Review: Steam Deck OLED’s brilliant screen fixes the portable’s biggest flaw

When the Steam Deck first launched, our extensive review specifically called out the “ho-hum” LCD screen as “the system’s biggest heartbreak.” The “washed-out” color reproduction and “obvious light bleed” were among the more obvious 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hardware upgrades, the new version of Valve’s handheld should arouse plenty of jealousy in those stuck with a now-outdated LCD unit.

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.

The brightness of the OLED screen (bottom) really shines over the old LCD screen (top) when viewed in direct sunlight.

Credit: 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”).

An indoor screen comparison. Note the better color and slightly larger characters on the OLED screen (bottom).

Credit: 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.

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 Valve), for instance, doesn’t really do much to make the Steam Deck feel less bulky in your hands—the new unit is still roughly 1.5 times the weight of a Switch, after all. That said, with a handheld this size, every bit of weight reduction helps, at least until a “Steam Deck Lite” option gives our poor wrists a more significant break.

Then there’s the faster memory, which Valve says “improves latency.” In most games, I could barely detect a difference in loading times or performance. But then there were titles like The Making of Karateka, where HD video that was stuttery and unwatchable on my original Steam Deck played perfectly smoothly on the new hardware. I also appreciated the new low-latency touchscreen response, which felt noticeably more responsive when using the Deck’s on-screen keyboard.

Valve also brags that the Steam Deck OLED hardware allows for “improved resume time by roughly 30%,” a figure that roughly matched our tests. But what sounds like a significant improvement on paper amounts to maybe a one-second faster wake-up time in practice, a difference that will barely add up to meaningful time savings, even over years of regular use.

The redesigned clamshell case adds a velcro clasp on top of the zipper.

Kyle Orland

The redesigned clamshell case adds a velcro clasp on top of the zipper. Kyle Orland

A thinner, zip-up inner case can be removed from the outer case (with a bit of velcro tugging)

Kyle Orland

A thinner, zip-up inner case can be removed from the outer case (with a bit of velcro tugging) Kyle Orland

Two, two, two cases in one!

Kyle Orland

Two, two, two cases in one! Kyle Orland

A thinner, zip-up inner case can be removed from the outer case (with a bit of velcro tugging) Kyle Orland

Two, two, two cases in one! Kyle Orland

Beyond those changes, there are other touted improvements that I had trouble noticing even after Valve went to the trouble of pointing them out. The new, larger fan in the OLED model is supposed to be quieter, for instance, but it didn’t seem noticeably so to my ears during testing. Only when we conducted a microphone measurement did the slight difference become apparent—46 dB on the OLED model versus 50 dB on the LCD (measured right next to the vent with the fan running at about 5,000 RPM).

Valve’s complete list of OLED unit improvements is full of other changes that were tough to notice and nearly impossible to measure—the “Improved bass response [with] flatter sound profile,” the “improved responsiveness and tactility of shoulder buttons switch mechanism,” and an “adjusted d-pad snap ratio and diagonal interactions” among them. I’m not saying these differences don’t exist, only that I wasn’t able to notice them even when I tried. Other improvements, like Wi-Fi 6E or an improved Bluetooth module, will be useful to the subset of players that can make use of them.

All told, though, I was impressed with just how many little touches Valve has put into the new OLED model design. Those range from a power LED that now turns green when the unit is fully charged to an analog stick that’s less of a dust magnet to metal screws that are now easier to remove and replace for repairs. It all points to a heartening attention to detail from a company that seems eager to iterate on what was essentially a first draft of the Steam Deck hardware.

Same old SoC

Two years ago, the Steam Deck’s AMD system on a chip was powerful enough to more or less fulfill Valve’s promise to run “the entire Steam library” at 30-plus fps. Today, that promise is looking unfulfilled when it comes to modern titles like Starfield and Cities: Skylines 2, to name just a few. The Steam Deck OLED doesn’t offer any improvements in CPU or GPU power to potentially ameliorate this problem, either.

Any longtime PC gamer will tell you that this is just the nature of the beast, to some extent. As technology evolves, a PC player has to be on the lookout for the point when the price-to-gameplay-value ratio is just right for an investment in a new graphics card, a new tier of RAM, or a higher-resolution monitor.

The SoC may be getting a bit old, but it can still handle Dave the Diver just fine.

Credit: Valve

The problem is that the kind of modular, one-piece-at-a-time upgrades that are possible on a desktop tower are much less feasible on the Steam Deck (and other portable gaming PCs). These handhelds have more in common with the console market, where an upgrade in hardware power requires investing in an entirely new machine. In turn, manufacturers will generally wait until there’s a true generational power boost available before offering a new system with more powerful internals.