Valve Steam Deck • Hacker News Board

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#401

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #164

Battery: 40Whr battery. 2 - 8 hours of gameplay Having the battery as low as 2hrs is brutal. I know the early Switch consoles weren't much better running AAA titles like BoTW but they've revised the chipset a few times since, and newer models floor at ~4.5hrs (3hrs for the lite). I'm all for more competition, but I'm not clear on who the intended audience is for this device.

If the Steam Deck is successful I imagine that will give less demanding titles that will be much closer to 8 hours battery lifetime a nice boost.

I'm suspect games like Among Us, Mindustry, Poly Bridge or Human Resource Machine or Life is Strange will boast a good battery runtime (just scrolling through my steam library).

USB-C charging also opens the door to some quite large battery packs (Dells sells a 65Wh power bank)

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#402

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

spiralganglion wrote: post #382

Impressions: * 1.47 pounds is 666g, versus the Switch’s 398g (with Joy-Con attatched). 67% heavier. * I do like that the two people I can see on the landing page both appear to be female, and not overtly "models" at that. I don’t want to read into whether this implies anything about what the marketing for this system might be — rather, I just like that we’re seeing a further erosion of the video-games-as-boys-club tr…

An excessively negative take, why?

1.5 pounds is what the 2010 iPad weighed, people managed to use it just fine.

As for visual appeal, who knows? PC gamer aesthetics seem to be oriented around dotting your CPU case with the most gauche RGB lights Amazon dropshippers have to offer. At least this is more toned down than say, a comparable Alienware product.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#403

Post by detaro » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

myrloc wrote: post #399

Would’ve been an instant win for me if I could do a Switch-style hookup to the TV. Without that, it’s just another limited mobile gaming console.

"would've"? it can do that, it has "USB-C" carrying video and a dock is announced.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#404

Post by MetaWhirledPeas » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #76

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.

Sure when you're talking about older games. But for newer games I'd say support for XInput is pretty consistent, and resolution support is usually OK too.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#405

Post by Wowfunhappy » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #116

opheliate wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was wrong with SteamOS being based on Debian? I’ve not used SteamOS myself, but I wasn’t aware there were problems in that regard.

It's ancient and Valve had to do tons of backports to support it properly. I imagine they didn't like that very much.

What does Valve have to backport? Surely games aren’t targeting super new libraries? (I’d expect Valve themselves to be the ones deciding what versions are targeted.)

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#406

Post by lasagnaphil » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

phront wrote: post #227

What video card is equivalent to this steam deck hardware?

It's using a custom AMD APU, so I estimate it would be probably a bit weaker than Ryzen 7 5700G's integrated GPU (1.6 TFLOPS advertised vs 2.1 TFLOPs for 5700G).

Though the performance may get a lot worse if you're using it on battery power, or the device gets hot enough to get throttled.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#407

Post by LeifCarrotson » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

ukd1 wrote: post #66

NegativeLatency wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB 2 on a mobile device might be for limiting power consumption?

USB 3/C has really fine grain power control - using "PD" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver... ), it's possible to negotiate the rates pretty finely - so I don't think it's that.

In a mobile device, it's not necessarily about the power delivered over the Vbus wire, but about the energy required for the transceiver and serdes logic in the controller. USB 1.0 "low speed" had a clock of 1.5 MHz, and USB 1.1 "full speed" is clocked at 12 MHz. You can communicate at that frequency with a microcontroller on an ancient process node on a coin cell. USB 2.0 "high speed" runs at 480 MHz. Running a processor at that frequency requires significantly more power, but is not too egregious.

USB 3 is clocked at 5 GHz, which requires more power still. Just having a transceiver capable of that frequency enabled will draw a significant load from a battery, regardless of whether you're using the bus for power delivery.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#408

Post by MikusR » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #82

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #56

Gotta admit, I never saw that coming. I thought SteamOS was dead after the failure of Steam Machines and Valve was only continuing with their Linux efforts because it's still a useful hedge against Microsoft locking everyone in the App Store. I totally did not expect them to copy the Switch use-case with it. I'm anxious to see how this turns out. Valve's history with hardware is not so great, so it could go nowhere l…

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…

What windows store lock-in?

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#409

Post by twostorytower » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #194

Valve is like 90s id Software without Carmack. They understand business models. They know that the money is to be made in game engines and game platforms, not games themselves. However, they’ve never had the technical talent and vision to execute on that. Half-life was supposed to be a demo for GoldSrc. It never took off and I can’t name a single 3rd party GoldSrc game. Likewise, Half-life 2 was supposed to be a demo…

Counter-Strike was a third party GoldSrc mod before Valve bought it and is arguably one of the most popular games of all time.

Source has Titanfall as well as its spiritual successor, Apex Legends, which use a modified Source engine.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#410

Post by JeremyNT » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

liminalsunset wrote: post #279

Can the 64GB version be upgraded DIY with a NVMe SSD? It claims to be a eMMC but goes on to clarify it is a PCIe Gen2 x1 connection. Does this mean it is just a m.2 card?

That's what I'm wondering here. If it's just a normal m.2 slot then you're way better off price-wise getting the entry level unit and upgrading later on.