Discover the Stunning OLED Display of the Steam Deck – Fixing Its Most Significant Flaw

Enlarged: The Steam Deck OLED (bottom) sunbathing with its older brother. When the Steam Deck initially hit the market, our extensive review specifically pinpointed the “ho-hum” LCD screen as “the system’s biggest disappointment.” The “washed-out” color reproduction and “obvious light bleed” were among the more glaring effects of Valve “cut[ting] corners to save cash” on the Deck’s 7-inch LCD panel. In the many months since that launch, Valve has offered frequent software updates to fix other early issues in areas like game compatibility, stability, and system-level features. But that lackluster LCD screen has remained the Steam Deck’s biggest flaw, a headache that users need to tolerate to enjoy a portable PC gaming experience that’s otherwise quite low on compromises. With the Steam Deck OLED, Valve is ready to eliminate that issue. The new unit, which goes on sale later this week, sports a brilliant screen that’s finally on par with the one Nintendo provided to eager Switch owners over two years ago. Paired with a handful of other small quality-of-life hardware upgrades, the new version of Valve’s handheld should arouse plenty of jealousy in those stuck with a now-outdated LCD unit. Enlarge / The red power button is pretty much the only way to tell the OLED version from the old LCD version from the outside. As nice as those upgrades are, though, they don’t touch the Steam Deck’s core pixel-pushing specs, which are already starting to look a bit dated in the shadow of upstart competitors with beefier chips. Whether those quickly aging internals are enough to last until the planned launch of a true “Steam Deck 2.0” in a few years depends largely on what kinds of games you expect to play on the handheld. Bright and smooth We’ve been touting the benefits of OLED vs. standard LCD screens here at Ars since at least 2016, so the major improvements in the Steam Deck OLED are pretty familiar by now. Deeper blacks, better contrast, brighter colors, less blurring—it’s all here. If anything, the OLED improvements are even more impressive because of just how lousy the screen was on the original Steam Deck. When the Nintendo Switch introduced an OLED model in 2021, we deemed the upgrade “nonessential,” in large part because the original Switch screen was already pretty decent. Jumping from the Steam Deck to the Steam Deck OLED, on the other hand, is akin to moving from a view through frosted glass to a view through expertly tailored prescription glasses. Enlarge / The brightness of the OLED screen (bottom) really shines over the old LCD screen (top) when viewed in direct sunlight.Kyle Orland The visual pop is most apparent in games designed to make full use of the HDR color gamut. By now, gamers with decent TVs or monitors are very familiar with the impact of, say, a brilliant HDR sunrise shining through the skyscrapers in a game like Spider-Man: Miles Morales. And while smartphone gamers have been enjoying this kind of effect on select games for a while now, there’s still a certain wow factor to seeing these colors on the relatively large screen of a dedicated gaming handheld. Steam Deck OLED also benefits greatly from the jump to a maximum refresh rate of 90 Hz, over the 60 Hz maximum on the original unit (and most portable gaming consoles to date). Yes, there is some heated debate over the actual impact of those extra frames (above 60 per second) on our conscious perception of motion and smoothness in animated images. But even if you can’t literally count the frames, the faster refresh rate has a pretty direct impact on how it feels to play reflex-heavy games. Whether you can take advantage of this extra smoothness on the Steam Deck OLED is highly dependent on the demands of the game you’re playing. Less-demanding titles like Hades and Neon White were able to easily hit a solid 90 fps on the Steam Deck OLED and were noticeably more enjoyable to play because of it. A game like Horizon: Zero Dawn, on the other hand, only reached 75 fps in benchmarks when the “Favor Performance” setting was turned on, leading to a distinct drop in the detail of on-screen settings and characters. And games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Cyberpunk 2077 seemed to max out in the 30–50 fps range on the Steam Deck, even with the graphical detail settings turned way down. Frame rate aside, pretty much every game on the Steam Deck can benefit from the increased screen real estate on the new model. The jump from a 7-inch to 7.4-inch diagonal measurement might seem modest, but it starts to sound better when you measure the jump in total screen area, which increases 12 percent, from about 142 sq. in. (5.9” by 3.7”) to 159 sq. in. (6.3” by 3.9”). Enlarge / An indoor screen comparison. Note the better color and slightly larger characters on the OLED screen (bottom).Kyle Orland The increase will be instantly noticeable to longtime Steam Deck users, especially when playing the many Steam games that were designed with a large desktop monitor in mind. More screen area means small text gets just a bit more readable and small details become more discernible on the new screen, decreasing the need to squint or hold the unit closer to your face. The OLED screen still maxes out at 1280×800 pixels, though, which combines with the larger screen to reduce the new unit’s “pixels per inch” clarity measurement (down from 215 on the first Steam Deck to about 204 now). But this isn’t like Nintendo’s 3DS XL line, where a huge, low-resolution screen made every pixel so big that you could easily discern every blocky, stairstep edge. In practice, it didn’t feel like the images on the new OLED unit were any less defined than those on the original Steam Deck. On the contrary, the OLED images seemed even sharper in my subjective tests, thanks in large part to the increased brightness and contrast levels that made outlines stand out that much more easily from their backgrounds. Quality of (battery) life Aside from the OLED screen that gives the new Steam Deck its name, the new unit comes with a hefty list of other quality-of-life improvements over the first Steam Deck. Of these, the most notable is easily the bigger battery, which Valve says can fit in the same-sized hardware shell thanks in large part to the thinner OLED screen. While the Steam Deck OLED’s official battery capacity is 25 percent bigger than its predecessor (50 Wh versus 40), Valve claims that this translates to a full 30 percent to 50 percent increase in usable battery life, thanks to a number of efficiency gains elsewhere in the hardware. Valve’s quoted range for battery use now runs from 3 to 12 hours on the OLED model, up from 2 to 8 hours on the original LCD model. Enlarge / That included charger will power up the battery on the Steam Deck OLED a bit faster than the battery on the old LCD model. As those large ranges imply, the actual usable battery life depends heavily on the game in question. A retro-styled title like Donut Dodo will be near the top, and a modern 3D powerhouse like Cyberpunk 2077 will be near the bottom. In our testing, the most demanding games running at the hardware’s highest brightness setting drained the OLED model battery in closer to 2.5 hours, undercutting Valve’s low-end estimate by nearly 20 percent. In everyday use, though, most players probably won’t feel the need to max out the brightness on the 1,000-nit OLED screen unless they’re playing directly in bright sunlight. For most indoor use cases, setting the brightness somewhere around 60 percent or 70 percent of the maximum provided a perfectly bright and clear image while significantly increasing battery life. Valve’s touted “improved battery chemistry” also sped up charging times in our tests, which might be useful if you’re in a rush to get away from a plug. It’s the little things Battery aside, there are a few other hardware changes I’d put in the “small but noticeable” category. The nearly 5 percent dip in total weight (down from 669 grams to 640 grams, according to…

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