Last week Valve announced the Steam Deck, their portable Zen-2-powered gaming PC that they promise will be able to run most games at 1280x800, although resolution doesn’t really mean that much on its own if you don’t know what type of performance the machine is targeting. Well, Valve recently let a few more details about the Steam Deck slip in a recent interview with IGN, and those hoping for glorious 60fps or unlocked portable gameplay are in for a disappointment. According to Steam Deck developer Pierre-Loup Griffais, achieving 30fps in games is their target (thanks to PC Gamer for the transcription).
800p isn’t a big deal to me, you’re playing on a small 7-inch screen, but the 30fps target is kind of a bummer. Obviously, the Steam Deck is a PC, so some games will run better than that, but I imagine that’s what you’ll be looking at for many newer games. Speaking of which, according to Griffais, Valve has tested numerous recent Steam games on the Deck, and haven’t found any that couldn’t hit that 30fps target…
For those who haven’t been keeping up, the Steam Deck runs on a custom AMD Van Gogh APU With Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU Cores and costs between $400 and $650 depending on how much internal storage you opt for.
The Steam Deck will begin shipping sometime in December. The system is already backordered well into 2022.
