Valve Announces Steam Deck As Portable SteamOS + AMD Powered Portable PC

[tildearrow]

A portable device that runs Linux and plays actual games?!

Let's go!!

[Quackdoc]

I find this highly dissapointing. don't get me wrong, the price to preformance is... fine. but that's it. Don't get me wrong, I know the challenges a thing like this faces. but this is a direct competitor to the nintendo switch, in more ways than one.

it looks like it targets 720p and maybe 1080 in some games which is fine, but that's it. just fine. I mean it will sell some consoles don't get me wrong but all in all IMO kind of disappointing. at least it should also work as a high performant android tablet when paired with qemu + android when virgl venus lands. But MAN it's just so medicore. AT LEAST they should have added thunderbolt support. if it had thunderbolt support or waited for usb 4.0 than it could have been amazing. but this? IMO just dissapointing.

[jaxa]

I find this highly dissapointing. don't get me wrong, the price to preformance is... fine. but that's it. Don't get me wrong, I know the challenges a thing like this faces. but this is a direct competitor to the nintendo switch, in more ways than one.

it looks like it targets 720p and maybe 1080 in some games which is fine, but that's it. just fine. I mean it will sell some consoles don't get me wrong but all in all IMO kind of disappointing. at least it should also work as a high performant android tablet when paired with qemu + android when virgl venus lands. But MAN it's just so medicore. AT LEAST they should have added thunderbolt support. if it had thunderbolt support or waited for usb 4.0 than it could have been amazing. but this? IMO just dissapointing.

That's all you need in a handheld. Resolution above 720p is not crucial, and battery life is a top concern. This appears to have peak graphics performance in the ballpark of a 5600G. Some newer games like Cyberpunk 2077 won't run that well on it, but for those you could use a game streaming option. Using it docked may be good enough for some 1080p gaming, which is the resolution the majority (68%) of Steam users still use according to the survey.

It would have been nice if Van Gogh was stuffed with lots of low-clocked CUs for higher performance, but it was not meant to be.

Next year's Rembrandt APUs will have USB 4.0, 6-8 core options, and better graphics performance. Some of Steam Deck's Chinese competitors like the GPD Win, AYA NEO, or ONEXPLAYER could adopt those APUs.

I assume you want Thunderbolt/USB 4.0 support for using an external GPU. Do many people actually do that?

[Ananace]

Nice touch by Valve.

I love the URL for that picture; https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.c...assic-park.jpg

[Quackdoc]

That's all you need in a handheld. Resolution above 720p is not crucial, and battery life is a top concern. This appears to have peak graphics performance in the ballpark of a 5600G. Some newer games like Cyberpunk 2077 won't run that well on it, but for those you could use a game streaming option. Using it docked may be good enough for some 1080p gaming, which is the resolution the majority (68%) of Steam users still use according to the survey.

It would have been nice if Van Gogh was stuffed with lots of low-clocked CUs for higher performance, but it was not meant to be.

Next year's Rembrandt APUs will have USB 4.0, 6-8 core options, and better graphics performance. Some of Steam Deck's Chinese competitors like the GPD Win, AYA NEO, or ONEXPLAYER could adopt those APUs.

I assume you want Thunderbolt/USB 4.0 support for using an external GPU. Do many people actually do that?

Its not just a handheld though, it is a steam DECK. and will becoming with an official dock. it also needs to compete on the TV to be competitive to the switch. overall I don't see anyone looking at this and choosing this over the switch. don't get me wrong, as I said, I think this has a market. it's just the market for it is so much smaller than what it could have been. this is only a good buy for people who want a good portable experience that isn't a laptop, and already have a sizeable PC library, (whether free or not, doesn't matter). whereas on the switch its good in portable, good enough in docked mode, even on a 4k TV. has good exclusive games (discounting emulation for now though as it's not yet ready to be a considerable alternative).

