I hope you aren’t literally still using an actual HDD.

What emerging players? You can’t just whip up a competitive GPU in a jiffy, even if you have Intel money.

Also, unless they are from a different planet that has its own independent supply chain, they’d have to deal with the very same memory shortage and the very same foundries that are booked out for years.

Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.

Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.

Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.

The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.

This heavily depends on the game. Which game were you testing?

In my experience at least, small Indies and last-gen or earlier ports from console are fine, but games with frequent loading times and those designed for SSDs benefit from being installed to the internal storage.

They are, unfortunately.

That’s a single risk you (hopefully) willingly accepted when you decided to use an extremely niche browser.

Been there, done that, eventually discovered the errors of my ways and returned to Firefox.

Somewhere above 720p upscaled to 1080p with the help of FSR should work for 60 fps. The lower render resolution is likely enough to compensate for the lack of VRAM. This is all theoretical, of course.

How’s your CPU situation?

Bit late, but in theory, it should work just fine, even at 60 fps, given that the Steam Deck’s display resolution is only about half of 1080p.

Use supersampling. Either at the driver level (works with nearly all 3D games - enable the feature there, then select a higher than native resolution in-game) or directly in games that come with the feature (usually a resolution scaling option that goes beyond 100 percent). It’s very heavy on your GPU depending on the title, but the resulting image quality of turning several rendered pixels into one is sublime. Thin objects like power lines, as well as transparent textures like foliage, hair and chain-link fences benefit the most from this.

Always keep the limits of your hardware in mind though. Running a game at 2.75 or even four times the native resolution will have a serious impact on performance, even with last-gen stuff.

Emulators often have this feature as well, by the way - and here, it tends to hardly matter, since emulation is usually more CPU-bound (except with very tricky to emulate systems). Render resolution and output resolution are often separate. I’ve played old console games at 5K resolution, for example. Even ancient titles look magnificent like that.