Steam Deck – The next step in portable gaming

The Steam deck is Valve’s debut in the handheld gaming space and is a portable gaming PC that undertakes to let you play your entire Steam library on the fly.

It promises to be the most versatile entry in the portable gaming market to date. This is because it is more than just another tiny console – it’s a legitimate plug-and-play gaming PC. It brings the desktop PC’s customisability, like installing a different OS and using either a keyboard and mouse or a controller.

Steam Deck UI compared with the Steam desktop application.

Price, specs, performance, and release date

The price differs according to the variation that you want to buy:

• 64 GB version for $399 (R6,173) – includes a carrying case.
• 256 GB variant for $529 (R8,164) – includes faster storage, a carrying case, and an exclusive Steam Community profile bundle.
• 512 GB variant for $649 (R10,031) – includes the quickest storage, anti-glare etched glass, carrying case, an exclusive Steam Community profile bundle, and a virtual keyboard theme.

If you are concerned about the small storage space, you can buy a microSD card to increase the capacity.

The Steam Deck will run its games using AMD’s custom-designed Accelerated Processing Unit (APU).

Consequently, it combines Zen 2 architecture, found within Ryzen 3000 processors, with the RDNA 2 architecture used in current-gen consoles. This means the Steam Deck will comfortably run most games in your Steam library at 30 fps but can boost most titles to 60fps if you lower the graphical preset to medium or low.

The Steam Deck’s custom APU.

If you decide to play your games primarily in 30 fps, you can expect to see a longer battery life (about 5 – 6 hours) versus when you are pushing the machine’s performance (2 – 4 hours).

The operating system, SteamOS, is a Linux-based OS explicitly developed to run games built for Windows without any hassle. However, you can always scrap SteamOS and install Windows if you feel like it. This is, unfortunately, the only way you will be able to run Fortnite on the Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck will officially launch on 25 February 2022 but will not ship on the same day. Unfortunately, South Africa is not one of the countries on the shipping list – although it is uncertain if this will change after the chip shortage has blown over.

The following table summarises the specs of the Steam Deck, sourced from Valve:

Read: The Swift 7: The thinnest of the thin