Yep, the Steam handheld is a thing

Yeah, it's probably fine at the internal screen res of 720p, but that's not what I was talking about. In order to be a reasonable docked device, it's needs to at least do 1080p well. Nice you have faith in FSR, but as of now it's really not very competitive with DLSS, and I'm pretty sure they could have stuffed an Nvidia chip inside that monster.

I just can't shake the feeling that this is going to be a hugely uncomfortable handheld with lousy battery life that no one will enjoy using, and it's too underpowered to really be useful as a docked PC replacement.

@frytup: For what its worth, I have a two or three gen old apu on my living room PC. Mostly that is a streaming box but I have found I can generally play two or three year old games at 1080p at medium-high settings. If amd-dlss is "good enough" then getting "reasonable" visuals on modern TVs seem reasonable and I suspect it will be comparable to console vs PC before this generation... but swapping them.

That being said: I would assume the idea would be more to stream from a beefy PC at that point... but also there is no need for a dedicated streaming hardware for that because basically everything can run the steam streaming app these days.

Nvidia has no SoC that would be suitable for this because they don't have an x86 license. An Nvidia device would mean pairing a discrete Nvidia GPU with an AMD/Intel CPU, and that might hurt the cost, thermals, and battery life in a prohibitive way.

I reserved one. Really excited about it but I'm also a lunatic that used the Steam Controller and Steam Link to play a lot of PC-centric stuff (mostly CRPG and Strategy stuff) and also isn't all that interested at being secluded in my office room nowadays and would rather be on the couch with the family playing Crusader Kings or whatever.

I think its too expensive, but I'm glad they did it. I especially think its funny they announced it on the same day the OLED Switch pre-orders arrived, since it didn't turn out to be the Pro version people were looking for. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo now works on one because of the Stream handheld showing them up, or if Nintendo still thinks they're special and don't have to keep up with the trends.

In the video posted below, Valve pretty much states that they plan on getting Battleye and EAC compatibility working by the time the Steam Deck launches, which means that games like Rainbow Six Siege and Halo MCC would work on it.

...if that comes to pass, anyway, Valve works on Valve Time and no one else's time. They've been talking about this very feature for some time now and it hasn't happened, so I wouldn't hold my breath, but I suppose it's good to know that there's someone involved with the development of Proton and/or Steam Deck that's at least thinking about anti-cheat issues.

@justin258: I see, maybe the release will mobilize some of the other people working there to get on the Steam Deck team and push towards that stuff? I know Valve's internal structure is based on what people want to work on, so I would imagine that having the device out in the open and in people's hands might incentivize more people to really work on getting it done instead of just a vague "sometime in the future". Maybe. It's Valve and all.

I really hope this thing does well and delivers. Like many people here have pointed, the ultimate test will be Valves motivation to support this system longterm. Steamdeck seems to be lightyears ahead of Switch with the hardware, but Switch is still the machine to play Nintendo IP sfuff. Another important aspect is, Switch games are not always performing great but if you buy stuff for Switch you know that you can play the game without needing to modify .ini files, battle with OS compability, driver support, ect all the fun pc stuff. The thing I'm trying to say is that especially with portable device the UX has to be fast and reliable. Switch might not have any media apps or even bluetooth headset support, but what is does have is quite sleek UX that works and is easy to enjoy for short bursts of time. I hope Valve will deliver with the UX stuff.

I've already got a switch and a computer. I don't see the need for me personally

I'm super tempted to pick this up because there are so many AAA and lower games I didn't get to play that I don't have the console for and can't run on my old Mac. Plus the 3DS and Switch have reaffirmed my absolute love for handheld gaming. The ability to wake up in the morning and run through some Mario 3D World without going downstairs and plugging in the dock is heaven.

But on the other hand, my biggest problem with PC gaming is fussing with everything to make sure it works, and I'm already hearing some games won't work right out of the box. Plus my backlog is so large and will only get larger when my brother decides to upgrade to the PS5 and gives me his PS4. I'm not sure I can justify picking up another console right now, especially with no steady job at the moment.

I'm glad you brought up Halo MCC because it relates to a big question I have. I've never messed with Linux or SteamOS before. If I go to a store page on Steam and don't see Linux system requirements at the bottom OR if I search for a game with the SteamOS/Linux filter on and can't find it, can I assume the game will not work on SteamOS? Or is that more like a "you might find a way to make it work but it's not supported and we're not going to help you" kind of thing?

Halo MCC doesn't have linux system requirements as well as most of the games I've been playing lately. I don't think I would get one of these anyway but this might be a huge future bummer for people who order one and expect it to play anything on Steam.

@mobiusfun:

I think the proton db is a better indication of if it will work on the steam deck. On that halo mcc is listed as gold which means it works. Here's the link for reference

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Halo

That's my understanding anyway perhaps someone else will chime in if it's wrong

Cheers

@mobiusfun: The problem you are going to have with MCC is the easy anti cheat, which Valve are working on supporting in the future versions of Proton. Proton is the thing that is going to make Windows games "just work". But from the sounds of people who actually game on Linux, Windows support is much better then it was, but is still not going to work as well as native Windows. I assume in the future Steam will list how supported a game is with Proton and Steam Deck, just like they list partial controller support or full.

