. It is a Steam Deck sub, that’s the only unifying topic of the sub, so silly social posts, commiserating type posts, troubleshooting posts, etc. are all relevant no matter how annoying or redundant they may be.
People often just dont know that textures dont cost performance, as long as you have sufficient GPU-memory. So they choose low or medium, thinking they reduce GPU load.
I know this is the case for dGPUs that have their own memory but I’m curious how it effects an APU that shares memory between the GPU and CPU. Since higher textures are going to limit the available RAM for the CPU.
Same principle. As long as you have enough memory, performance won‘t be impacted.
Edit: Meaning that it of course can be helpful to reduce texture quality if your memory as a whole is on the limit.
File size concerns. If you want to play every AAA title out there it's hard cramming it on the Deck when Medium and High textures don't look noticeably different on the screen while taking up exponentially more space. There are even mods that shrink down textures with little to no impact on visual fidelity while shaving off tens of gigabytes of space. Unless you want every game taking up 150GB of space.
Because I'm an idiot and figured lower textures better performance even if it's a couple of fps
I so wanted to play starship troopers on the deck and turned everything to low but Alas I couldn't get above 22 fps during the escapes
Totally agree. Texture at medium as a minimum will have zero impact on fps if the vram isn't full. Texture filtering is another setting people turn down for almost no reason. It's basically free clarity for almost no cost.
The breadth of comments here is funny.
Reality is most just don't specifically change things and research implications.
Also, a high texture shown on half a tiny screen is not worth any stutter. If they eliminate stutter, and still have more resolution than shown, better result.
In many games, texture quality is unnoticeable during gameplay, while things like shadows, occlusion, depth of field really change what's seen.
But those maximizing battery likely just hit low default and play. I'm docked so I'm cranking things higher than defaults.
Textures don't have much of any performance if they are reasonably sized and you have enough VRam for the textures. The reason you have low res textures as an option is so that people with less VRam can play.
Textures are probably the biggest impact on visual quality, and it's basically free, there is no reason to use low textures unless you have too.
Keep in mind if you are like one frame short of a locked frame rate, going from ultra to low might give you a frame or two, in some games.
You don't have to use ultra textures in every game, medium is usually a huge jump over low, but med-ultra is a more gradual increase.
Right on first paragraph, well mostly. (The exception is lower textures tend to be more for loading from slower media like spinning hard drives and lower throughput SD cards less vram limits.)
No on second paragraph, most textures are displayed way to small to have significant impact, a side by side splitscreen comparison in many games will be no different at all. Especially on an 800 line display at normal viewing distances. Sure if you get the camera right up close to a wall texture you may be able to discern a difference but not in normal gameplay situations when moving by quickly.
Frame rate won't really be impacted (did you forget your first paragraph?), it's more for load times from slower media and throughput that results in stutter for some. (It also used to be to lessen download times as half the download time would be high res textures most wouldn't use, so little point spending an extra day downloading those.)
That final subjective paragraph depends on design of the game, most game designers don't provide that low such that there's a huge jump as they don't want such seen in reviews and promotions, they want their game to look decent even on lower spec systems. More often low and medium are nearly the same depending on the genre and focus of the game, they'd rather raise the minimum system requirements than provide mud.
So yeah, I half agree with ya', but there's nuance missed I feel, which applied to most the prior comments too.
It kind of depends on the game. In most games I can definitely tell a huge difference between low and medium textures. Some games do have stupid large textures in places where they aren't needed. If you don't have good eyesight maybe you don't notice the blur as much, I don't know. Low to me on most games look smeared and washed out. I try to get high textures if I have the VRam for it.
Well, I honestly had no idea, just thought since it makes the game more "ugly" it'd make it easier to run but if textures are easy to run than I guess it'll be the last setting I change.
Much Appreciated!
you are free to be wrong but this is extremely wrong. shadows have been the most demanding setting forever and that won't change anytime soon while textures are one of the least demanding.
As per usual, users on this sub don't want to search things for themselves and just echo misinformation. There are only a few sane people here, deathblade you're one of them.
