Valve’s designers and coders are confident that the company’s upcoming portable gaming console can handle any game that you throw at it.
Ever since its reveal, the Valve Steam Deck has the gaming community excited for what’s to come. It has plenty of features and is seen as a direct competitor to the Nintendo Switch, even though Valve's portable gaming machine is essentially a console with PC hardware.
That said, those who are responsible for Steam Deck are certain that the console can handle any game found in the Steam Library.
Respectable Frame Rates
In a video, Pierre-Loup Griffais, Valve programmer and coder, said that they haven’t come across anything that Steam Deck couldn’t handle.
To be clear, Griffais noted that the devs are looking at a 30 FPS minimum at 800p, which is the native resolution of the console’s display (1280x800).
While some people worry about the Steam Deck not being able to take full advantage of the hardware, Griffais clarified some things in a tweet.
The "30 FPS target" refers to the floor of what we consider playable in our performance testing; games we've tested and shown have consistently met and exceeded that bar so far. There will also be an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf vs. battery life.
— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) July 25, 2021
He said that the 30 FPS target is what the devs consider as “playable” during their performance testing. The games that they’ve tested passed while some titles exceeded expectations.
Griffais went on to say that you will have the freedom to favor more performance or sustainability if you want the console to last longer on a single charge.
“There will also be an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf vs. battery life,” he tweeted.
Now, even if the Steam Deck is a capable machine, the developers will still have to resolve the issue with Proton first, especially when it comes to adding support for games that have strict anti-cheat measures.
Steam Deck vs. Nintendo Switch
In other news, some people at Valve have chimed in their opinions regarding Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch comparisons.
Before anything, Valve’s console drew some comparisons to Nintendo Switch, probably because they have roughly similar designs and the fact that Steam Deck also has a docking station that you can connect to a TV.
Greg Coomer, Valve designer, said that although the design does have some resemblance to Switch, their main intention of creating the Steam Deck was for the audience to have an additional platform to play Steam games.
In other words, the similarities to the Switch are just an “artifact” of how the designers proceeded with their design direction.
Anyway, are you confident that Steam Deck can actually handle every game in the Library?
