Bonus Material: God of War PS4 vs Steam Deck (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Rich here with your next drop of Steam Deck bonus material. A lot of work went into producing the data and analysis that went into the review, where only a small portion ended up in the final review - so why not share those assets in full?

Yesterday I told the story of how the Steam Deck's 30fps was completely broken when I received the console and the first phase of testing the machine up against PS4 was to use a bizarre USB-C to HDMI dongle hack to force a locked 30Hz output. Today, we're talking God of War where we could use gold master code with an unlocked frame-rate on PS4 and then replicate that as closely as we could on Steam Deck at its preferred resolutions. It's one of the elements I'm most proud of - a lot of the work that went into this review was about doing things that the PC press would never think of, or did not have the knowledge to replicate. 

Steam Deck war stories time: final data on the Deck side for God of War was captured on Monday February 21st. Prior to that the 30fps cap didn't work and I also observed issues with frame delivery in Steam UI. If a game is rendering above 30fps consistently, we shouldn't be seeing so many 50ms frame-times. On Monday, SteamOS updated and the 30fps cap worked properly, the Steam UI seemed significantly smoother to my eye and the Steam UI benchmarks seemed much closer to the GPU-bound limits of the Linux desktop metrics I'd already captured. It was only at that point that I felt comfortable enough that the product was reviewable, that things were actually working.

Coming next: how about extended versions of the gameplay clips I used in the review?

Downloads: https://digitalfoundry.net/2022-02-26-god-of-war-ps4-vs-steam-deck-bonus-material