Valve has announced the Steam Deck, a portable gaming PC scheduled for release in December, a surprising new entry into the portable console gaming space. While this SteamOS device is not the first portable gaming PC (remember the GDP Win Max, SMACH Z, and Nvidia Shield? With this news, the portable gaming PC has gone from a niche, expensive piece of hardware to a device that may be recommended by its little brother over the Nintendo Switch.

AMD APUs with Zen 2 CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs with eight compute units power the Steam Deck, putting it in the same realm as the PS4 and Xbox One. comparing GPUs, the low-priced 1080p gaming PC, coming in 2019 for about $145 The best comparison is the budget AMD RX550, a popular card for.

"In terms of total APU power, that's about 2 teraflops." Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais told IGN." This should allow people to play the games in their libraries at 720p without any problems, and it provides a lot of horsepower for that."

Valve said Steam Deck will support ray tracing and variable rate shading. Also, since it is essentially a small gaming PC, it allows users to tweak graphics settings just as they would for PC games.

Videos provided by Valve show various types of games running fairly smoothly, including Death Stranding, Doom Eternal, and Jedi: Fallen Order. Bluetooth support allows wireless headphone Bluetooth support allows you to pair wireless headphones or even a wireless gamepad in case you don't like the trackpad or awkward button placement.

But, as with all portable technology, trying to have it all is an absurd Frankenstein that no one actually wants, while Valve makes the market leader Nintendo Switch look like an upgrade. smartly avoids a design approach where everything looks like a kitchen sink.

The cheapest model of the Steam Deck is only $50 more than the just-announced $350 Nintendo Switch OLED; the Steam Deck feels like the Switch Pro that most Nintendo fans still want, so it's easy to compare this to the Nintendo It's easy to compare it to the Switch because it already has quality-of-life features that the Switch doesn't have, including Bluetooth support, SSD storage (NVMe on the 256GB and 512GB models), and the ability to throw games onto the display without a docking station via USB-C. It is. Gabe Newell himself admits that it was "a struggle" to achieve the surprisingly low price.

I recently said that when Nintendo announced the OLED model of the Switch, portable PC makers need to think a bit about what they can do to make their systems more competitively priced; Valve has shown that by keeping it simple and affordable, it is possible. demonstrated that it can be done.