SteamPal is a fact. Valve announced their first handheld console named Steam Deck

[Forbidden Wafer]

6 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

In summary: Concerning.

The only ones really relevant: it is heavy and large, plus compatibility is kind of spotty through proton.
Regarding weight and size: it is not much heavier than the Aya Neo and is way lighter than the OneXPlayer, while having a similar size to the last one.
Proton/Wine/DXVK still being worked on, but have advanced quite a lot in the last few years.
About its future as a new platform, I doubt Valve expects that to happen when they called it a Steam pal.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

49 minutes ago, IamGame said:

not sure if this has been posted yet, but it appears the storage might just be upgradeable:  click here

 

edited for fat-finger-itis

This is, uhh... Interesting?  But I'm gonna need more to go on than 'Random YouTuber with suppose screenshots where Gabe himself is answering basic support question emails'.

[GoodBytes]

59 minutes ago, IamGame said:

not sure if this has been posted yet, but it appears the storage might just be upgradeable:  click here

 

edited for fat-finger-itis

If you are going spend money to buy additional storage, might as well get the highest end model.

Personally, the only model that makes sense is the highest end model, or mid-range one if you don't mind redownloading game or just having 1-2 games only installed.

Ignoring OS size which consume the drive space:

• Gears Of War 4: ~110GB
• CoD 4: ~ 100GB
• Borderlands 3: ~110GB
• Hitman 2: ~150 GB
• RDR2: ~150GB
• Battlefield 5: ~50GB

(The above is based on disk space for the games listed in the system requirements that I found online)

[CerealExperimentsLain]

4 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

If you are going spend money to buy additional storage, might as well get the highest end model.

Personally, the only model that makes sense is the highest end model, or mid-range one if you don't mind redownloading game or just having 1-2 games only installed.

Ignoring OS size which consume the drive space:

• Gears Of War 4: ~110GB
• CoD 4: ~ 100GB
• Borderlands 3: ~110GB
• Hitman 2: ~150 GB
• RDR2: ~150GB
• Battlefield 5: ~50GB

(The above is based on disk space for the games listed in the system requirements that I found online)

OKay, but hear me out.... Need For Speed III NextGen, the engine rebuild that supports Win10, and modern GPUs... 620 megabytes.  Bam.  

 

And, being less of a jerk, you'll probably find that playing olderish or lighter weight games offers vastly better battery life than trying to get RDR2 running on a 15w APU.

[GoodBytes]

26 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

OKay, but hear me out.... Need For Speed III NextGen, the engine rebuild that supports Win10, and modern GPUs... 620 megabytes.  Bam.  

 

And, being less of a jerk, you'll probably find that playing olderish or lighter weight games offers vastly better battery life than trying to get RDR2 running on a 15w APU.

Sure, the decision is yours. I can't read people mind on what they plan to do with the system. I can only raise concerns, and I hope people don't take it badly, and just think for a moment if it will affect them or not. 

 

If one plans to play big games on the go, then while you may be able to upgrade the internal storage of the system (or you can buy a high-speed microSD card), might as well purchase the higher end model, is my point. I mean you'll spend ~100$ more in any case, might as well get the SSD version and be ready to go, out of the box, is my point (or enjoy the anti-glare screen on the highest end model).

 

I am sure someone will come and say, I'll buy this system just so that I can play MegaRace

[WereCat]

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

If you are going spend money to buy additional storage, might as well get the highest end model.

Personally, the only model that makes sense is the highest end model, or mid-range one if you don't mind redownloading game or just having 1-2 games only installed.

Ignoring OS size which consume the drive space:

• Gears Of War 4: ~110GB
• CoD 4: ~ 100GB
• Borderlands 3: ~110GB
• Hitman 2: ~150 GB
• RDR2: ~150GB
• Battlefield 5: ~50GB

(The above is based on disk space for the games listed in the system requirements that I found online)

 

Hmm, 2230 M.2 may be a bit more difficult to find in some regions.

I found only Kioxia 256GB for around €80 and its DRAMless and TLC. 

 

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/KIOXIA-KBG40ZNS256G-Client-256GB-NVMe/dp/B0866BPJPG/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=m.2+2230+nvme&qid=1626496320&sr=8-6

 

I wonder what they put in since the price jump for storage alone is quite high. I at the very least hope they used an NVMe with DRAM and the cherry on top would be MLC instead of TLC... I hope they avoided QLC. 

