Following earlier rumors of a handheld system in the works at Valve, the Steam Deck was officially announced yesterday alongside a December 2021 release window.
The Steam Deck is powered by AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture, so it’s not surprising to hear straight from Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais that the hardware support DirectX 12 Ultimate features like variable rate shading (VRS) and acceleration for ray tracing, but it’s always good to get confirmation.
Perhaps most excitingly, Valve confirmed to IGN that you’ll be able to do with the Steam Deck everything you could do with a PC, including browsing the Web or playing games from other stores such as Epic’s.
Speaking of Epic, Tim Sweeney publicly applauded the Steam Deck announcement on Twitter specifically for the platform’s openness.
Amazing move by Valve! A handheld PC/console hybrid running the SteamOS fork of Arch Linux, and it’s an open platform where users are free to install software or their choosing - including Windows and other stores. https://t.co/jf5TWUWGP5
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 15, 2021
The hardware is very powerful for its target resolution of 1280x800. In fact, programmer and modder Peter ‘Durante’ Thomas likened it to an Xbox Series X in ‘performance per pixel’ (via RobotBrush).
If one of your favorite games is among those titles that suffer from significant overhead on Proton, you could always opt to install Windows on the Steam Deck.
• The CPU is basically half a XSX/PS5, with slightly lower clock.
• 16 GB of RAM (really neat), 4x Switch, same capacity as PS5
Obviously there will be a bit of overhead (varying from basically nothing or even better performance to significant overhead) for running games on Proton compared to Windows, but this is the performance you should expect.
Last but not least, Valve founder Gabe Newell also commented on the upcoming handheld system. Newell stressed that it was hard but critical for Valve to maintain a low price point to sell millions of it.
Are you interested in getting a Steam Deck? If so, which configuration do you prefer? Let us know in the comments!
Our view is, if we’re doing this right, that we’re going to be selling these in millions of units and it’s clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in and that’s going to have long-term benefits for us.