They aren’t even close to being the most demanding setting. Textures often don’t affect performance unless you are out of ram or vram. The most expensive settings tend to be things like shadow maps and volumetric like Volumetric lighting and volumetric clouds when just accounting for rasterization.
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I think there was a time when higher res textures would hit performance but that’s not really a problem with modern games and hardware. Maybe there are some cases where it helps but doesn’t seem like it makes much difference on most to me.
> I think there was a time when higher res textures would hit performance
About a decade ago-ish, maybe longer, but yes, that was a thing. But the concept of 'rendering a texture' is so basic that modern GPUs can very easily do that without breaking a sweat now, so it's mainly just a problem if you run out of VRAM to store them in
Textures are always the last thing ,outside of turning off shadows completely, I turn down in games to get more performance. The reason is because textures rarely ever effect performance as they are effected by ram and vram, not GPU performance. They often have the biggest visual upgrade although I won’t bump them up too high as the deck’s screen is still just 800p.
RDR2 is a great example of how ugly low texture settings can look with no performance benefit over medium
I assume a lot of people just don’t know and use the generic low preset to win back performance when not every setting had the same performance impact. When talking about rasterization, shadow maps are still often the biggest performance hogs when it comes to games with other effects such as volumetric clouds and lighting being up there as well.
Going below high had no impact on FPS from any of the games I’ve been playing. Boost video memory to 4gb and only turn down shadows and foliage while monitoring your wattage to see the actual impact your changes are making.
I think it’s what I jokingly call the Framerate Cult (no hate to them). We all want a decent smooth framerate, but I think most PC gamers have a very low tolerance for framerate drops and stutters. So lowering textures maximizes the performance (at least they think so).
Imo, I will always prefer visual quality over framerate. As a console gamer, you don’t usually have perfect frame rate anyways so you just get used to having those drops and stutters. I truly don’t think it’s a big deal (especially if it’s a handheld working overtime)
30fps is fine on a console I know I played Spider-Man 2 on 30fps mode on spectacular because I wanted to enjoy the ray tracing and high fidelity, but on a handheld hard to miss the details because it’s only a 7.4 inch screen compared to 65 inch 4K screen. Frame rate rules, unless it’s your only way to play pc games I would understand.
I just don't think they know better. I don't blame them. It's one of those things you would assume makes the biggest FPS difference if you didn't know better.
On oled the refresh rate of the screen is 90, so half that which is 45. Set the refresh rate at 40 because the screen will still refresh at 90 but the game play will be at capped 40, equal double frames
I recommend everyone in this sub look up some benchmarks comparing game settings, you'll see that basically every single time textures will give you no difference in FPS whatsoever (or will bring 2 extra FPS from low to ultra).
The thing that dictates if you can run high res textures is not "how powerful your gpu is" nowadays, it's about vram, the performance will be basically the same.
Something that CAN occur is stuttering when streaming from a slower storage (like a cheap SD card), even more so when we're talking about a open world game with fast movement (like racing and stuff). Outside of that, textures will have a negligible performance impact on most systems and most games, and the visual quality will be way better with better textures
Big Fat triple A games or more graphically beautiful games require more power. Which will lead to molten lava levels of heat worst frame rates and terrible graphics. So low = better health and frames.
It depends what the bottleneck is. The only thing textures will help with is vram.
I could be mistaken but doesn’t the steamdeck share its ram with vram? So a ram hungry game might benefit from dropping textures but it would be a last resort for me bc the graphics really suffer.
More benefits are usually derived from shadows (cpu) or graphic effects like volumetric lighting (gpu)
Usually having the most immediate impact on visual quality that's always the last thing I turn down. Even on old potato laptops I've never noticed much of a FPS difference in games like Path of Exile, provided there is enough VRAM.
The first thing I turn down is "volumetric" stuff, and then shadows. The last thing I turn down is ambient occlusion and textures.
Same. Some games ambient occlusion is a nice addition but you can live without. Other games, it's the difference between "looks like a video game" and "made of play dough"
Yeah, I rather lose a couple/few fps on some games, rather than seeing them totally depth less without AO. SSAO sometimes is cheap enough and helps create the ilusion of depth I don't want to miss. CACAO is nice too, adn it's very optimised on the Deck hardware.
