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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Valve releasing Switch competitor SteamDeck Dec 2021, $399, Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU

JRPGfan on 15 July 2021
trunkswd said:
Captain_Yuri said:

Pretty much. Like I own a Switch and I know how good of a handheld it is. But there are plenty of things that I wish it did and that's the hole this fills. This is a console for PC gamers like myself, not for people that want the switch experience.

Like Nintendo games on it look great, they really do. But then you try to play third party games on it...  It looks truly terrible for my liking. Like if you look at something like the Witcher 3, this is effectively what the difference is going to be:

The left is the switch version, the right is the ps4 version as this is more powerful than a base ps4. It's why many people wanted a Switch Pro so badly.

The main reason I am fapping to this is because if you wanted to play third party games on an handheld, you had to either pay $1000 for a PC handheld which are significantly weaker than this or you get a switch and deal with it's short comings. Now you can play Xbox and Playstation games that are coming to PC as well as the large library of PC games on the go. Heck you can even play gamepass games day 1 on this and you don't need to re-buy any of your steam games.

I knew Witcher 3 didn't look good on Switch, but that is worse than I expected. With the Steam Deck starting at $399 that makes me wonder how much money Nintendo makes on the Switch hardware. 

Nvidia sold a tegra powered tablet like the Switch for 199$.
And supposedly to rope in, Nintendo, nvidia sold the chips it had in stock (at a slight loss) just to get rid of said stock (it couldnt sell).

Nintendo makes a healthy profit on every unit of Switch sold, light, standard or oled version.



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Jizz_Beard_thePirate on 15 July 2021
Paatar said:
Captain_Yuri said:

Pretty much. Like I own a Switch and I know how good of a handheld it is. But there are plenty of things that I wish it did and that's the hole this fills. This is a console for PC gamers like myself, not for people that want the switch experience.

Like Nintendo games on it look great, they really do. But then you try to play third party games on it...  It looks truly terrible for my liking. Like if you look at something like the Witcher 3, this is effectively what the difference is going to be:

The left is the switch version, the right is the ps4 version as this is more powerful than a base ps4. It's why many people wanted a Switch Pro so badly.

The main reason I am fapping to this is because if you wanted to play third party games on an handheld, you had to either pay $1000 for a PC handheld which are significantly weaker than this or you get a switch and deal with it's short comings. Now you can play Xbox and Playstation games that are coming to PC as well as the large library of PC games on the go. Heck you can even play gamepass games day 1 on this and you don't need to re-buy any of your steam games.


you are using an outdated picture of Witcher 3 on Switch just saying. With the extra graphics options, turning sharpness all the way up and turning off AA actually makes the entire image much clearer. 

Probably. I grabbed it from DF's Switch vs PS4 comparison as PS4 versions of the game will be very close to SteamDeck in terms of visuals and performance but I wouldn't doubt there have been patches since then. But the point still stands none the less that the difference is big.



             

                   PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

hinch on 15 July 2021

People complaining about price, this is a cutting edge mini PC and there's nothing remotely out there that reaches the same performance in this form factor.

This is relatively a bargain considering what released before it. The chinese handhelds (GPD Win, Neo Anaya) that released just recently aren't anywhere near this and this does it cheaper and in terms of tech, performance, functions and features. This will easily last a generation or two of console ports and that's not something that you could say about most other portable consoles.



Conina on 15 July 2021
zero129 said:

You will be adding another handheld to that image soon id imagine Conina .

Probably... at least I'll reserve one and wait for reviews in November/December.

According to https://lgc.lysioneer.nl/ ~1400 of my Steam games should fully work "out of the box" and ~1600 of my Steam games fully work with workarounds.

But I hope that Valve adds a Steam library filter for SteamOS / SteamDeck until launch. That would allow dynamic collections like "SteamOS + controller support + genre x + single player without mandatory VR"



Leynos on 15 July 2021
zero129 said:

Ok so after seeing a few guys on the emu scene talk about this they think it wont have any problems running Switch games with the latest project hades update for Yuzu it runs many games at full speed on weaker ryzen based igpus. This think could be playing Switch games at 4K res on its release!.
Well i guess i know what system ill be playing Botw 2 on if thats the case.

That's just outright stealing.



Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

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Darc Requiem on 15 July 2021
Alistair said:
Darc Requiem said:

Does it use standard PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs? If so, would it be cheaper to buy the $399 model and buy your own SSD. $130 for a 512GB SSD seems high and its a ludicrous $250 for the 1TB version. You can get a 2TB NVMe SSD for around $160

No you can't upgrade the internal one later. Instead you use high speed micro SD card, just like the Switch. The price is perfectly reasonable, use your SD card instead. Also Apple and others charge $400 for 500GB of added storage, I don't see how you can complain if Valve is asking for just $130. This is a small integrated device, not a motherboard.

104MB/s Micro SD cards aren't going to cut it. That makes the Steam Deck a big nope from me. 



kazuyamishima on 15 July 2021

So this thing will be able to:
1) Run all Steam library
2) Run Windows and all games released there, Xbox games too
3) Run PlayStation games released on Steam
4) Run older/current systems via emulation like the switch with even higher resolution and fps.

If you see it like that, it could do great numbers.



Soundwave on 15 July 2021
JRPGfan said:

That actually sounds pretty powerfull for a handheld..... my worry is just the battery life.

Like this might be alot more powerfull than a Switch, but without the games or battery life, what does that matter?

You do realize the Steam store has thousands of games, right? It can even load non-Steam store games too, it has a larger library than any Nintendo system ever if you want to get technical. 



TheBraveGallade on 15 July 2021

the main problem I see is the storage space and speed.
even the mid range model, while it COULD run stuff, wouldn't have enough space unless valve nudges enough devs to actually fucking make devs make more efficient code.
casue even the same game would take up like, 4 times the install space on this thing then on the switch...
my laptop has 256SSD and i still only have room for, what, 5 games? and NONE of them are triple A, not really.

plus, unlike switch, there is actually pretty little incentive to optimise for this little bugger unless it really gains traction, meaning the performace might end up being fucking terrible anyway compared to the optimized switch.



Conina on 15 July 2021