In the summer of 2021, Valve introduced the Steam Deck, a mini-computer for handheld gaming, setting its sights on the tens of thousands of titles in Steam’s library. The recipe for it includes a system chip signed by AMD, equipped with four Zen 2 cores and 8 CU RDNA 2, and finally a new version of the Linux-based Steam operating system with the Proton compatibility layer.
As hardware specs are all about it, the Steam Deck isn’t a performance monster. The focus is on achieving a smooth gaming experience, which is possible with the help of tools like a locked frame rate and reduced graphics settings. Plus, the bar is set at 30fps—far from the PC gold standard at 60fps. Despite this, Valve has a more cautious approach regarding future changes to hardware specs.
Right now, the fact that all Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one goal for users to understand what kind of level of performance they can expect when playing and for developers to understand what to aim for… there’s a lot of value in having that one specification. […] I think we’ll choose to hold that one level of performance for a little bit longer, and only look at changing the level of performance when there’s a significant gain to be made. – Pierre-Loup Griffis
Having Khalifa on the map is already excellent. In an interview with the edge Design directors Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais explain that changing hardware specifications should be worth it. Lifting performance they wait for it to mean a bigger step, rather than doing it just for the sake of it. In addition, they believe that from a developer’s point of view, there is value in maintaining what the machine can handle uniformly. The two points they currently want to focus on for a successor are the screen and battery life.
The list of bugs grows as more people get on the Steam Deck and we get more feedback on things – and the feature list stays the same size because when we add features we get more features that we want to add based on our own experience and what we hear from customers. – Lawrence Yang
In terms of software, Yang believes that Steam Deck will likely not be placed in the “stable” category. Stable enough to provide an enjoyable gaming experience, but not like traditional consoles. Instead, he believes that as long as players are interested, they want to keep updating and experimenting, by improving what’s there and new functionality.
What do you want to see on the Steam Deck next?
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