Your TV is playing a large part in the degraded visuals. It may be receiving a 720p signal from the Steam Deck, but it then needs to upscale that to whatever resolution your TV is displaying. Most TVs are hot garbage at doing this task, and will make your picture look washed out, or even pixelated.

If you aren’t using the Official Dock and Charger, then you need to make sure they’re delivering enough power for the Deck and any attached peripherals. USB-C is much more complex than previous generations, and not all docks/cables are created equal.

These are problems I’ve never encountered in my ~2 years of owning a Deck myself, but I can’t give you more feedback without knowing what specific Dock and Television you’re using.

I know it’s not helpful but I don’t have any of these problems. Very much plug and play for me.

Using the official dock? Most of my problems were solved by updating the firmware. That does NOT happen automatically via the regular Steam Decker updates btw, need to trigger it yourself.

Yeah. It’s really that bad. They’ve been releasing quality of life patches, but Valve made a portable device that happens to support docking, not a device meant to be docked.

Based on your experience, I assume you have the official Steam Dock, which I find worse to use with the SteamDeck than any random USB C dongle that I have tried.

Edit: Be sure to check for updates. I recall some of the issues you mention (like the blank screen) were mentioned in SteamOS release notes this year.

Which dock are you using ? We can’t help much without information.

There’s gotta be an issue in your setup. I’ve never had audio issues and performance should be identical when running at the same resolution.

The official dock has been fine for me on both an LCD 1st batch model and a late 2024 OLED model, plugged in 100% of the time. What dock are you using? There’s a lot of bad docks out there, from a compatibility standpoint.

Another thing to try is a full factory reset. Make sure your game saves are backed up in steam cloud and move as many games to the SD card or temporary drive as you can to make it easier to get back up and running.

I use a dell dock from work and various controllers and have had no problems at all, in fact we use it almost exclusively as a console.

sorry to not be helpful but I have not had this problem

Try to enable “Game Mode” or “PC Mode” on your TV for that HDMI input. Also check the audio settings for supported formats and play around with the settings.

Also, what dock are you using?

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I have none of those issues, but a couple of extra weird ones… this is the official dock btw. First, maybe it’s something I plugged in, but the Deck’s battery will be drained (slowly, over many days) if it’s plugged in and not turned on. Suspended or off is the same, I must unplug. Then the one that really pisses me off because I can’t wrap my head around it, I can’t unplug it unless I fully turn it off first. Doing otherwise tends to make my home network comatose! Basically nothing can see anything. Computers lose connection to the NAS, to the router… nothing works until I plug it back and turn it on, then I can turn it off and unplug. ffs.

My experience has been the polar opposite of yours. Of course, depends on the dock and TV as much as it depends on the deck, so our mileage will vary.

It sounds as if the dock was the problem. I myself have a third party dock and haven’t had such problems.

After using a Switch for nearly a decade, the docking experience with Deck is pretty awful in comparison. Make sure the firmware is up to date on the dock you have or buy a better one if that doesn’t work and you can certainly get it in a useable state without serious issues… but I sure do wish it was a simple as slotting it in and having everything seamlessly work like it is with Switch.