Steam Deck review from Eurogamer
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2022-steam-deck-review-a-handheld-pc-capable-of-console-quality-gaming
The good
Imagine PlayStation 4-level performance at Nintendo Switch mobile resolution or better and you have some idea of what Valve's Steam Deck can actually deliver in terms of raw performance. With minimal tweaking, you're playing Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War at native resolution at 30fps and to put it frankly, that's quite a marvel to behold.
Forza Horizon 5 seemed to have issues in pre-release coverage (and during the review period too, to be honest) but since the last major SteamOS upgrade, I'm running it at a flat high preset with 4x MSAA at 30fps - it's like a mini-Xbox One rendition of the game, only with improved quality settings over the One S version. Doom Eternal? Whack up everything to ultra settings, engage dynamic resolution scaling to counter frame drops on big explosions and glory kills and you're locked to 60 frames per second from start to finish - incredible. There are limitations to be aware of and specific weaknesses to look out for, especially when CPU and GPU compete for system resources, but the fact is that this Steam Machine offers eye-opening levels of performance for any portable device, let alone a handheld.
Performance is the surprise package with Steam Deck because based on my tests, it effortlessly bests AMD's prior Vega-based graphics - even with titles that do not run on native Linux. To emphasise the class-leading performance of the RDNA 2 GPU core in the Van Gogh processor, I benched games including Control, Death Stranding and Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Steam Deck and an Asus Zephyrus G14 laptop, featuring a Ryzen 9 4900HS processor with Vega 8 graphics and a 35W TDP.
The not so good
The audio-video experience offered by the handheld is both good and bad. Concerns were raised about the quality of the screen when the first hardware reviews emerged a couple of weeks back and the display does feel compromised. Colour reproduction, black levels and brightness are all average and the omission of variable refresh rate (VRR) is a missed opportunity for a system where so many games unlocked sit between 45-60fps. Sit Steam Deck side-by-side with Switch OLED and it's a night and day difference in favour of the Nintendo machine and I think I even prefer the original Switch LCD display. Acoustics are a mixed bag: on the one hand, the speakers themselves are extremely impressive and it's rare that you can actually compliment a mobile system on its bass levels - this is great! However, fan noise is undoubtedly intrusive. It's not that the Steam Deck is loud as such, it's more that the high pitch of the fan under load is problematic.
Ultimately, achieving decent battery life comes down to the user tuning the game if necessary and using the in-game settings and system-level tools to get the battery life to where you want it. It's all about the maths: the maximum I've seen the Deck draw from the battery is in the region of 27W (15W for the processor, the balance on screen, storage, memory, WiFi etc) and the Deck has a 40wHr battery. 40 divided by 27 is 1.48, meaning that if you run demanding games flat-out, you'll get an hour-and-a-half of battery life. However, reduce settings, lower resolution and crucially use the 30fps frame-rate cap and the load on the battery reduces, improving system stamina. Valve does give you a useful performance metrics overlay which does all of the maths for you. So, we're looking at 1.5 hours or so running God of War on PS4 quality settings with an unlocked frame-rate, which rises to two hours if you cap to 30fps. On the flip side, I could run Cuphead at 60fps for well over six hours.
The inconvenient truth
There is one final warning though. Steam Deck looks like a console, but it's not a console. It's still very much a PC. Right now at least, there's not much in the way of hand-holding with the Deck and getting stuff to run well is usually down to the user to sort out. Balancing settings, figuring out battery life on any given game - it's all on you. Coming to the Deck after say, using a Switch, you realise how much developers and platform holders look after you in getting the most out of a resource-constrained piece of hardware.
Steam Deck gives you freedom, but it may take you some time to figure out what you're doing, and on a game by game basis no less. And yes, don't expect every game to work. I mentioned earlier that many titles don't work yet and you can face a situation where a game that used to work receives an update that takes the game out of commission on Steam Deck - Cyberpunk 2077 used to run, but the latest 1.5 update changes that, crashing on boot.
If the work-in-progress nature of compatibility and the constraints on battery life don't put you off, the notion that this isn't a console and that traditional PC settings tweakery remains a constant might make the difference. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Steam Deck experience is that you gain a greater appreciation for how developers and publishers do so much of the hard work for you - a situation that may improve as more games receive Deck-specific profiles.
Very cool piece of hardware, but not yet for the average gamer. An yes it's big
But they also say it's more comfortable to hold in your hands than the Switch.