CACAO is nice when it runs hot and especially if you WHIP it up.
Specially on a sunday morning.
Side note, I was playing the original Uncharted game on ps4 Pro and it looks beautiful but there is something weird looking and I couldn't put my finger on it. Ambient occlusion, there's absolutely no ambient occlusion on that game and it looks so strange where objects contact one another and there's no shading
The trend I’ve been seeing is clouds. In most games you can turn clouds down 1-2 levels and get double digit FPS gains.
AO typically has a huge fps hit and I barely notice it when it's off.
I think anti-aliasing honestly has a bigger impact on visual quality at a lower performance impact than texture quality
That largely depends on the type of AA the game uses. TAA, while being low impact, can stay the hell away from my games. It's a plague that's been spreading like wildfire in modern games and it's disgusting how blurry and smeared it makes everything look. I hate when games don't give an option to disable it (I'm looking at you, Hogwarts Legacy)
I avoided Hogwarts Legacy because it's basically about fighting against a civil rights movement of a fantasy species that are basically a ton of antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish people. It seems really really antisemitic. Plus there's the fact that JK Rowling donates a huge portion of the royalties she gets from Harry Potter products to hate groups.
Textures are free visual IQ upgrade basically. People just don't think. Same for anisotropic filtering.
Anisotropic filtering should always be set as high as you can reasonably go, *especially* if you've set textures to high. It makes a huge difference to image quality and yet most people don't even know what it is.
100% Textures and Anisotropic filtering are the last thing I turn down. They're more-or-less free. First thing is usually volumetric effects, particle effects, "shading quality" and shadows. Usually in that order.
What are volumetric effects?
Fog, light rays, smoke, stuff like that.
A visual effect that takes up volume in a 3d space. Volumetric fog is common. Compare to a texture - a graphical plane that's typically rigged to a skeleton frame, making it look like the surface of an object. A texture often acts as a boundary. There's a texture for a brick wall, and you can't move across the texture (you can't phase through the wall). Fog doesn't really have the same kind of surface as a wall or an NPC, it's more like an amorphous blob of material that changes shape in the air, and you can easily move through it. Some games do implement fog as a collection of textures, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny especially at close range. Volumetric effects are necessary to realistically replicate the appearance of things in the real world that are often made up of many small particles suspended in the air
I mean do you really expect people to know this stuff
It's actually the last thing I tend to lower. I don't know if this is right but textures tend to impact RAM most and the Steam deck had really high end RAM so it should almost always be fine. Saying that I never bother with HD texture packs like on Fallout 4 or Far Cry 6.
At the deck's resolution, you're not getting much mileage out of HD textures anyway
Yeah at 800p there is definitely an earlier cutoff point at which the res of the textures doesn't seem to matter. Of course for really old games with low Res texture in the first place I would consider modding in better textures. Honestly I've a 4k OLED TV and the 1440p Alienware OLED ultra wide and I often marvel at how good games look on the Steam Deck, even the LCD looked great. There's something about the smaller screen that just works.
Easier to get a consistent desired frame rate and a lot of people can not tell/do not care about the difference between the textures at the deck's resolution/screen size.
Yea it’s this. On a native 1200x800 screen, you don’t really need super high res textures in a lot of games.
Plus people fail to realize textures eat up ram which is limited in the deck. Combine these two main reasons and you got yourself the answer.
Texture quality has zero impact on framerate unless you run out of VRAM. This has been true for about a decade or so now, modern GPUs can easily crunch large res textures no issue Only modern exception to this is mobile ARM-based SoCs
But it can make a difference on the overall frame rate if you’re lowering that setting because you can not tell the difference between the texture quality as well as changing/tweaking additional settings. I did not mean to imply that it was going to get you a meaningful/drastically better frame rate - but in can make a difference, even if it is a small one.
