Valve’s Steam Deck handheld is like a Nintendo Switch built by PC nerds - lewisyedis1951

The rumors were true. Valve officially pulled the curtain binding along the Steam Floor on Thursday—a $399 gambling handheld designed to land your Steam play library to the palms of your hands, powered past AMD hardware and Valve's own Linux-based SteamOS operating scheme. Preorders open July 16, with shipments starting in December.

The Steam Decorate looks like the Nintendo Switch, if the Nintendo Switch was created by diehard PC enthusiasts. You'll find a big 7-inch exhibit front and nitty-gritty—the same sized as the new OLED Switch—complete with touchscreen functionality. It's non OLED, alas, just Valve says the display shines at a very respectable 400 nits (crucial for outdoor use) and runs at 60Hz, a.k.a. the PC gaming golden standard. By equivalence, the Switch drops down to 30Hz when undocked, a refresh rate that simply wouldn't fly for us PC snobs. The Steam Deck's screen should also personify a bit clearer than its Nintendo rival, with a 1280×800 resolution and an "Optically warranted LCD for increased readability."

Valve

Other than that the Steamer Deck looks, well, like a exemplary (til now slenderly chonky) gaming handheld, with all the buttons, analog sticks, and D-pads you'd expect, including haptic feedback patronise so you seat experience your games rumble.

The connectivity is where things lead off to take a turn for the PC-centric. The Steam Deck supports some Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and IT comes non only with a microSD card slot for expanded entrepot, but likewise a USB-C port that can be used to superpowe the device, drive multi-channel audio via its DisplayPort-over-USB-C functionality, or connect to opposite hardware.

Valve

"Steam Deck of cards is also an open Personal computer, adding the ability to install whatever software or connect with any computer hardware," Valve same in a note to journalists, while its website boasts that "You can connect to peripherals, throw the picture onto a big screen, and do all the different PC things you'd look."

Yessssss.

Valve

Name a more iconic duet.

The beating ticker at the center of the Steam Deck is a custom AMD APU "optimized for handheld gaming." It's powered by a CPU with four Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000-series) cores and eight duds working at between 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz, paired with 8 Radeon GPU cores improved upon AMD's fantastic new RDNA 2 architecture, which is also found in the Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards, the Xbox Series S|X, and the PlayStation 5.

Don't expect to run ray-tracing on the Steam clean Deck—the marketing doesn't mention the cutting-edge lighting personal effects anywhere—only Valve claims that it offers "more than enough public presentation to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient world power envelope." Precondition the modest screen resolution, which would be pitiful for a full-medium-sized monitor merely honourable fine in a lilliputian handheld suchlike this, we'rhenium tending to believe the claim for most games, though you'll no doubt require to tinker with graphics settings to get specially strenuous games (like Cyberpunk 2077) running well on this. Valve showed off the Steam Deck running Jedi: Dead DecreeandControl to drive the channelize home.

Even the storage options are deserving of Personal computer gaming. Yes, the entry level $399 version comes with a tiny 64GB eMMC drive moving over a PCIe Gen. 2 connection, similar to the Nintendo Alternate. But you can also opt for $529 and $649 configurations that accompany 256GB and 512GB NVMe SSDs, severally, spouting happening the assonant PCIe 3.0 connective most people have in their gaming PCs right now.

Valve

Notifications in sue.

All all told, the Steam Deck looks damned impressive along paper, and that's not plane acquiring into the most important part—the games. Setup sounds equal a breeze, just like when you buy Fire surgery Echo devices direct from Amazon. Simply devolve on the Steam Pack of cards, logarithm into your Steam account, and your full existent Steam program library and friends list will be outright available. Steam clean chats, notifications, mist saves, the ability to stream games from your particular gaming desktop to the Steam Embellish via remote play, IT's all there.

Most Steam clean games aren't optimized for Linux, which SteamOS is built upon, but Valve's been tardily enhancing into its Proton compatibility layer for years. Proton lets a shocking act of Windows-centric games function on Linux with no to tokenish tussle. Developers don't have to do any spear carrier work for Proton to work its magical either—most of your games should just work.

Valve

Between Proton and SteamOS itself, Valve has quiet been laying the foundation for the Steam Deck of cards for overflow one-half a decade now. We posterior't wait to get our hands thereon in December. A Steam-centric gaming handheld sounds like an unalienable dream for moving or trips to the green. Just be willing to hook into Wi-Fi from someplace (even your phone), because the Steamer Bedeck lacks animate thing capabilities.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/394867/valves-steam-deck-handheld-is-like-a-nintendo-switch-built-by-pc-nerds.html

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