Valve introduces Steam Deck

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Dr. Geronimo said:
I get the obvious comparisons to the switch, but never understood it being a switch killer since the switch is already a massive success. Hell the switch already wins just by virtue of being the only system I ever see in stores.

Gaben also came out and said that the 512GB version was the one that sold the most, showing that it was enthusiast demand pushing this thing the most.

Personally I couldn't see myself spending 650 on a handheld. I'm still salty at myself for spending 500 on my 3070. I got the cheapest version but so wish there was a $450 128GB version.
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Comparing both the Deck and the Switch is pointless because both systems are aimed at completely different audiences. The Deck is aimed at people that are enthusiast PC gamers that already have a Steam library, to retro enthusiast that want to load a bunch of emulators on to it and Linux enthusiast that want to play and tinker with a new Linux devise. The Switch is aimed at life long Nintendo fans, Joe average console gamers and children. There is barely any overlap between both demographics, perhaps there being the "handheld" enthusiast that buys anything and everything that is a portable devise.

The thing is a lot of people still fail to realize is that the Deck is not just a game handheld, you are getting a more than capable PC with a Zen 2 CPU with 4 core/8 threads @ 2.4-3.5GHz, a GPU of 8 RDNA2 Compute Units @ 1.0-1.6GHz and 16GB LPDDR5 RAM. Plug a mouse/keyboard and monitor, quit to the KDE Plasma desktop environment and now you have a PC starting at $400. That's a heck of a deal in today's market.
 
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So honestly I haven't looked into this thing at all until my friend asked me today if I was going to get one. I was like "What?" and looked into it.

Are people actually impressed by these specs enough to spend $650? At least have the self respect to buy the cheap model and replace the extremely overpriced storage yourself for less.
Belvedere said:
Plug a mouse/keyboard and monitor, quit to the KDE Plasma desktop environment and now you have a PC starting at $400.
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Talk about some low standards. I'd really like to see how anybody is going to enjoy using a keyboard/mouse on a 7" screen.
 
ZMOT said:
in theory linux should be even more idiot-proof than windows (in some cases it already is)
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in practice, idiots take one look at linux and cry themselves to sleep in the corner of their room.

Even simple shit like "./configure, make, sudo make install" makes them pee their pants.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
Are people actually impressed by these specs enough to spend $650? At least have the self respect to buy the cheap model and replace the extremely overpriced storage yourself for less.
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Replacing the internal storage is a completely viable option, but it is not a something everyone would want to do if they are concerned about opening the Deck. Tests have shown that using external SD cards offer small to negligible increase in load times so that is the simplest option to increase storage space. Valve also made the SD Card slot in the Deck hot swappable.

Just Some Other Guy said:
Talk about some low standards. I'd really like to see how anybody is going to enjoy using a keyboard/mouse on a 7" screen.
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Did you miss the part where I clearly stated that you can plug an external monitor to it?

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The Deck is a PC, it has an USB-C port, you can plug any off-the-shelf USB-C hub to it and add any peripheral that's compatible with a PC.

Valve it going to make a custom USB-C dock for it in the future precisely because that is an use case.

Deck Dock.jpg
 
Belvedere said:
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The Deck is a PC, it has an USB-C port, you can plug any off-the-shelf USB-C hub to it and add any peripheral that's compatible with a PC.

Valve it going to make a custom USB-C dock it in the future precisely because that is an use case.
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I did miss that part, yeah. My bad. However driving a monitor off hardware like that isn't going to be a great experience, and you'd be better served from a laptop that is much beefier for not much more money. Maybe for some general PC stuff, but idk.

It only makes sense in some situation where you always need the handheld portability. Trying to make it into something it isn't is just a bad idea, money wise.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
I did miss that part, yeah. My bad. However driving a monitor off hardware like that isn't going to be a great experience, and you'd be better served from a laptop that is much beefier for not much more money. Maybe for some general PC stuff, but idk.

It only makes sense in some situation where you always need the handheld portability. Trying to make it into something it isn't is just a bad idea, money wise.
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Whether or not is a bad experience is entirely dependent on the end user choices, sure it is not going to be great if it is plugged to a 4K monitor running at its native resolution and trying to run Doom Eternal on Ultra. If instead you are realistic about it and play titles with system requirements that are well within the recommended specs of what the Deck could do at 1080p then you are going to have a good experience.

As with any mobile hardware, expectations have to be realistic but considering what's being offered here at the price range it is being offered, it is very appealing. Linus already showed that there is nothing within the price range of the Deck that can compete with it and offer that level of performance either being other handheld PCs or laptops.

Think about it, if playing PC games on-the-go is the goal here, this form factor is far more practical than a laptop.
 
Belvedere said:
Whether or not is a bad experience is entirely dependent on the end user choices, sure it is not going to be great if it is plugged to a 4K monitor running at its native resolution and trying to run Doom Eternal on Ultra. If instead you are realistic about it and play titles with system requirements that are well within the recommended specs of what the Deck could do at 1080p then you are going to have a good experience.

As with any mobile hardware, expectations have to be realistic but considering what's being offered here at the price range it is being offered, it is very appealing. Linus already showed that there is nothing within the price range of the Deck that can compete with it and offer that level of performance either being other handheld PCs or laptops.

Think about it, if playing PC games on-the-go is the goal here, this form factor is far more practical than a laptop.
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As said, only for being a handheld portable. He was thinking about getting one just so he could play games in another room of the house. At that point I'd say no, laptops are going to work better. Nowadays you can get a 3060 laptop for $1000.

