Every PC I’ve ever used automatically detects and adjusts resolution to the display you connect to it. Even Nintendo Switch will detect when it’s docked and automatically adjust the display resolution. But on Steam Deck you literally have to adjust the display resolution for every game, every time you switch displays.
Since getting the SD I have shoved my PC into another room to displace the heat (until I get a mini-split) and I just stream from it to the Deck, whether docked at my desk or on the couch or on the big screen. But this really complicates that process unnecessarily.
This has also not been fixed in Nobara or Chimera.
What’s the limitation there?
Games go real funky on Linux when it comes to running two monitors, in my experience. They struggle to find the primary monitor, and they don’t always get the resolution right. It works a little better on Windows, but not much in my experience.
In my experience, games decide to store the resolution in their own config files, together with all graphics settings. They’ll do the same on Windows; hook up a 4k screen to a game you normally play at 1080p and the game will run in 1080p by default. This is particularly annoying for games that sync graphics settings across the cloud. This is a limitation of those specific games, I don’t think Valve can’t do much about those.
The Deck should set the default game resolution to “native”, which should use the display resolution. However, it’ll also set the screen resolution to be quite low by default to reflect the hardware capabilities of the Deck.
Nintendo does something similar with the Switch, actually. In docked mode, it’ll render the game to about 900p (or less, depending on the game) and upscale that to 1080p to pretend it’s actually running at a higher resolution. The display then upscales that to 4k again, unaware that any tomfoolery is going on. The Deck, on the other hand, doesn’t lie about its internal 800p resolution, and lets the display deal with upscaling. This is actually better for latency and quality on many TVs, but if you prefer to use FSR on the Deck to handle upscaling more gracefully (or try to run the game at a higher resolution than tested) you can override the presented resolution.
You should be able to change the external monitor resolution in Settings -> Display -> External Display Scaling. This in combination with the default resolution (“native”) should be enough to set the default resolution. Double check your games’ saved resolution, though, most games don’t handle new displays with different resolutions automatically.
Never been my experience…
Based on what?
It doesn’t. The default is always 800p.
This setting no longer exists.
Could be an Nvidia thing, but I’ve had games that opened on my secondary screen and absolutely refused to move to my other screen. It also decided that my secondary screen was where it should read the resolution capabilities from. I found that if I made the game freeze so an “application is not responding” message came up, I could move the frozen window sometimes, but even that is a matter of luck and requires messing with the game to freeze it.
Based on the fact games I play on my desktop sometimes switch to 1280x800 after I played them on my Deck, for one. Resolution is stored right next to windowed/full screen mode in the settings for most games.
I’ve transferred entire (save)games (long live DRM free GOG!) over the network to my Deck and there too I had to mess with the resolution settings in-game. I’m sure the Deck tells games that it should stick to 800p max, but if a game has a config file that says you want 1080p, it’ll try to apply that regardless of what the display claims to support.
That’s weird, it was set to native on all games I checked and I don’t remember changing any settings. Maybe it’s because installed most of my games not long after I got my Deck, before I got the update? Or maybe it’s got something to do with Steam settings I changed in desktop mode?
Either way, that really sucks. I would write a script or maybe a little GUI application to set the resolution for all games to native in your situation, but Valve really needs to step up their game and add a setting for the default here. Normal people shouldn’t need to script their consoles for changing the resolution.
That sucks too, I guess they took it out when they implemented per-game resolutions? I can still find much more recent posts referring to the setting online.
also gog isnt drm free any more sadly cyberpunk being a big example
I haven’t played CP2077 in a while but I never had to do anything but run the setup on my GOG purchase, no account login necessary as far as I remember. Did they change something?
Uhhhh I’m pretty sure it is. Otherwise they are destroying the only thing they have going for them and lying in their marketing.
just because YOU have never had problems doesn’t mean they don’t exist most games do store there res and other user settings s in their own config file just cause it normally follows monitor resolution doesn’t mean it’s not stored and I’ve had many problems with games opening on the wrong display or just flat up refusing to display one one screen and unless it’s changed in the past few days I just used the external display scaling were you docked?
No one said that.
Again, based on what? What resolution are the choosing and why? Every PC game I have ever played has its’ settings automatically adjusted to the native resolution.