[kitnoman]

24 minutes ago, WereCat said:

 

Hmm, 2230 M.2 may be a bit more difficult to find in some regions.

I found only Kioxia 256GB for around €80 and its DRAMless and TLC. 

 

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/KIOXIA-KBG40ZNS256G-Client-256GB-NVMe/dp/B0866BPJPG/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=m.2+2230+nvme&qid=1626496320&sr=8-6

 

I wonder what they put in since the price jump for storage alone is quite high. I at the very least hope they used an NVMe with DRAM and the cherry on top would be MLC instead of TLC... I hope they avoided QLC. 

That's actually true. The $250 difference in storage from 64gb $399 to 256gb+fast charger and better anti glare glass $649 is too high.  Lets just hope that other than the sd card feature, it has a standard m.2 layout so you can just buy the $399 and then get a $100-200 m.2 gen3 or gen4 that's either 1tb or 2tb. But having the steam os built in, most likely the ssd would be soldered. I would love if it has a sim card feature too. I mean wifi is good, but having data is better for a handheld.

[WolframaticAlpha]

9 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

I dunno why so many PC gamers buy into this delusion.  This is not a competitor to the Switch, it will not 'Defeat' Nintendo or anything like that.  It's an expensive, less idiot proof hand held PC that plays Steam games.  It will really only appeal to PC gamers who want exactly that.  The switch is lighter, cheaper, has a massive library of beloved first and second party games, before you even get into the second party games, and every game for the Switch actually works with the Switch input controls, where many PC games will not even 'quite' work right on a gamepad due to not being built for it.

This is like opening a middle class fast casual dining restaurant and saying 'HAH.  WE WILL FINALLY DESTROY THE MCDONALDS DOWN THE STREET'.  hah. both are gonna coexist and, at best, see their own independent successes.

 

People who buy Switches are not going 'Hey, I want this because of it's great specs!'  They buy it because it's the Mario/Pokemon/Zelda/Metroid/Animal Crossing machine that also has a big library of other games.  The Steam Deck will not 'defeat Nintendo' because these two devices demographics will barely overlap.

 

Some of you really have no perspective.  The PS Vita for example was basically a PS3 that fit in your hands and all Nintendo did was like 'Hey, you like the 3DS?  We got a 3DS XL! :O' and they just happily went along printing money.

1 If you think that 80 million people are buying the switch just for mario, then idk what to tell you. I liked nintendo games, but I bought a switch because it was portable. A handheld and gaming console in one? Wonderful! If the deck had existed at the same time, I would've bought it instead. And I didn't get into PC gaming until last year/

2 There are two crowds of people buying the switch. The home console crowd and the handheld crowd. The steam deck appeals to the home console people. The wii u was semiportable, but it was outsold by it's more powerful competitors. So, the deck will appeal to a lot of the home console crowd. 

 

3 Nobody is talking about destroying nintendo, but giving it a whip in the butt. I just want competition. I am sick of playing 500p games at 23fps on the switch.

4 >The switch has a massive library of first and second party games

It also has a near absence of third party, which steam is full of. You can watch netflix and prime on the deck. Not on the switch. The switch game sales(as in discounts) are non existent,

 

I can buy my favourite games like hl2, the dooms, portal, witcher3 fallout new vegas oblivion etc on the steam deck for next to no money. I can run emulators. Heck, if someone optimizes the ryujin and yuzu emulators for the deck, then I would be able to play switch games on the deck. The deck is WAY more open. I wouldn't jailbreak my switch, and many others wouldn't as well. But now I have an endless supply of games. I can play old games, upscaled that nintendo feeds you at 60 dollars per remaster.

 

5 The vita didn't die because the 3DS was more successful. It died because sony pulled off some dumb moves that doomed the thing. May I remind you, that almost nobody bought a 3DS at launch. 

 

6 If we keep your nintendo exclusive argument, then why did the Wii U fail?

 

7 Not everyone owns a PC good enough to play games. For 399, if it can do 720p30 or 720p60 at medium settings, I think it is an EXCELLENT deal.

 

 

The switch and the deck will coexist, but I need the deck to at least show nintendo that there is competition, because they have become pretty complacent. Games are well and fine, but we need new hardware. It might not be a necessity, but it would be greatly appreciated by the consumers.

[EldritchMoose]

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

I am sure someone will come and say, I'll buy this system just so that I can play MegaRace

Y'know as a fan of ancient games, I'd pay good money for a modern machine that allows me to easily play Megarace-era games out of the box. As it stands I have had so much trouble getting part of my GOG library to run on Windows 10 that I ended up installing Windows 7 on a laptop just so I could circumvent the offered solutions of downloading patches from now-defunct forums every time I felt like playing some Soldier of Fortune or Carmageddon.

