[Discussion] How well does playing your Steam Deck docked work for you?

I’ve only done it a few times but my biggest success was using it at a LAN party with a dock, monitor, keyboard, mouse, headset, and controller. Everything was wired except for the headset which was Bluetooth.

Mostly played some party games, a few solo roguelites, and a couple of AA online multiplayer games. The multiplayer games were a bit of a pain since getting Epic’s easy anti cheat to work required everything to be installed on the main NVMe storage instead of the SD card. I’m glad I did some testing before getting to the LAN because otherwise I’d spend half the time troubleshooting lol.

Really well! I tend to only play it docked, actually. I use my PS4’s controller, plugged in (since it’s paired with the PS4 and switching BT pairing is always such a hassle. Well, now it’s never in need of charging either so). I do sometimes have trouble with responsiveness, but it’s never been a big issue. The only issue is that if I want to switch between play modes the Steam Deck really hates that. Also, the controller doesn’t work in desktop mode which is a pain when I want to do something like use Jellyfin and need to fiddle with something during playback. Granted, there might be some settings to mess with to enable that but I haven’t got around to it.

Also, it may help to know I am using a dumb TV (I noticed another commentator had caveats based on their smart TV). It’s quite old but has HDMI and runs the deck just fine. Occasionally the connection will cut out, but I’m honestly not sure if that’s the Deck or the TV having a problem. I thought it was the TV (it’s old, it’s got some crystalline looking spots, and one of its four HDMI ports does not work) but when playing multiplayer those disconnects came with online disconnection too, so maybe it’s the Deck. Not sure. Very rarely occurs. Thankfully I have a penchant for turn based games so I can sit and wait it out.

But yeah, playing the Deck docked works pretty well in my experience. Just about any controller that can be plugged in via USB will work, too. I used to use a very cheap, wired-only Switch controller until it died (a brand I knew full well was crap and the controllers always have some issue in the long run, but it was RGB for just $25…).

@Fubarberry I am currently playing GTA5 docked and it is fantastic. But when I tried playing the Dead Space remake docked, it wasn’t as smooth an experience. There was some weird visual blurring effect happening every time I tried running. That game is far better played on the deck itself IMO.

Without the Steam Controller, I didn’t want even play docked on tv / monitor. The only time I tried it was to record some gameplay (an external recording device in between monitor and the Deck), so that I get everything record, not just the gameplay. I don’t have the original dock and tried with some random HDMI output thingy. And it worked! Here some bad illustration of the setup:

From Steam Deck over converter, to recorder. The recorder splits up to tv output and saves the live video recording to drive.

[ Steam DECK ]  o--o  [ USB to HDMI ]
                            o
                            |                 -----------
                            o                |           |
  [ USB Drive ]  o--o  [ Recorder ]  o---o   |    TV     |
                                             |           |
                                              -----------

And it worked perfectly fine! Did I need to do the ascii illustration? No, but I had fun with it. :D

Works well enough using PS5 controller on 3rd party dock. Only issue is that I will have to delete the Bluetooth controller on SD and pair it. Probably because I use the controller on PS5 and PC.

Quick Access Menu can be accessed by pressing PS button + X. Hope this helps someone out there.

I’ve noticed a bit of lag on my inputs when using the dock and a ps5 controller so far. It wasn’t bad, but it was noticeable. Maybe a tenth of a second or so?

I play some games docked like Strategy games (on the computer screen) or family games (on the family TV) and it works fine.

Where it would be problematic is if I also played these games in handheld mode as I would have to change quite a few settings.

It would be nice if the Deck could switch between docked mode (using more power with better FPS/resolution) and handheld mode automatically.

In a way you can do this by switching between the game profile/general profile, but it’s just a workaround.

Personally I’ve been encountering more issues with docking than I used to have. Seems like it will work fine in either docked or handheld mode by themselves, but swapping between the two will cause a game to crash or steamOS to restart within the next 5-10 minutes.

I am on beta, so it could just be a SteamOS bug that’s not in the normal builds.

It works just fine for me. I have played a few games that need a keyboard and trackball, so those work great docked. I used to have a setup with external speakers and a monitor connected to my dock.

If I ever get a Steam Controller I am sure I will play docked even more. My most played game is No Man’s Sky, which I mostly play on a stand for my iPad. It puts the screen a little higher and allows it to stand up when I am not holding it.

I just did it for the first time yesterday, with a game in which I make heavy use of motion controls. It worked great. I jumped right in and had zero problems. 4k@60 was nice.

Disclaimer first: I haven’t played docked ever since I moved to my current apartment, so for about 2 years.

So, for me playing docked was a mixed bag. The main issue was that upscaling from 720p to 1080p (my TV’s native resolution) never yielded a satisfactory image quality. This means, that I only played games docked, that were relatively light on the hardware.

Things that worked well were 2D games, obviously, and light 3D games, like Cassette Beasts or the space-part of Elite: Dangerous (landing in Elite was, of course a no-go at native 1080p).

I also had issues with my gamepad, a DualShock 4, interfering with the WLAN of the deck. If I remember correctly, that has been fixed by a Steam Deck update meanwhile.

I also had severe issues trying to stream from my desktop to the Deck. It hadn’t liked my desktop’s 16:10 aspect ratio. From what I can tell from the current Steam Link Android app, it seems this also has been fixed meanwhile.

For the games that worked fine, I have had a lot of fun playing docked though.

I often play docked, but when I do I am usually playing something with high graphics demand (FFVII Rebirth) where I flip to desktop mode and use the Steam Link app to connect to my PC. If you are looking to play a really high end game via streaming, I recommended not using the SteamOS streaming and rather using the SteamLink app. Performance and controller detection work much better.

For local games I’m playing stuff more like Moonstone Island, Planet Crafter, etc and it works great. I like the ability to slap on some extra peripherals. I attach a small USB keyboard for games that occasionally need it, and a mouse, but I generally play with the PS5 controller I have.

My one beef is Smart TVs like my Samsung playing poorly with their stupid “smart device detection”… And it some times takes some playing around to get the video to connect properly (sound comes through)… A problem absent from my “dumb” Westinghouse TV/DVD combo LCDs i grabbed. So YMMV on connectivity if you have a less than well built Smart TV.

I mostly keep it docked and I capped to 1080p and let my TV upscale it. Its ok for what I use it for but it struggles on some 3d games. I havent noticed any issues switching between docked and undocked.