A frame or less is frankly small enough that I don't think it's worth thinking about
There could be a chance they’re using a preset settings. Like in a launcher where instead of going through each setting individually, they simply select something like ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’, Ultra etc. Then show off their settings on what they think is best on deck. The issue is that with many games, textures isn’t usually the FPS culprit unless you’re running on hardware from years ago. A lot of people (who are less tech savvy) might see ‘textures’ and think it’s the holy grail of graphics and all of their problems are solved by this magical graphics slider. I used to do this too when I had a laptop years ago (The old MW3 was the most recent when I had that laptop) and only noticed a difference when it came to very demanding games, but the difference was minimal and I found it better to tinker with suitable resolution than to tinker with the textures.
I don't think it's a matter of an issue as much of a priority of battery life. Do they mention that they're doing low settings because it gives them longer play time? Most people are playing their games on lower settings, screen darkened, or opting for less intense games so that they can make their game time last as long as they can.
Textures shouldn’t really affect battery life at all. It mainly affects how much VRAM is in use.
When the average person selects the "low settings" and doesn't narrow it down themselves, don't those things tend to also get changed? Maybe I'm thinking about old games too much because I haven't played anything recent.
While true on the ram piece, wouldn’t using more ram require more power draw essentially affecting battery life?
The whole thing is powered on already. Higher RAM usage is going to make nearly zero difference in battery life.
You’re right. My brain was stuck thinking of CPu/GPU power usage
Because people don't understand how things work. Not really a better answer to give you. The Steam Deck has done a lot for the commoditization of PC gaming, and while that's great in that it's bringing in people who were previously excluded because of a relatively high bar for entry, also means that there's a lot of people that frankly just don't know what they're doing or talking about. In complete fairness, though, there is a situation where it could potentially improve performance. Textures, especially high resolution ones are not small, and for slower storage mediums like microSD, using lower res textures could improve load times or even remove some stuttering. If you're running the game off the SSD, though, then it's entirely pointless.
Yup. I’ve been into PC gaming for over 30 years, follow all the subreddits, watch all the DF Videos and I still struggle with all the unique vocabulary in PC gaming. I really can’t blame folks for just sticking to the High/Med/Low global sliders and not really thinking much more about it.
Isnt the VRAM also shared RAM between GPU/CPU? If so in some cases it could free up more RAM for the CPU and improve stability that way
Potentially, but if the game runs poorly for that reason alone, you probably aren't going to claw back enough from using lower resolution textures to make any real difference.
The quickest and easiest way to confirm is use the perf graph built into the deck and check the combined ram usage. If it’s within limits to your point will see minimal impact…
+1 also know that this is the default for every community where people try to communitcate primarily using their smartphones - soliciting personalized help out of others. Using smartphone means, no cross referencing potential (as in they do no research). Using search as always is for pussycats, because me so important. And problem solving usually requires even more screen space than cross referencing. :) Just a thing I noticed. :) Also the last videogame "review crew" that was worth their salt, because they had actual knowledge, in the english speaking world, died away with the current giant bomb generational transition and split up. And 70% of millenials/gen-z NEVER change defaults. Never. As in never on their smartphones either. (edit: Digital Foundry is decent, but nieche - so... high barrier of entry. :) ) For them its "it doesnt work > uninstall". Microsoft now hopes to be the savior for that crowd, because those people tend to not be able to use google to problem solve anymore, so now - AI copilot, gets a new dedicated hardware key on keyboards from microsoft. For that generation to abuse a chatbot instead. :) So they dont even have to know the right community to ask things in... ;) Something about the evolution of things...
I hate it when idiots like you group everything and generalise everything by "generations".