[xAcid9]

Now that I looked at the spec again, I wonder how strong is the CPU. Is it gonna perform similar to my i7-3770?

[YamiYukiSenpai]

I'm definitely looking forward to playing Halo: MCC online again once anti-cheat is fully supported.

 

I wonder if Valve will work with Riot to make League of Legends and Valorant work on Linux.

[Quackers101]

But wait

Quote

That doesn't mean that the Steam Deck will be limited to Linux games. Valve says that its Proton compatibility software has been "vastly improved."

So it means they have improved steam OS or is it a proton feature?? Is it going to run more than what is supported by proton?

[saltycaramel]

I’m listening to WAN and Linus fanboying over this thing rationalizing every possible aspect of it (to the point of condoning emulation of Wii and PS3 games which is basically piracy) gave me diabetes..by all means, be excited about it, but the “for sure great plastic” and the “think of the machining tools they had to buy upfront” (like Valve it’s building these in a workshop in their basement)…hope Gabe was listening and will give Linus super early access, I get it..

[KaitouX]

3 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

Now that I looked at the spec again, I wonder how strong is the CPU. Is it gonna perform similar to my i7-3770?

Should be slightly faster over all, as the maximum performance should be somewhere close to a base clock Ryzen 3 3100, but depending on the load the clock might drop, so probably will end up being slower in some tasks, faster in others. I would say it probably will be closer to the 4790K on average.

 

10 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

I’m listening to WAN and Linus fanboying over this thing rationalizing every possible aspect of it (to the point of condoning emulation of Wii and PS3 games which is basically piracy) gave me diabetes..

Depends where you are, but in many countries it isn't illegal to rip games you own and use them in emulators. Some places even have weird rules like you can't break the copy protection, but you can copy the disc.

[skywake]

19 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

I’m listening to WAN and Linus fanboying over this thing rationalizing every possible aspect of it gave me diabetes..

Firstly, can we not do this joke? Just don't.

 

Secondly what's not to be excited about? If you are into portables this is basically what you've been dreaming of for the last decade. Speaking as someone who's more of a portable gamer, this class of product is the way forward. It has been for a bit of a while now. And it's great that Valve is not only pushing it to a larger audience but also pricing it this aggressively. This is exactly what people who are into portable devices have been waiting for.

 

I mean ok if you're not into portables it's not a product for you and that's fine. Not everything has to be for you. And other people being excited about a thing that isn't for you does not diminish your enjoyment of other stuff. So just let people enjoy this

 

I for one make no secret of being a Nintendo fanboy and mostly because they've been pretty much the only game in town for portables since forever. The Switch was and still is a pretty fantastic piece of hardware for that reason. But the prospect of a half-decent PC in the same form factor? That's a nice future. I'll gladly pay the early adopter tax for that. And because it's literally a PC I can plug a large HDD full of movies into it and use it as a HTPC when it's docked or grab my wireless KB/Trackpad and use it as a kind of super-portable laptop. It's a nice concept

[WereCat]

2 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

I’m listening to WAN and Linus fanboying over this thing rationalizing every possible aspect of it (to the point of condoning emulation of Wii and PS3 games which is basically piracy) gave me diabetes..by all means, be excited about it, but the “for sure great plastic” and the “think of the machining tools they had to buy upfront” (like Valve it’s building these in a workshop in their basement)…hope Gabe was listening and will give Linus super early access, I get it..

So you're the $100 guy?

[Velcade]

14 hours ago, SlidewaysZ said:

I did give up on the 512gb since those got pushed back to q2 really quickly. Managed to snag a 256gb for Q1 which isn't bad.

Did they tell you you're bumped to 2022 in your confirmation email?

[saltycaramel]

x86-powered gaming is “the way forward” for portable gaming?

 

Let’s see how it compares in perf-per-watt and bang-for-the-buck to the best ARM offerings.

 

This fall (before the Steam Deck is even out) the new borderless-design iPad Mini will be out for (if the price stays the same) 399$ with 64GB of premium flash (not eMMC)  and A14 SoC (CPU-wise kinda like a Ryzen 5 4500U in benchmarks, GPU-wise it benches like a GTX 960M in gfxbench 1440p and 1080p). With a screen of around 8” and roughly 2300x1600 (give or take) resolution. Fanless and 0.66lbs/300g.

