News Steam Deck Hands-On: PC Gaming in My Hands

[Admin]

We went hands-on with Valve's Steam Deck to see how it performs, and just how big it is.

Steam Deck Hands-On: PC Gaming in My Hands : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

What I don't get is why they didn't use a lot of that dead space on the back for an external battery pack slot, either for their own custom designed battery or an adapter so you can store and use any high output battery pack.

 

[excalibur1814]

Please, PLEASE, don't waste your money or, at least, wait for it to hit eBay.

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

What I don't get is why they didn't use a lot of that dead space on the back for an external battery pack slot, either for their own custom designed battery or an adapter so you can store and use any high output battery pack.

I'm just spitballing here but maybe for thermal/acoustics? Just a guess here, but perhaps more battery or some other feature that would actually fill the space would cause an increase in thermal load which would make it unreasonably warm to hold or would require the fans to be much more audible than desired. Maybe it's even due a larger battery causing an increase in weight of an already hefty device?

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I'm just spitballing here but maybe for thermal/acoustics? Just a guess here, but perhaps more battery or some other feature that would actually fill the space would cause an increase in thermal load which would make it unreasonably warm to hold or would require the fans to be much more audible than desired. Maybe it's even due a larger battery causing an increase in weight of an already hefty device?

A little bit of weight compared to as little as 2 hours of battery life? I think most people would take a little bit of weight.

 

[vmem]

A little bit of weight compared to as little as 2 hours of battery life? I think most people would take a little bit of weight.

This could just be me, but I find myself looking for places to rest my arm after playing the switch for 3-4 hours. The switch is only 0.66lb whereas the Steam Deck is 1.47lB. If we added a battery and made it say 2lb or 3lb (these things are mostly battery by weight anyway), I can see people struggling to hold it up for long enough for the battery to make sense. Think about it this way, if you're going to end up looking for a surface to set it down or rest your arms on, you might as well be bringing a batterypack along. I pre-ordered mine and we'll see how I feel after playing with it, but I hope they made the right compromise between battery vs weight.

 

[Ticktok]

What I don't get is why they didn't use a lot of that dead space on the back for an external battery pack slot, either for their own custom designed battery or an adapter so you can store and use any high output battery pack.

With the USB-C charging there's not really a need. There's already so many large capacity external battery packs, especially with the Nintendo Switch and the Mac book charging that way, that for any extra gaming time you could use/carry one of those. I already have a couple large capacity high output usb-c battery packs for my phone and nintendo switch.

And like other people said, it would add too much to the weight and affect the cooling routing. Why complicate either of those when the usb-c charging packs already exist.

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

Nice, if it can play control on low, it can play anything on low (my GTX 1080 has massive struggles with it, more than cyberpunk on low).

Hopefully if it catches on, it might receive optimizations on newer games. Seems like a solid little device for a quick couch game or on the go with a battery pack.

The screen though…the top model all the way if you travel, too bad that it’s not an option on the others.

 

[Bmuduoy]

Please, PLEASE, don't waste your money or, at least, wait for it to hit eBay.

Why do you care so much? Is it made of babies or what?

 

[mitch074]

From experience, Proton has little impact on game performance, driver optimization and graphics API have a lot more. If the game is using DX11, it'll probably be choppy; OpenGL or Vulkan, on the other hand, it's very likely to work well, and in the former case, better than on Windows (free AMD drivers on Linux got a grounds up rewrite a few years ago). DX12 is all or nothing. DX9 might actually run better than on Windows.

 

[leadpoop]

Personally, if the device can play 95% of games at with at least 30 fps or better, and deliver their advertised battery life, then I look forward to using the device. I am not a hard core gamer, nor do I care about top notch graphics, but if I can pick up the device and play a bit here, or there. Sign me up.

 

[ezst036]

Valve's efforts to promote Linux are nothing short of amazing.

 

[slovtux]

Please, PLEASE, don't waste your money or, at least, wait for it to hit eBay.

Waiting for the scalpers to sells the deck for 5 times the price on eBay ... Thanks but no thanks.

 

[btmedic04]

I'm hesitant about the steam deck mainly due to how the steam controller and steam machine debacles played out. will wait to see what this ecosystem looks like in a year.

 

[verigoodtomyou]

eye measure for frames? u know steam has a built-in overlay fps counter you can toggle on, right?