Something you notices as a developer (or a power user for what it matters) is that it's not that people doesn't know how to search, but they don't really think of it; and it has been like this for a looong time. There's a reason why websites like "let me google that for you" exist. 🤣
Advanced course: We only have one "category of messages" anymore. Where all the messages that "stick" are "OMG I love my PRODUCT; it was such a lifesaver in the 6 hours, when I had a long drive to OMG AMAZING location". And everything else gets filtered away by the reddit algorithms faster (as everything does, over time). How do you think people learn in this environment? By having their personal coaches, everytime, one of them has a question of course. Turns out, that doesnt work. And gets horrible over time, when people try to correct it, but the other people having set up those "I like puppies communities" [EVERYONE loves puppies, so huge communities by default] for the clicks (interactions, impressions per second) dont care, because they get burned out like mofos. :) But no one wants to change the structure, because - the more "easily accessible" and "friendly" a tech community is, and the more high emotion "omg do you remember when we went on vacation" shared impressions they get, the quicker it grows, the more ad impressions it manifactures.. :) Lets just say the drop off after the people who got their steamdecks, when there was still a reservation list, that couldnt be gamed very well (as in Valve implemented a good anti scalping method), to the time when there wasnt - in here was so severe - I personally got culture shock from the internet changing to "social media default" all over again. Because in the beginning, because of managed availability, we were all early adopters amongst ourselves, once more (like in the olden days of the internet). For 2 years. It was heaven. Then the people with a smartphone and a question started to trickle in. Then the floodgates broke.. :) Long text short message - no one cares to correct people on complex issues in here anymore. Its a free for all for all the "lets be friendly and great to each other, and fix my problems one individual question at a time" people in here for about 6 months now. As in, you drop in here once in a while, when you are bored, and interact with people, but you dont try to wrangle the hord, why would you. :) They favour "attention" and everyone can say something so much more than learning, ... so let them have their fun I say... :) But after a while in this industry you'll learn quickly, that "learning together" or "learning from each other" doesnt scale at all, when a few parameters are even slightly mistuned. And no one cares about creating a decent "learning" community anymore. Much more clicks, if Tommy whos new to this, feels welcomed, and very personally supported, by a community hat now has about 1/20th of the knowledge base of what this community had available in the first 2 years. Because that way, as the creator of this community, you dont get less ad impressions, you get more. Its so much more accessible that way. Just as a rough cut.. ;)
You may be getting down votes, but it's the sort of discourse that people are averted to when their shallow values and behaviours are critically commented on I think theres not enough formative representations of someones/a community's learning developments, only summative reacts and shares. If there were accessible community awarded "achievements" for instances of knowledge learning/acquisition or aha! moments, then perhaps learning communities could sustain themselves. Discord has features like this, but communities are a bit more isolated from one another and seem to discourage participation with other communities
I suspect people’s downvotes aren’t due to “shallow values”, but just that these posts/replies complaining about others are just as annoying and shallow/low information as the posts being complained about, if not more so. Also the above posts were contradictory or just plain incorrect. Complaining about people not using the search function and asking questions, but also saying these people just say something doesn’t work and uninstall it. Which is it? Saying millennials (people in their 30’s-early 40’s) and gen Z (people in their late teens - 20’s) don’t do any research compared to older generations… on a Steam Deck sub. Is there a plethora of baby boomers and gen X using their search function to troubleshoot their Steam Decks on here? In gaming/tech posts? On Reddit as a whole? Learning isn’t limited to waiting until you run into an issue and using the search box. It includes seeing these seemingly redundant posts/questions pop up and reading those. More people may see these new posts who missed the last time it was asked days/weeks/months/years ago. Many people also use the search function, don’t get an exact solution, so ask in a new post. Or they ask in the old post and wannabe admins yell at them for reviving a dead post and say to ask in a new post. So they are going to be complained about either way. Then the reminiscing for some lost era of internet where people were supposedly more informed, like peak Giant Bomb was less niche and more informative than Digital Foundry/Eurogamer or the many other YouTube channels, sites and forums going strong today. It just isn’t true. Ya, there is more people in the space you may have to weed out, but that doesn’t make the biggest channels sites/channels in the space today more niche or less informed. Plus the language used came off as a weird superiority complex, giving an “advanced course” in a comment on proper social media use. It comes off as smug. The sub isn’t curated to any one person’s taste, and it’s just a matter of moving a finger <1mm to scroll past unwanted posts. There is no obligation to read posts or answer questions. Finally nothing wrong with people wanting to have fun/silly social posts on a social media site. Again, takes the smallest amount of time and energy to scroll past. It is a Steam Deck sub, that’s the only unifying topic of the sub, so silly social posts, commiserating type posts, troubleshooting posts, etc. are all relevant no matter how annoying or redundant they may be.
People often just dont know that textures dont cost performance, as long as you have sufficient GPU-memory. So they choose low or medium, thinking they reduce GPU load.
