Revealed in July of this year, Valve’s handheld gaming computer the Steam Deck is quickly approaching its expected release date. An extension of past hardware products produced by Valve, like the Steam Controller and Steam Machines, the Steam Deck looks to finally put full-blown PC gaming into a small portable device. Rather than play its own proprietary games like its closest competitor, the Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck instead allows players to play games from their Steam library on the device.
Of course, a gaming device is only as good as the components powering it, and the Steam Deck appears to have respectable hardware. With an AMD APU utilizing the company’s Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures, a multitouch 1280 x 800 LCD display, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM, the Steam Deck should be able to play most modern titles at satisfactory levels of performance.
Specs don’t always tell the entire story, however. Luckily, Twitter account OnDeck has plenty of footage of various titles like The Witcher 3 running on dev kits of the upcoming Steam Deck hardware. One of the account’s latest videos shows nearly two minutes of gameplay of Double Fine’s celebrated 3d-platformer, Psychonauts 2, which launched earlier this year in August.
The short gameplay snippet appears to run remarkably well on the Steam Deck. The framerate seems to be a solid 60 FPS and Psychonauts 2’s colorful graphics remain sharp, despite the resolution of the display, although the zoomed-out view of the clip makes it somewhat hard to tell what the graphics settings are set to. Other Twitter users are impressed with the level of detail and performance showcased in the video and are asking the OnDeck account for more footage from other games.
With the Steam Deck’s smart spec combination of a modern APU and a somewhat low-resolution screen, the device should be able to churn out satisfactory performance for gaming. Of course, one of the trade-offs with a high-performance handheld is battery life, so it will interesting for players to see how the device’s longevity holds up.
The Steam Deck includes a 40 watt-hour battery, which Valve estimates can last up to seven or eight hours on lighter games, although obviously heavier titles will burn through that more quickly. To combat this, the Steam Deck’s system software includes an optional FPS limiter for gamers to try and balance the handheld’s performance and battery life as they see fit. Regardless of battery runtime, OnDeck’s video of Psychonauts 2 on the Steam Deck is certainly impressive from a fidelity and smoothness standpoint, and eager adopters won’t have to wait much longer to get their hands on the Steam Deck to see the device's performance for themselves.
The Steam Deck is set to start shipping in December 2021.