@lego_my_eggo: @fatback64: Thanks, that's reassuring.

My main concern is SteamOS 3.0 and Proton support, and just how convenient will it be to manage on a daily/weekly basis for the average user.

I'm very excited to see what people think in Q1 2022.

EDIT: TL;DR most of your Steam library, especially single-player games, will probably work just fine on the Steam deck without you having to worry about what operating system is running underneath. Those occasions where games don't work fine are what I'm most critical of when it comes to Valve's discussion about this thing - I imagine most users are going to be real disappointed at least once when they spend money on something and find it doesn't work on their Steam Deck. Double-check the website ProtonDB to see if something you want to play works on Linux or not.

/EDIT, and original post below.

OK, so, a few years ago Valve released something called Proton. Proton uses a few open source projects to get Windows games running on Linux - primarily, DXVK and Wine. It's essentially a program that sits between your game and Linux and translates all the Windows stuff to Linux stuff and back again. If the game needs to talk to Windows, it talks to Proton, and Proton talks to Linux, and Linux talks to Proton, and Proton talks to the game, and back and forth and back and forth.

Generally, this works quite well in 2021. I have to go into Steam's settings and turn this on to allow it, but once I do I can install any game and, aside from a short quip from Steam about how it has to use a Proton compatibility layer, run it just as I'm running it from Windows. No fuss. No funny business. No "it's easy for a tech guy but hard for everyone else" nonsense. If you can download and run Steam games on Windows, you can download and run Steam games on Linux.

...about 90% of the time. I just pulled that statistic out of my ass, sure, but you get what I mean.

Getting that last 10% to work as well as the other 90% has proven difficult. Some of the games that don't work, or don't work well, require some tweaks to get going. This usually involves finding a user-made version of Proton and telling Steam to use that - Glorious Egg Roll is the name of a common one suggested by users. Sometimes, a game has a Linux version but it's actually best to get the Windows version downloaded - that one's pretty simple but if you have no idea what's actually happening here, you'd have no idea what to even look for.

Most commonly, though, some form of DRM or anti-cheat prevents a game from running, and that's what Valve is trying to tackle now - if they can figure out how to get DRM and/or anti-cheat measures working, they can get a lot of multiplayer games working that currently don't work. Rainbow Six: Siege is a major one. Halo: MCC is another big one.

I wouldn't bank on this happening by launch regardless of what Valve says.Seriously, I don't doubt Valve's technical brilliance or the depths of their pockets but they've been talking about this since Proton really started going and it hasn't happened yet and no one really knows what the hold up is.

That said, I would bank on the Steam Deck being an exceptional device for playing single player games of all types. Games like Control, Star Wars Fallen Order, and Cyberpunk 2077 are not games I would expect to be playing on this thing, despite the Steam Deck showing those in all sorts of menus, but I would expect pretty much everything up to 2017, 2018-ish to run well on this thing provided it already works on Linux. If you want to play Doom 2016 on the go, CS: GO with friends, Subnautica, Civilization, Divinity: Original Sin, Grand Theft Auto V, Skyrim, Frostpunk, things in that ballpark? Yeah, you can do that without a problem.

You can check a website called ProtonDB to see if something is going to run on your system.

If you want your GOG collection to work on Linux, you're going to have to start messing with Lutris and that is a whole other ball of wax that I wouldn't recommend to someone who isn't willing to go digging around for how-to's and resolutions and parsing answers from the Linux community. I've done it, it's not rocket science, but also maybe not the easiest and simplest thing in the world.

@justin258: I appreciate the explanation, thank you!

Scalpers are never going to let you have this for Mass Retail Price.

@robertforster: Hopefully the restriction Valve put in place of having to have purchased something on Steam before June for the first 48 hours of pre-orders put a big dent in scalpers. That should be enough time for anyone interested to drop a refundable $5 on one just to be safe. But i don't know if demand is going to be high enough for basically a hand held laptop that people are going to drop the same amount of cash as they where for the limited PS5/Series X, where the games and features are more tied to that specific hardware unlike PC/Steam Deck. I never got why Sony and Microsoft never used all the data in a persons profile to see that an account was active and real and sell more directly to there fans, other then potentially keeping retailers happy and some free publicity.

This is extremely not that product. It's a fantastic product and is an affordable way to play PC games but it certainly isn't going to require less "technical know-how" to play games on a Linux distro compared to playing on a Windows PC. It's going to be very simple most of the time thanks to the strides made with Proton but the same is true with almost all modern games on Windows. 99% of the time if a game is finicky on Windows you can bet it's going to be finicky on this thing and there are going to be more cases of having to make tweaks on this when none are required on Windows.

Not trying to be a downer because I agree it's looking like a fantastic product but if the barrier is somehow still thinking PC gaming is scary and unknown in 2021 then this isn't the product to solve that.