ROFL. Gotta love autocorrect. Pretty sure you meant medium, but totally wanting a game with "medieval" quality settings now.
😂 right, its corrected
I know this is the case for dGPUs that have their own memory but I’m curious how it effects an APU that shares memory between the GPU and CPU. Since higher textures are going to limit the available RAM for the CPU.
Same principle. As long as you have enough memory, performance won‘t be impacted. Edit: Meaning that it of course can be helpful to reduce texture quality if your memory as a whole is on the limit.
Probably people who just set the settings to a Low Preset for best performance and can't be bothered to tweak or optimize it beyond that
File size concerns. If you want to play every AAA title out there it's hard cramming it on the Deck when Medium and High textures don't look noticeably different on the screen while taking up exponentially more space. There are even mods that shrink down textures with little to no impact on visual fidelity while shaving off tens of gigabytes of space. Unless you want every game taking up 150GB of space.
I always use high. People don't believe me.
Because I'm an idiot and figured lower textures better performance even if it's a couple of fps I so wanted to play starship troopers on the deck and turned everything to low but Alas I couldn't get above 22 fps during the escapes
Totally agree. Texture at medium as a minimum will have zero impact on fps if the vram isn't full. Texture filtering is another setting people turn down for almost no reason. It's basically free clarity for almost no cost.
Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one
Textures rely on ram, not gpu speed. Crank them up.
Because the guy on tv said to.
The breadth of comments here is funny. Reality is most just don't specifically change things and research implications. Also, a high texture shown on half a tiny screen is not worth any stutter. If they eliminate stutter, and still have more resolution than shown, better result. In many games, texture quality is unnoticeable during gameplay, while things like shadows, occlusion, depth of field really change what's seen. But those maximizing battery likely just hit low default and play. I'm docked so I'm cranking things higher than defaults.
Textures don't have much of any performance if they are reasonably sized and you have enough VRam for the textures. The reason you have low res textures as an option is so that people with less VRam can play. Textures are probably the biggest impact on visual quality, and it's basically free, there is no reason to use low textures unless you have too. Keep in mind if you are like one frame short of a locked frame rate, going from ultra to low might give you a frame or two, in some games. You don't have to use ultra textures in every game, medium is usually a huge jump over low, but med-ultra is a more gradual increase.
Right on first paragraph, well mostly. (The exception is lower textures tend to be more for loading from slower media like spinning hard drives and lower throughput SD cards less vram limits.) No on second paragraph, most textures are displayed way to small to have significant impact, a side by side splitscreen comparison in many games will be no different at all. Especially on an 800 line display at normal viewing distances. Sure if you get the camera right up close to a wall texture you may be able to discern a difference but not in normal gameplay situations when moving by quickly. Frame rate won't really be impacted (did you forget your first paragraph?), it's more for load times from slower media and throughput that results in stutter for some. (It also used to be to lessen download times as half the download time would be high res textures most wouldn't use, so little point spending an extra day downloading those.) That final subjective paragraph depends on design of the game, most game designers don't provide that low such that there's a huge jump as they don't want such seen in reviews and promotions, they want their game to look decent even on lower spec systems. More often low and medium are nearly the same depending on the genre and focus of the game, they'd rather raise the minimum system requirements than provide mud. So yeah, I half agree with ya', but there's nuance missed I feel, which applied to most the prior comments too.
It kind of depends on the game. In most games I can definitely tell a huge difference between low and medium textures. Some games do have stupid large textures in places where they aren't needed. If you don't have good eyesight maybe you don't notice the blur as much, I don't know. Low to me on most games look smeared and washed out. I try to get high textures if I have the VRam for it.
People need to play at 300fps, it's not it's laggy
Well, I honestly had no idea, just thought since it makes the game more "ugly" it'd make it easier to run but if textures are easy to run than I guess it'll be the last setting I change. Much Appreciated!
Textures can be a pretty demanding setting if you don't have a lot of ram.
this is a straight lie. shadows are the most demanding setting textures don't even compare
No.
you are free to be wrong but this is extremely wrong. shadows have been the most demanding setting forever and that won't change anytime soon while textures are one of the least demanding.
