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Valve Steam Deck

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Re: Valve Steam Deck

#371
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…

It's interesting timing because the Switch Oled edition was just announced with no bump in power. So if you want a capable handheld with access too all the indies which will play games much better than your switch... here you go. And you can still keep your switch for nintendo exclusives because they've just made it clear that they're not upgrading the switch in a worthwhile way for at least a year. I would say this…

> I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.

PC gamers and steam gamers are often very different markets. Nintendo, for decades now, was about fun, not power. I'm casual gamer, just for fun, and steam deck, while super cool, is certainly not going to replacement my switch.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#372
post #262

And so, this is what Proton was for. Hope this is a success, as the success of Linux as a gaming platform is strictly linked to the success of this. It does look very appealing: it could become a Switch with the whole PC library available. Damn cool.

" PC library available" That's the problem proton does not run all the games.

You can install Windows on it too, to run run pretty much all the games.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#373
I wonder what this might mean for the Valve Index.

I mean, 1.6TFlops is still far from an RTX 2080 (10.1 TFlops), by a factor of 10, but still…

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#374

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.

Even some first party Nintendo games can't be relied on to run at a stable framerate so I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Link's Awakening has some nasty and inconsistent stutter issues, Breath of the Wild runs better than on the Wii U but it still has its moments.

Then you have games like Hyrule Warriors where it just feels actively bad.

Lots of Switch Games actually run a lot better under even a very mild overclock (Nintendo even officially lets the CPU get OC'd during loading screens for limited periods of time, to great effect).

This is beating the Switch on most aspects outside of first-party Nintendo library.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#375

Halfway down the page on https://www.steamdeck.com/en/ they have a graphic of a user logging in with the username 'gordon' and an obscured password, which conveniently has the same number of letters as halflife3, haha.

Well, wouldn't it be a killer move to announce HL3 on steam, with heavy com on the mobile gameplay?

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#376

Everyone is talking about gaming, but do you guys think this could be a laptop replacement? I've been intrigued by docking tablets for years now, but haven't found one I like yet (that can run linux well, so no Surface). I like the tablet form factor for web browsing and watching videos, but nearly all the tablets are too phone-like to get real work done. I don't actually play games much anymore, but do people actual…

Rather than a laptop, it would make a handy remote control for eg. a robot, with visualization integrated.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#377
“Installing Linux is hard” is about to flip on its head as people find themselves with Linux installed by default and instead having to figure out how to install Windows (and pay for it explicitly).

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Valve but it seems like they create these hardware projects to occasionally remind platform owners like microsoft/playstation/nintendo that they can't completely abuse their users and software devs (Win10 store lock-in, etc) and retain all of them. Valve just wants to protect steam and credible hardware platform competition is how they do it. I don't think they have any real plans to produce and support hardwa…

Seems like the Google Fiber strategy - start deploying key products/services to influence the big players in the market to finally innovate or at least play nice for consumers.

Sadly, I'm not convinced that strategy has any long term effect.

I'm still bitter about how bad & expensive Internet access is in the Silicon Valley

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#380
This is great! I don't know how much of it is open in the -all specs open- sense, but being able to install usual OSes on it, paired with the really nice price, makes the platform interesting for a lot more uses other than gaming. In fact, I don't see it as a simple gaming platform but also a portable terminal with lots of buttons. Hopefully more competition in this field will also help bring down prices of other interesting gear such as the GPD handhelds and mini-PCs, the One Xplayer etc.
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