Regarding Proton, should probably also add that it may come with a performance hit when you are basically cheating the game into thinking that it's running on Windows. On a powerful desktop it's a negligible hit, like maybe your game runs at 80fps instead 90fps, but this isn't a powerful desktop. Some folks will undoubtedly install actual Windows on the first thing they do, but Windows will then presumable take more RAM and drive space and I'm not at all confident that Microsoft has good drivers for this niche product so you may also be getting crashes and weird stuff happening.

Is this really how some people want to play PC games?

That that part that just does not appeal to me, how is this betterthan a laptop that will have a much bigger screen that you pair with a Xbox controller in your bag? What is ist about this form"switch" factor that makes this a better idea than a laptop or even a purpose built gaming device in another form?

So, what stops a company like GDP form using these new chips from AMD? Linus Tech Tips reviewed the early prototype model of GDP Win Max last year (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9ByWPqYtc).

The GDP shows that there is just as reasonable setups that allow for bigger screens and are still portable. Moreover something like the Win Max can be used as a computer more naturally too.

@monkeyking1969: With the vita form factor I can just take it out of my bag, play a bit, and toss it back in when I reach my stop or whatever. With a laptop I need to take out the laptop, balance that on my knees or a tray, pair the controller, and then play

The clamshell form factor has a LOT of issues in terms of balance. If you think the steam link is chonky then that is chonky AND unbalanced. Usually pretty top heavy and uncomfrotable.

But yeah, there is nothing stopping gdp or aya from getting the same hardware. And that is a good thing. Because this isn't a closed garden. This is to make people more comfortable with the idea of just playing with a gaming form factor laptop on the go. Which benefits Valve (and MS) a lot.

@robertforster: But... there's a queue system in place. Scalpers can't stop me from getting it for retail price. I'm scheduled for Q2 next year. I have no certainty that I will be able to get a PS5 in that time frame at retail price. (I have a Series S, so no need for me to look for an Xbox)

So, some gaming and tech sites other than IGN got invites to check out the hardware. But I'm going to point out LTT's coverage since Linus gave us a clue as to what this thing can actually do.

He did some benching with Doom Eternal at 7:30 of the video: Native resolution (1280 x 800), at the medium settings preset: He says around 40 frames with dips to 20. The performance metrics weren't allowed to be shown.

Me getting to the same location on my 15" Surface Book 2 (16GBs RAM, i7-8650U, GTX 1060) with the same medium preset and resolution: Between 70 and 90 in the outside area, and in the 100's inside buildings.

Gallery

Sure, my quick comparison is between matured hardware, software and drivers while the Steam Deck is still in development and only using one game. But as someone who is trying to make a purchasing decision and really wants to know what this thing can actually do, I can't help being disappointed by the Steam Deck at this point assuming that other games in my library will follow a similar performance trend.

@facelessvixen: at about 9:00 in that video, Linus says that he put it on Medium, tweaked a few other things, turned off dynamic resolution, and ran it at 1280x800 - its native res - and he says it's pretty smooth. Valve had it defaulted to native res, High settings, dynamic resolution. I saw the rest of that video earlier today and they seemed pretty positive on it and its performance in general. That this thing seems to be running Control reasonably well, certainly better than a base PS4, is pretty mind-blowing. I remember being a kid and thinking that Metroid Fusion was an amazing thing to hold in my hand, and being floored at the idea of playing Skyrim in my hands when that came out on the Switch.

In a more general sense...

I still stand by most of what I said in this thread earlier - this thing is going to great for anything up to 2017, 2018-ish and for indie games but for AAA games past that you're going to have to make a lot of compromises. It's still going to be a better experience than the Switch most of the time. And I still wouldn't bank on the Steam Deck being 100% as easy as a console - it's a PC running Linux and playing games through Proton, at some point you're going to have to fiddle with something, whether it's a config file or a user-made version of Proton or whatever. And anything outside of your Steam library will be an entirely different story altogether.

I really want to see how this thing holds up when it's running games on Windows. SteamOS is almost certainly stripped down to only run what it needs to run, whereas Windows is a beefy bastard of an operating system that always takes up as much as it can.

EDIT: For the record, I did reserve one soon after it was announced and I think I will wind up paying it all off and getting it - the 512GB version. I rarely play games handheld anymore but having a gaming PC that I can just dock and hook up to any TV, anywhere, and go sounds goddamn amazing, even if it does wind up sitting under my living room TV 24/7.

@facelessvixen: Now I wonder how will other shooter games' playability and performance be going to be like on Steam Deck?

Probably it will be good but for me, I'm not used to shooters on handhelds compared to keyboard & mouse or gamepads.

I love the idea of this, however, I think I've come to the conclusion that I just won't like the idea of a portable device that outputs at 40 fps, for the cost of a Series X. It'll be a hard sell, I think, unless Steam OS functionality really goes above and beyond expectations.

For portable device this is a monster.

I would definetly not play games like control or doom that are meant to be played in front of monitor.

The amount of indy games on steam is crazy to enjoy on the deck, and the emulation possibilites are endles.