411–420 of 1001 posts
Storage seems like it'll be an issue unless you only want to play indie games. It says it's got the hardware to play AAA games, but even last gen AAA games like Doom Eternal won't fit on the base model, and the next step up with more sufficient storage is more expensive than the next gen consoles.
microSD cards are pretty cheap though.
Didn't turn on your PC for a week? Enjoy a 45-minute wait while Steam downloads and installs yet another giant update, preventing you from playing anything until it's done.
If this is going to be like that, I'm out. Even though a device like this is what I've been looking for.
First impressions: Really good hardware for the price. They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. They're definitely overcharging for storage, but I imagine it'll be easy enough to modify one, so it probably doesn't matter much. Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Going with a relatively low resolution compared to modern ones is actually a surprisingly smart mov…
Because it's cheaper to produce and easier to design for USB 2. The cpu and chipset are limiting factors as well.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/chipsets-am4
Scroll down to the table at the bottom of the page to see what AMD's chipsets can support.
A $400 dev machine running Arch?
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.
I have a pretty extensive Switch library and can definitely say that performance of ports is really hit or miss.
This is also missing that PC games are already designed with a broad range of hardware in mind and nearly every game for PC has extensive settings to control graphical quality vs performance.
Sure, maybe a device like this might have performance issues but I don't think the Switch completely trumps this in terms delivering playable experiences.
First impressions: Really good hardware for the price. They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. They're definitely overcharging for storage, but I imagine it'll be easy enough to modify one, so it probably doesn't matter much. Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Going with a relatively low resolution compared to modern ones is actually a surprisingly smart mov…
One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions. edit: On closer look that's comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that's still a lot of extra w…
1. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech
edit: crtl-f mistake, that's the docking station
CPU: AMD APU 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) RAM: 16GB LPDDR5 Display: 7", 1280x800, 60Hz OS: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based), KDE Plasma desktop Storage: Onboard 64GB eMMC/256GB NVMe/512GB NVMe, microSD slot
Does this mean it's a next gen AMD APU, since it uses LPDDR5? I don't think Cezanne (current Zen 3-based APUs) support DDR5.
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…
