I’m also brand new to the Deck and am struggling with getting a good percentage of my (light, mostly indie) PC games working.
I’ve installed a handful of games from Epic and Amazon via the Heroic Launcher and added them to Steam. So far about half work out of the box, while the others have errors I’m uncertain how to even troubleshoot. Steredenn for example loads in a tiny box (about 1/3 the screen width) in the middle of the screen. Sable fades to a perma-white screen with music playing after advancing past the title screen.
I’ve tried ticking the force compatibility box and toggling to Proton Experimental. I’ve also looked up the games on ProtonDB, and in some cases there aren’t any tinker tips. For Steredenn for example the game is just listed as Native (but my copy is PC, not Linux native) and all the posts (under “Steam Deck”) say it runs perfectly out of the box.
So how do I go about troubleshooting and tinkering with games that should work pretty easily but don’t work out of the box?
You’ll want to tinker with the performance settings within RPCS3 itself, and also make sure the game you are trying to play has a sufficiently high performance rating with this emulator. If it’s a game that is not currently running well even on a powerful PC, the Deck won’t be able to do much with it.
Retro Game Corps is reportedly working on a PS3 emulation video for the SD. I’m watching to see what he can get running and what he has to say about the most effective settings to tweak to improve performance.