Similarly, Deus Ex: Human Revolution hits 1440p60 just fine at medium settings, where image quality is reasonable, performance is solid, and the artwork holds up - and you can even go for 4K 30 if you prefer. Half-Life 2 is a good example, running at 4K 60fps max settings without MSAA. Watch on YouTube The video goes into more detail about the triumphs - and tribulations - of using the Steam Deck with a 4K TV.įirst up, we're going to be looking at some older and less demanding games - seventh generation console titles are often a good fit thanks to meagre performance demands and solid gamepad support. A true native 4K is going to elude us except in simple titles, but we should be able to push image quality quite a bit regardless. 1080p and above content fares better, so that's what we'll be targeting here - at a minimum, around double the pixels of the Steam Deck's internal display.

Games at this resolution tend to look blurry and soft, with the scaling tech to preserve sharpness absent on many TVs. While you could of course simply scale up 720p to fill a 4K screen, the results often aren't flattering. So can we actually achieve a good docked TV experience with the Steam Deck on a modern 4K display - or are the demands of high-res gaming just too much to ask from the low-power, low-bandwidth AMD APU at its heart?

Plus, there's a wide library of older and less technically challenging content that the Steam Deck may be able to accelerate to high resolutions on raw performance alone. This may seem farcical but new second generation reconstruction techniques - FSR 2.0 and TSR - have just hit commercial games, providing massive performance gains for high-res rendering. Valve's Steam Deck is an excellent portable machine for 720p gaming, packing last-gen console performance in a compact shell - but can we push the system further? With a 4K display as a target output we're going to drag the Deck as far as we can into docked, home theatre gaming.

Steamdeck dock