Valve Steam Deck • Hacker News Board

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#71

Post by mojzu » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

seneca wrote: post #16

Valve has a pretty bad track record with hardware, do they not? I'm not very aware of this industry, but the vague impress I have is that they've tried this a couple of different ways and it hasn't gone well for them. I'm curious why they would make this play again.

Happy index/steam controller customer here, had to RMA one of the index controllers for a weird resetting issue but they handled that really well so I feel I’ve got my money’s worth. I may be biased though because valve is actually the company I have been a customer of the longest in my life

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#72

Post by goda90 » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #44

There’s obviously a lot of people who like playing games in a more mobile format, as evidenced by the huge popularity of the Switch Lite / mobile gaming. Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move. But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution. I guess the question becom…

The Shield was Android with GameStream. This will run games directly on x86 Linux which, with all their Proton work, will result in a much bigger game library out of the box. There have been more niche handheld x86 devices, but they were even more money, and different form factors. Steam being as big as it is, I think this has way more potential than anything done before.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#73

Post by Vaslo » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

Hope there are enough chips to support this in today's supply chain mayhem...

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#74

Post by wayoutthere » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #44

There’s obviously a lot of people who like playing games in a more mobile format, as evidenced by the huge popularity of the Switch Lite / mobile gaming. Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move. But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution. I guess the question becom…

This is different than the NVidia Shield handheld in that hardware has come a loooong way since 2013 and it’s actually possible to run modern AAA games at 1200x800 using what is effectively a mobile chipset. No streaming from a PC required.

If I played more games I would absolutely buy one of these. I already own the NVidia Shield that plugs into your TV because it’s a great streaming box even if you ignore the gaming aspect.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#75

Post by lemoncookiechip » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

The resolution, the weight, the battery life and potentially the cooling are all sub-par. There's also the fact that this can't compete with the Switch due to the simple fact that games are optimized to run at a stable framerate by the developers or subcontracted companies for the Switch, while this will just run games from Steam at a low-res and hope for the best.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#76

Post by legitster » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

As a long-time user of Big Picture Mode, I am pretty skeptical how happy I would be long term with one of these. When it comes to things like basic controller support or options for unusual resolutions, it's still the wild west in the Steam library.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#77

Post by timw4mail » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #54

This looks like it will trounce the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo doesn't even have new hardware in the pipeline other than an iterative OLED screen. Now that Nintendo depends on a single portable console, is there a risk that they'll go the way of Sega?

I wouldn't count on the Switch going anywhere. PC gaming is a fairly small market compared to consoles these days.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#78

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

vbernat wrote: post #35

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech > Operating System: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based) > Desktop: KDE Plasma This is sure to excite the Linux community.

And they switched from Debian to Arch. Can't say I don't understand them, but I would have thought there would have been better bases than a rolling distribution (Gentoo, NixOS, Fedora).

I find that odd too, but in my recent experience, Manjaro has been the best Linux experience I've had since Ubuntu 14.04. Just install and everything works. Although Gnome was a bit of a hassle, xfce and Cinnamon run beautifully.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#79

Post by hobofan » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

I know giving predictions against Nintendo is always a bit of a gamble due to their strong 1st party IPs, but with the announcement of the Switch OLED (and with that basically killing the hope for a Switch Pro), they might have seriously bungled it.

At least for me, I know when my Switch finally kicks the bucket (and maybe even before then) I'll seriously consider a Steam Deck instead. I've been using my Switch almost exclusively for indie games, and even though there is quite the selection of them for the Switch I could have played basically all of the indie games earlier (and then some) if would have had access to my Steam catalog. So unless you really want Nintendo's 1st party (expensive, never-dropping-in-price) games, this really looks to be a no brainer.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#80

Post by tyingq » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

Pretty nice specs for a handheld battery powered device...

  Processor AMD APU
    CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
    GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
    APU power: 4-15W

  RAM 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s)

  Storage
    64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
    256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
    512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
    All models include high-speed microSD card slot

Though it does weigh 669 grams (~1.5lbs).

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech