Having the entire Steam catalog in the palm of your hands is such an exciting idea that it’s hard not to get excited about the Steam Deck, the portable PC developed by Valve. For now, says the study responsible for Half Life, there is no Steam game that does not work on the Steam Deck, and the current market trend to ask for more resolution and more FPS seems to encourage this to continue for many more years, in the meantime Steam Deck targets 30FPS and 800p as the standard for its games.
Speaking to IGN, one of the engineers in charge of this portable Valve “console” has commented that “if people continue to value games with high resolution and high frame rates, I think the content will really suit our goal. 800p and 30 Hz, “says Pierre-Loup Griffais.
In the previous days it had already been commented that depending on the rate of images per second we would gain more autonomy with the battery. For example, Valve said, playing Portal 2 at 30FPS guarantees about five hours of battery life. In spite of everything, the parents of Steam still have many more tests ahead of them to carry out, since if someone chose to prioritize performance over resolution, “we could be in a situation that would generate counterparts, although for now we have not seen it,” he adds .
Another of the Steam Deck engineers has also highlighted that the technology of the machine is similar to that of the new generation platforms so he is confident in the good performance of the games of the future. “I think a very important aspect is that we are using the latest generation of GPUs from AMD,” says Yazan Aldehayyat. “We are using a new generation of AMD CPUs, and even the memory itself, we are using LPDDR5, which is new to the industry. I think we could be one of the first products to showcase this new memory technology. And all of this , gives us good guarantees for the future. ” Sharing the RDNA 2 architecture used by the Xbox Series or PlayStation 5, you expect optimizing games on the Steam Deck to be really straightforward.
We are not the only ones with this architecture,” he stresses, “so any optimization that game developers do for this new architecture will work for all systems that use it. So we are in a great moment.” Expectations from Valve couldn’t be more positive. As soon as he announced the machine, Gabe Newell said that he expects Steam Deck to sell millions, which in view of the expectation it has generated does not seem unreasonable. Less considering that it debuted as Steam’s third best-selling product just a few hours after opening its reservation campaign.