I guess chalk it up a bit to sticker shock. $650 for a handheld with that low of a spec is just...wow. But you are right that well, it's pretty much all you get as far as handhelds are concerned.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
As said, only for being a handheld portable. He was thinking about getting one just so he could play games in another room of the house. At that point I'd say no, laptops are going to work better. Nowadays you can get a 3060 laptop for $1000.

I guess chalk it up a bit to sticker shock. $650 for a handheld with that low of a spec is just...wow. But you are right that well, it's pretty much all you get as far as handhelds are concerned.
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The Steam Deck isn't that low spec for $650. A quick look at amazon for laptops with 16gb ram shows a price range from ($400 - $2000) where the cheapest come with 2 core CPUs and the same, slow emmc flash storage. In the 500-650 range for laptops on the AMD side, they seem to come with 5500, 5500u, 3050u APUs, all of which I believe have inferior integrated GPU cores since the Steam Deck has the 8 rdna cores that seem to be better than the vega stuff in laptop APUs. In this crazy world where desktop GPUs are hard to get and easily 3x msrp, I think the Deck is priced fairly.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
As said, only for being a handheld portable. He was thinking about getting one just so he could play games in another room of the house. At that point I'd say no, laptops are going to work better. Nowadays you can get a 3060 laptop for $1000.

I guess chalk it up a bit to sticker shock. $650 for a handheld with that low of a spec is just...wow. But you are right that well, it's pretty much all you get as far as handhelds are concerned.
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Aside from raw cost, there’s other reasons to go laptop vs handheld. There’s a decent number of games that I specifically chose to get on Switch instead of Steam, because anything that isn’t a 3D first/third person game I genuinely prefer playing on a handheld vs. mouse/keyboard.
 
Gar For Archer said:
Aside from raw cost, there’s other reasons to go laptop vs handheld. There’s a decent number of games that I specifically chose to get on Switch instead of Steam, because anything that isn’t a 3D first/third person game I genuinely prefer playing on a handheld vs. mouse/keyboard.
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I thought we were already past the damn laptop comparison? Some people don't want to fuck around with controllers and shit when playing out of the house.

Also, as always, some italian or spaniard (I don't know they aren't speaking american) is doing the real dirty work of actually showcasing games in more than 30 second bullshit clips. The general performance of the machine is equal to or even slightly surpassing my expections
Basically, if the devs gave the tiniest fuck about optimisation you're great.
 
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SSF2T Old User said:
in practice, idiots take one look at linux and cry themselves to sleep in the corner of their room.

Even simple shit like "./configure, make, sudo make install" makes them pee their pants.
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Dude there's a significant number of people out there who don't understand GUI filesystems, like, even just being able to understand how folders are nested on any OS looks like some l33t hacker shit to them. And GUIs were designed to make the computer significantly easier to use than the command line, because just about nothing you said is intrinsically understandable in the same way as "double click the folder twice and it opens". Even I don't exactly know what exactly running ./configure, make, sudo make install does. Is configure an application? Is make an application? Why do you need to explicitly specify that it needs to run in the current directory with ./? That's what ./ means, right? Why do you need superuser permissions for it? Why are superuser privileges invoked with sudo, a contraction of "super user do"?

I'm not trying to be a dick or anything, but it's very easy to forget that even simple commands mean absolutely nothing to anyone whose never been exposed to them before. (and I really don't know what that example command you said does, I'm guessing you're installing a compiler?)
 
Pissmaster said:
(and I really don't know what that example command you said does, I'm guessing you're installing a compiler?)
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Those commands are used when you're building a program from the source code.

If unfortunately your linux distro doesn't have the app to install on package manager/store, the program in question doesn't have an AppImage (the .exe equivalent in the linux world), or you refuse to use things like SNAP, then building from source is the only other way to install programs on your distro. First you'd have to "clone" (a.k.a. download) the folder from wherever the program is available (most of the time it's on a github), then open up a terminal to change the directory to the folder you just downloaded after you unzipped it (some programs have a serpate build folder inside the program folder that they ask you to change the directory to instead of the main folder). ./configure (or sometimes ./config) opens up the configure file and checks to make sure that you have the required libraries/dependencies to run/install the program (sometimes they give you an option to customize config to whatever settings you want). Make starts building from the source folder itself, and then sudo make install gives the program admin privileges to install it onto your computer (like how windows sometimes asks for admin privileges to install software onto it)
 
Some gamecube emulation on Dolphin. Unsurprisingly runs fine and based on the power draw should be getting ~5h playtime on battery. Looks like there is some jank with the GUI and how it interacts with the steam OS but you'd think the Dolphin devs will fix that fairly quickly.
 
And the age old question remains:

But can it run Crysis? (Remastered)
It sure can, 1280x800 - Medium settings - 60FPS

It is interesting to point out that Crysis Remastered lists the 1050 Ti as the minimum system requirement for it, which is curious because Digital Foundry found that the performance of the Deck running games at 720p is comparable to the performance of a 1050 Ti running the same game at 1080p. So take that as a frame of reference of what to expect of it.
 
Car Won't Crank said:
The mask nonsense is a turnoff. Valve didn't need to do this marketing stunt on an already interesting device even if Gabe were personally delivering them.
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I guess it's to placate all the Jim Sterlings of the world, who already have Valve on their shitlist for allowing almost anything on Steam.
 
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