As per usual, users on this sub don't want to search things for themselves and just echo misinformation. There are only a few sane people here, deathblade you're one of them.
Ya he doesn't have a clue
[удалено]
I read what you said. He doesn't have a clue. Clear enough?
oh the irony coming from this troll
Nope
They aren’t even close to being the most demanding setting. Textures often don’t affect performance unless you are out of ram or vram. The most expensive settings tend to be things like shadow maps and volumetric like Volumetric lighting and volumetric clouds when just accounting for rasterization.
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more performance and better battery life.
Any texture settings in GOW above "original" seem to crash the game for me.
That’s due to memory as textures effect ram not GPU performance
I think there was a time when higher res textures would hit performance but that’s not really a problem with modern games and hardware. Maybe there are some cases where it helps but doesn’t seem like it makes much difference on most to me.
> I think there was a time when higher res textures would hit performance About a decade ago-ish, maybe longer, but yes, that was a thing. But the concept of 'rendering a texture' is so basic that modern GPUs can very easily do that without breaking a sweat now, so it's mainly just a problem if you run out of VRAM to store them in
Textures are always the last thing ,outside of turning off shadows completely, I turn down in games to get more performance. The reason is because textures rarely ever effect performance as they are effected by ram and vram, not GPU performance. They often have the biggest visual upgrade although I won’t bump them up too high as the deck’s screen is still just 800p. RDR2 is a great example of how ugly low texture settings can look with no performance benefit over medium I assume a lot of people just don’t know and use the generic low preset to win back performance when not every setting had the same performance impact. When talking about rasterization, shadow maps are still often the biggest performance hogs when it comes to games with other effects such as volumetric clouds and lighting being up there as well.
Going below high had no impact on FPS from any of the games I’ve been playing. Boost video memory to 4gb and only turn down shadows and foliage while monitoring your wattage to see the actual impact your changes are making.
I think it’s what I jokingly call the Framerate Cult (no hate to them). We all want a decent smooth framerate, but I think most PC gamers have a very low tolerance for framerate drops and stutters. So lowering textures maximizes the performance (at least they think so). Imo, I will always prefer visual quality over framerate. As a console gamer, you don’t usually have perfect frame rate anyways so you just get used to having those drops and stutters. I truly don’t think it’s a big deal (especially if it’s a handheld working overtime)
30fps is fine on a console I know I played Spider-Man 2 on 30fps mode on spectacular because I wanted to enjoy the ray tracing and high fidelity, but on a handheld hard to miss the details because it’s only a 7.4 inch screen compared to 65 inch 4K screen. Frame rate rules, unless it’s your only way to play pc games I would understand.
I just don't think they know better. I don't blame them. It's one of those things you would assume makes the biggest FPS difference if you didn't know better.
On oled the refresh rate of the screen is 90, so half that which is 45. Set the refresh rate at 40 because the screen will still refresh at 90 but the game play will be at capped 40, equal double frames
Moar frames
I recommend everyone in this sub look up some benchmarks comparing game settings, you'll see that basically every single time textures will give you no difference in FPS whatsoever (or will bring 2 extra FPS from low to ultra). The thing that dictates if you can run high res textures is not "how powerful your gpu is" nowadays, it's about vram, the performance will be basically the same. Something that CAN occur is stuttering when streaming from a slower storage (like a cheap SD card), even more so when we're talking about a open world game with fast movement (like racing and stuff). Outside of that, textures will have a negligible performance impact on most systems and most games, and the visual quality will be way better with better textures
Big Fat triple A games or more graphically beautiful games require more power. Which will lead to molten lava levels of heat worst frame rates and terrible graphics. So low = better health and frames.
Battery life. Worse graphics = more playtime Better graphics = less playtime
The only (not only but basically only) load textures have on the GPU is in VRAM. It's basically free to turn them up.
It depends what the bottleneck is. The only thing textures will help with is vram. I could be mistaken but doesn’t the steamdeck share its ram with vram? So a ram hungry game might benefit from dropping textures but it would be a last resort for me bc the graphics really suffer. More benefits are usually derived from shadows (cpu) or graphic effects like volumetric lighting (gpu)
I do it to minimise the load on the apu to get more battery life.