They could have made it more than it is. and I find that dissapointing

[jaxa]

Its not just a handheld though, it is a steam DECK. and will becoming with an official dock. it also needs to compete on the TV to be competitive to the switch. overall I don't see anyone looking at this and choosing this over the switch. don't get me wrong, as I said, I think this has a market. it's just the market for it is so much smaller than what it could have been. this is only a good buy for people who want a good portable experience that isn't a laptop, and already have a sizeable PC library, (whether free or not, doesn't matter). whereas on the switch its good in portable, good enough in docked mode, even on a 4k TV. has good exclusive games (discounting emulation for now though as it's not yet ready to be a considerable alternative).

They could have made it more than it is. and I find that dissapointing

It has DisplayPort over USB-C and supports 4K @ 120 Hz and even 8K @ 60 Hz output (using DSC, 4K @ 60 Hz without DSC). It will work with TVs even without the official dock.

The Nintendo Switch has far weaker graphics in portable or docked mode. I have to check the numbers but... maybe this will emulate Switch games as well as the Switch can play them?

[d3coder]

Isn't Valve also funding the KWin fork?

Afaik they fund whole stack, from kernel and drivers, middleware(Qt, Wine, libs), to end user software and desktop environment.(KDE)

[mazumoto]

The Display ...
it's ...
no it cannot be.

but they say it's ...
16:10.

...

Impossible. For gaming. Where people use 21:9 or worse. And this thing is 16:10.
And I can't get 16:10 monitors for work.

The world is broken.

(but nice device, Valve!)

[levifig]

Gamers kids now can drop in chat and go "btw i use arch"… 😏

[kiffmet]

I am confident that the GPU performance will be better than expected thanks to the LPDDR5 RAM (yes, it's dual channel, ~51GiB/s total bandwidth but with more granular memory access, so it's roughly equivalent to ~DDR4 3200), DCC and RDNA2's IPC bump compared to a beefed up GCN5 (4000/5000 series APUs). With working NGG, especially geometry heavy games should see a nice bump (this was GCN's greatest weakness next to machine latency and utilization issues). Sure, many people have hoped for more CUs but then the console would be bandwidth limited which nullified the gains.

I think the software base is well chosen. Always having a recent kernel and graphics driver is a must for a dedicated gaming system. Rolling release also allows for fast distribution of bug fixes and feature updates. Maybe the console will also support fwupd? Via the AUR, there is a comfortable way for the community and modders to quickly bring their own creations/homebrew to the console.

The choice of KDE is a pleasant surprise and also understandable, as KDE is ahead in software maturity compared to GNOME (Phosh) when it comes to mobile usage. There is a possibility that the Steam Deck will use Gamescope, since it's based on the SteamOS compositor and extends it with a lot of neat features, including nested usage, integer scaling, low latency via avoiding copies and and optional compositor level fps limit + vsync. This doesn't exclude Wayland as a possibility (it's well usable since Plasma 5.22 and Valve isn't hesitant to put in some elbow grease, should it be necessary) What would be absolutely nice to have, but likely won't come is Adaptive Sync on the integrated screen. Otherwise this would have been in the marketing material already. The USB-C is capable of full DP-1.4 and HDMI 2.0 however, so being able to use it when docked is very likely.

It has been said that Valve was working directly with DRM and anti-cheat devs a while ago, but the announcement of this new console came with the first official confirmation that this effort will actually bear fruits. I am super stoked about this and I hope that the console will be successful. Linux becoming a serious gaming platform is now a realistic possibility, especially since the enhancements on the software side will benefit the opensource community and eventually every Linux user.

Maybe Valve can now get the game devs to directly target Proton (Windows compatibility would be a free "side effect" when thinking about it this way) or to at least evaluate their games for it. Even if not, Valve did a superb job supporting the games on their own and they are capable of maintaining this momentum. 75% of the top 1000 games already being supported in Proton is a good starting point IMO.

2022 might not become the year of the Linux desktop, but maybe the year of the Linux gamer