Valve’s Steam Deck handheld is esteem a Nintendo Switch constructed by PC nerds

The rumors had been appealing. Valve officially pulled the curtain relief on the Steam Deck on Thursday—a $399 gaming handheld designed to bring your Steam gaming library to the hands of your hands, powered by AMD hardware and Valve’s maintain Linux-based completely mostly SteamOS working intention. Preorders open July 16, with shipments initiating in December.

The Steam Deck looks to be esteem the Nintendo Switch, if the Nintendo Switch modified into created by diehard PC enthusiasts. You’ll get a spacious 7-lunge interpret front and center—the equal dimension as the recent OLED Switch—total with touchscreen performance. It’s no longer OLED, alas, but Valve says the interpret shines at a if truth be told legit 400 nits (the most fundamental for outdoors expend) and runs at 60Hz, a.k.a. the PC gaming gold stylish. By comparability, the Switch drops down to 30Hz when undocked, a refresh fee that merely wouldn’t flit for us PC snobs. The Steam Deck’s show ought to calm also be a bit clearer than its Nintendo rival, with a 1280×800 decision and an “Optically bonded LCD for enhanced readability.”

Valve

Rather than that the Steam Deck looks to be, nicely, esteem a typical (yet a minute chonky) gaming handheld, with your entire buttons, analog sticks, and D-pads you’d seek info from, together with haptic feedback beef up so it’s likely you’ll if truth be told feel your video games rumble.

The connectivity is where things open to recall a turn for the PC-centric. The Steam Deck supports both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and it comes no longer most tantalizing with a microSD card slot for expanded storage, but additionally a USB-C port that shall be aged to vitality the machine, drive multi-channel audio by its DisplayPort-over-USB-C performance, or join to other hardware.

Valve

“Steam Deck shall be an open PC, together being able to put in any machine or join with any hardware,” Valve acknowledged in a interpret to journalists, while its web sites boasts that “That it’s likely you’ll join to peripherals, throw the image onto a spacious show, and set aside your entire other PC things you’d seek info from.”

Yessssss.

Valve

The beating heart at the center of the Steam Deck is a custom AMD APU “optimized for handheld gaming.” It’s powered by a CPU with four Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000-collection) cores and eight threads working at between 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz, paired with 8 Radeon GPU cores constructed upon AMD’s unprecedented recent RDNA 2 structure, which shall be found within the Radeon RX 6000-collection graphics cards, the Xbox Series S|X, and the PlayStation 5.

Don’t seek info from to breeze ray-tracing on the Steam Deck—the selling and marketing doesn’t point out the cutting-edge lighting outcomes wherever—but Valve claims that it provides “bigger than ample performance to breeze the most stylish AAA video games in a if truth be told efficient vitality envelope.” Given the modest show decision, which would be pitiful for a fat-sized observe but lawful stunning in a minute handheld esteem this, we’re inclined to think the notify for most video games, despite the truth that you just’ll no question want to tinker with graphics settings to catch particularly strenuous video games (esteem Cyberpunk 2077) working nicely on this. Valve showed off the Steam Deck working Jedi: Fallen Present and Control to drive the purpose dwelling.

Even the storage alternate strategies are noteworthy of PC gaming. Sure, the entry stage $399 version comes with a minute 64GB eMMC drive working over a PCIe Gen. 2 connection, equal to the Nintendo Switch. Nonetheless it’s likely you’ll also decide for $529 and $649 configurations that reach with 256GB and 512GB NVMe SSDs, respectively, working on the equal PCIe 3.0 connection most folk win of their gaming PCs appealing now.

Valve

All in all, the Steam Deck looks to be damned spectacular on paper, and that’s no longer even coming into into a truly great fragment—the video games. Setup sounds esteem a disappear, lawful esteem even as you happen to come to a decision on Fire or Echo devices assert from Amazon. Simply steered the Steam Deck, log into your Steam epic, and your entire present Steam library and chums list will be true now available. Steam chats, notifications, cloud saves, the ability to circulation video games out of your predominant gaming desktop to the Steam Deck by far flung play, it’s all there.

Most Steam video games aren’t optimized for Linux, which SteamOS is constructed upon, but Valve’s been slowly bettering into its Proton compatibility layer for years. Proton lets a ravishing quantity of House windows-centric video games breeze on Linux and not utilizing a to minimal wretchedness. Builders don’t want to carry out any extra work for Proton to work its magic both—most of your video games ought to calm lawful work.

Valve

Between Proton and SteamOS itself, Valve has quietly been laying the muse for the Steam Deck for nicely over half a decade now. We are capable of’t wait to catch our hands on it in December. A Steam-centric gaming handheld sounds esteem an absolute dream for touring or journeys to the park. Accurate be ready to hook into Wi-Fi from someplace (even your cellphone), for the explanation that Steam Deck lacks cell capabilities.

Senior editor Brad Chacos covers gaming and graphics for PCWorld, and runs the morning info desk for PCWorld, Macworld, Greenbot, and TechHive. He tweets too.