The rumors had been true. Valve formally pulled the curtain again on the Steam Deck on Thursday—a $399 gaming handheld designed to convey your Steam gaming library to the palms of your fingers, powered by AMD {hardware} and Valve’s personal Linux-based SteamOS working system. Preorders open July 16, with shipments beginning in December.
The Steam Deck seems to be just like the Nintendo Switch, if the Nintendo Switch was created by diehard PC fans. You’ll discover a massive 7-inch show entrance and middle—the identical dimension as the brand new OLED Switch—full with touchscreen performance. It’s not OLED, alas, however Valve says the show shines at a really respectable 400 nits (essential for outside use) and runs at 60Hz, a.okay.a. the PC gaming gold commonplace. By comparability, the Switch drops all the way down to 30Hz when undocked, a refresh charge that merely wouldn’t fly for us PC snobs. The Steam Deck’s display screen must also be a bit clearer than its Nintendo rival, with a 1280×800 decision and an “Optically bonded LCD for enhanced readability.”
ValveOther than that the Steam Deck seems to be, properly, like a typical (but barely chonky) gaming handheld, with all of the buttons, analog sticks, and D-pads you’d anticipate, together with haptic suggestions help so you possibly can really feel your video games rumble.
The connectivity is the place issues begin to take a flip for the PC-centric. The Steam Deck helps each Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and it comes not solely with a microSD card slot for expanded storage, but in addition a USB-C port that can be utilized to energy the machine, drive multi-channel audio through its DisplayPort-over-USB-C performance, or connect with different {hardware}.
Valve“Steam Deck is also an open PC, adding the ability to install any software or connect with any hardware,” Valve stated in a be aware to journalists, whereas its web site boasts that “You can connect to peripherals, throw the picture onto a big screen, and do all the other PC things you’d expect.”
Yessssss.
ValveName a extra iconic duo.
The beating coronary heart on the middle of the Steam Deck is a customized AMD APU “optimized for handheld gaming.” It’s powered by a CPU with 4 Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000-series) cores and eight threads working at between 2.4GHz and three.5GHz, paired with 8 Radeon GPU cores constructed upon AMD’s incredible new RDNA 2 structure, which can also be discovered within the Radeon RX 6000-series graphics playing cards, the Xbox Series S|X, and the PlayStation 5.
Don’t anticipate to run ray-tracing on the Steam Deck—the advertising doesn’t point out the cutting-edge lighting results wherever—however Valve claims that it presents “more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.” Given the modest display screen decision, which might be pitiful for a full-sized monitor however simply effective in a tiny handheld like this, we’re inclined to consider the declare for many video games, although you’ll little question have to tinker with graphics settings to get significantly strenuous video games (like Cyberpunk 2077) working properly on this. Valve confirmed off the Steam Deck working Jedi: Fallen Order and Control to drive the purpose dwelling.