Add a DualSense Ps5 controller and we’re at 470$.

Alternatively, add a Razer-Kishi-8”-tablet-edition (it doesn’t exist yet) and we’re at 500$ and +0.36lbs/163g (for a total of 1.02lbs/463g).

 

The cheapest Steam Deck with non-crappy-eMMC storage is 529$ and it weights 1.47lbs/669g. It has a (stated) crappy battery life if you don’t cap the fps at 30 or if you don’t give up local gaming for game streaming (which can be done proficiently on the iPad Mini as well, if not better). It has a fan and fan grilles to keep clear. It is 720p. 

Let’s be fair and up the iPad Mini storage to 256GB. Now we’re at 649$ for a 256GB iPad Mini (549$) + a Razer Kishi (99$).

529$ vs 649$ 

Hardware-wise, the Steam Deck is ~120$ away from being utterly destroyed by an iPad Mini + controller (if anybody from Razer is reading, you guys only need to tweak the Kishi a little to make it iPad Mini-compatible, someone on reddit is modding it the DIY route, Microsoft in its marketing material treats the iPad as the perfect xCloud machine for Apple users, maybe a tablet_edition-Kishi before Christmas would be a good idea..)

Software-wise, I’ll admit they’re as apples and oranges as it gets. But since Valve itself mentioned game streaming, there’s some overlap there.

(about the “we’ll a make SteamOS available to other manufacturers” part, last decade nerds and open-advocates have already been rug-pulled by Google with Android_but_yeah_no_you_better_run_GoogleServicesOS, why would this model go anywhere this time?)

Is this device an interesting value proposition for a number of Steam/PC_gaming users and in some ways a dream come true? Sure.

Is this the way forward for portable gaming? Hardly. This feels more like yet another experiment (that builds upon Valve’s previous Steam-machines endeavour) in this weird transitional era in which the x86 world found itself flat footed by the ARM mobile revolution, so we’re seeing companies experiment with creating “a link between worlds” solutions (Android apps on Windows 11, iOS apps on macOS, and this glorified 2006-era UMPC, remember those?).

All the best to it but I wouldn’t bet much on it creating fond back-of-the-car gaming memories for millions of kids or being competitive vs something like a Switch, like Linus seems to think it could. 

[saltycaramel]

Googling “SteamOS ARM” returns interesting forum discussions from 7-8 years ago.

 

8 years later, we’re still at the point of hyping into an x86-based 1.47lbs/0.67Kg UMPC with a friggin’ fan. 

 

Makes you think.

[Forbidden Wafer]

38 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

x86-powered gaming is “the way forward” for portable gaming?

 

Let’s see how it compares in perf-per-watt and bang-for-the-buck to the best ARM offerings.

Can your iPad or any other ARM play the >30 years of x86 games? If not, what is your point?
Everybody knows it isn't the most power efficient solution, but where are the chip-makers doing the necessary changes to improve translation performance?

[GoodBytes]

7 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

Now that I looked at the spec again, I wonder how strong is the CPU. Is it gonna perform similar to my i7-3770?

The CPU is on the weak side. 

Current game consoles have faster CPUs and more cores.

[saltycaramel]

@Forbidden Wafer

 

So it’s the way backward, I suppose.

 

A specialized niche device to bring that back catalog on the go (better be near an outlet tho).

 

It has a place, for sure.

 

Hardly the way forward though.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

 

8 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Nobody is talking about destroying nintendo,

 

18 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

This is harnessing the power of the PC, to defeat nintendo. Even if this thing loses, I hope it gives a good whip to nintendo, which frankly has become lazy with switch.

 

Well, except you.  Granted you did edit your post but I managed to quote it so you could say 'No one is talking about destroying Nintendo' without you having literally said 'Destroying Nintendo'.   Sneaky sneaky there, aren't you? 

[Forbidden Wafer]

44 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

A specialized niche device to bring that back catalog on the go (better be near an outlet tho).

You described exactly what it is. Not sure why you are even bothering putting it down.
Don't like the back catalog? Go play app store games filled to the brink with mTX+P2W. 
Also, go play COD/Fortnite/Pubg on your iPad(Pro). See how long the battery lasts. 3-4h max.

[Fasterthannothing]

2 hours ago, Velcade said:

Did they tell you you're bumped to 2022 in your confirmation email?

If you click on the product page where it listed the reservations it will show you your expected date.