 

[TerryLaze]

will wait to see what this ecosystem looks like in a year.

What do you mean?! Are you afraid that steam will stop existing?! The only ecosystem here is that the deck is a PC running steam what do you expect to change?

 

[Amonym0us]

Please, PLEASE, don't waste your money or, at least, wait for it to hit eBay.

What's with all this begging?
1st Don't Tell people what to do with their money.
2nd How is it a waste? If you like to game is worth getting. At most is a personal decision.
3rd Hit ebay? Really? To pay more for it from shady sellers? No thanks.

 

[btmedic04]

What do you mean?! Are you afraid that steam will stop existing?! The only ecosystem here is that the deck is a PC running steam what do you expect to change?

hardly. steam itself has been around for a long long time. the ecosystem im talking about is the steamdeck itself. valve has this habit of coming up with fantastic ideas and then they flop spectacularly at launch. for instance, the steam controller was incredibly late and fewer than 500k steam machines were sold in the first 7 months of their release. they quickly disappeared from the market shortly afterwards and nobody talks about them anymore

 

[TerryLaze]

hardly. steam itself has been around for a long long time. the ecosystem im talking about is the steamdeck itself. valve has this habit of coming up with fantastic ideas and then they flop spectacularly at launch. for instance, the steam controller was incredibly late and fewer than 500k steam machines were sold in the first 7 months of their release. they quickly disappeared from the market shortly afterwards and nobody talks about them anymore

Yeah but the first "engineering" units already got tested, so even if valve only dumps out the first batch and then completely abandons the deck, it's still going to be a full PC that will be able to run steam, even with zero support from valve, if they release the deck it's going to keep being what it is.

 

[mitch074]

Valve's efforts to promote Linux are nothing short of amazing.

It's a matter of survival: Windows 11 is pushing the Xbox and TPM angle so much that it's very likely that 5 years from now, Windows 12 Home will only allow software installs from 'trusted' stores, AKA those who pay Microsoft the big bucks - Valve are making sure they have an alternative.

 

[Old Molases]

Is it true that its performance is equivalent to ps5 and xbox1?

 

[TerryLaze]

Is it true that its performance is equivalent to ps5 and xbox1?

No this is half in cores and probably also in GPU power although nobody is confirming this, it's roughly on ps4/xbone level .

 

[TerryLaze]

Is it true that its performance is equivalent to ps5 and xbox1?

No this is half in cores and probably also in GPU power although nobody is confirming this, it's roughly on ps4/xbone level .

 

[mitch074]

No this is half in cores and probably also in GPU power although nobody is confirming this, it's roughly on ps4/xbone level .

and with the power budget, half the frequuency - thus, a quarter the actual processing power.
Good thing its screen is a 1/8th of the 4K resolution the other consoles are targeting...

 

[TerryLaze]

and with the power budget, half the frequuency - thus, a quarter the actual processing power.

Maybe, but the clocks on the ps4 were terrible as well so maybe not.
Also ZEN is much much better than jaguar.

 

[mitch074]

Maybe, but the clocks on the ps4 were terrible as well so maybe not.
Also ZEN is much much better than jaguar.

When compared with the base models, maybe. Remember though that games for these consoles were geared for their strengths - the Steam Deck will run "generic" PC games.
Zen 2 has triple the IPC Jaguar had - but that's including SMP. All in all, at similar clock speeds, a quad core Zen 2 chip would have twice the performance of a similarly clocked 8-core Jaguar processor.
On the Steam deck, the CPU's power budget is very low - so the processor will run all cores at half the clock at best that a PS4 or XBONE would have. Single threads will peak as high though.
But the CPU isn't the part that gets the biggest load : the GPU part is the one that will have to push the pixels. And while RDNA2 is a big upgrade over GCN 1.1 / 2nd gen, offering 40% more performance per compute unit per MHz, the Steam Desk offers only 8 CUs to the PS4's 18; granted, it can boost to twice the PS4's APU frequency, but you can't count on it happening all the time; base frequency is only 200 MHz higher than the PS4's.
And that's the base PS4 model - the one that couldn't run Cyberpunk at all. If we look at the PS4 Pro, that used 36 GCN 1.3 CUs at 911 MHz, it's more than twice as fast as the base model.