Valve Handheld: Steam Deck

New Previews up




Also Steve's done a teardown of the Steam Deck

 
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Looks like the focus is on the battery life. Valve promises 2-8 hours, but GN exhausted the battery in 1h27min by running demanding games and not capping fps at just 50% brightness.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-steam-deck-can-drain-its-battery-in-90-minutes-if-you-dont-cap-your-fps/
PC Gamer said:
GamersNexus ran a range of battery tests, including Devil May Cry 5 with an uncapped framerate and Vsync disabled. With those settings the Steam Deck lasted 87 minutes—and that was with brightness set to 50%. For comparison, DMC 5 lasted a full two hours with Vsync enabled, slightly lower settings, and a 60 fps framerate cap.

YouTuber The Phawx also ran intensive battery life tests to determine the worst case performance with the Steam Deck, and came to a very similar number using the game Control: 85-90 minutes. "If you turn Vsync off and have low settings and 90 fps when there's no reason to—you have a 60Hz display—you can inadvertently have terrible battery life," he says. Both channels tested one of the other games Valve made available for previews, Dead Cells, and got six hours of battery life with Vsync enabled. It's a sign that indie games and older, less graphically demanding PC games will likely be able to run for several hours on the Steam Deck, though neither test came close to Valve's stated upper limit. "For the life of me, I never managed to get to eight hours," The Phawx said.

This testing highlights one of the key differences between the Steam Deck and traditional game consoles like the Nintendo Switch: configuring your games with the proper settings will be vital to getting the most juice out of the system. In Forza Horizon 5, The Phawx was able to get around four hours of battery life by locking the framerate to 30 fps and making a few settings adjustments.

Shooting for 60 fps will broadly mean lower battery life in modern games—about two hours, judging by what we've seen so far—but older and lighter games should be more in the 4-6 hour range.

One other bit of good news from GamersNexus's testing: the Steam Deck is fairly quick to charge. While turned on (and idle), the Steam Deck can charge to 80% battery in 100 minutes. It'll take another 80 minutes to reach a full charge—just like smartphones, the Steam Deck slows its charging rate after a certain point to preserve the longevity of the lithium-ion battery.
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90min - 6 hour battery life.
80% charge in 100min; 100% charge in 3 hrs
 
Keeping my fingers crossed that once purchase confirmations start going out at the end of the month that people drop their order. I didn’t preorder for about a week so my place in line is pretty low. I don’t want one right away but have some travel coming up later in the year and would love to have a new toy.
 
Madmick said:
Looks like the focus is on the battery life. Valve promises 2-8 hours, but GN exhausted the battery in 1h27min by running demanding games without capping fps at just 50% brightness.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-steam-deck-can-drain-its-battery-in-90-minutes-if-you-dont-cap-your-fps/

90min - 6 hour battery life.
80% charge in 100min; 100% charge in 3 hrs
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Thx for the info

6 hours for dead cells is pretty great, as I'm likely to use this more for older/indie games and emulation.

What does the switch get for less demanding games?

I'm at work and it's dead. It would be nice to be able to play Dying Light 2 on the go as well, with my cloud save.
 
GtehMVP said:
Thx for the info

6 hours for dead cells is pretty great, as I'm likely to use this more for older/indie games and emulation.

What does the switch get for less demanding games?

I'm at work and it's dead. It would be nice to be able to play Dying Light 2 on the go as well, with my cloud save.
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Nintendo promises 4.5 - 9.0 hrs of battery life, but Tom's Hardware found this in testing. As PC Gamer noted, it probably doesn't vary as much because there aren't so many different settings:

Nintendo Switch battery life results
  • 5:00 = Nintendo Switch OLED
  • 4:40 = Nintendo Switch (2019 Model)
  • 3:28 = Nintendo Switch (Launch Model)
  • 3:19 = Nintendo Switch Lite
 
A few interesting things could play out it supports a number of windows games. These games like Horizon 5 usually requires a decent GPU so for it to even run it's impressive. The other is Valve said it supports VR. Unlikely they will brag about this for their current headset. This is due towards needing lighthouses so portability is shot so a stand alone headset could be in the works and that could be amazing.
 
Battery life is too short and price is a little too much. It requires you to maintain an online connection for games?
 
I don't have one on order but I think it is easier to find a place to plug it in. It's a fairly complex piece of hardware even if it's only a laptop PC. There is tons of work keeping it cool an reducing energy use. It's impressive and the work Valve put in for ergonomics an cooling. Think of it a portable Playstation 5 anyone remember when Sony made a portable Playstation PSP?
 
I wouldn't mind having this if I was doing a cross country trip on a train or something. I am just worried about being online all the time. I am assuming the device gets super hot when you charge it. I am also interested in what can you do if device is stolen. Can you brick it? I live in a city and I imagine someone snatching/running away with it
 
Emails are supposed to come out tomorrow to complete your purchase. I'm not in the first wave but hoping to have the ability to buy in the next couple of months. Hoping enough people opt out to complete their order that I love up in line.

I know I won't have one, but I will be obsessively checking my emails over the weekend hoping to have a buy order.
 
Dinkin_Flicka said:
Emails are supposed to come out tomorrow to complete your purchase. I'm not in the first wave but hoping to have the ability to buy in the next couple of months. Hoping enough people opt out to complete their order that I love up in line.

I know I won't have one, but I will be obsessively checking my emails over the weekend hoping to have a buy order.
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I checked mine the other day it says "After Q2"
<DCrying>
 
NoSmilez said:
Battery life is too short and price is a little too much. It requires you to maintain an online connection for games?
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kenetics said:
This , battery life way to short.
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And this is why I'm so frustrated the Apple M1 processors aren't available to PC Gamers.

They could build a device with otherwise the exact same specifications, and it would be far more powerful, graphically, yet with the same battery you'd get like 9+ hours of battery life. That's how freakishly dominant the M1 processor is.
 
Madmick said:
And this is why I'm so frustrated the Apple M1 processors aren't available to PC Gamers.

They could build a device with otherwise the exact same specifications, and it would be far more powerful, graphically, yet with the same battery you'd get like 9+ hours of battery life. That's how freakishly dominant the M1 processor is.
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Isn't the Apple M1 an ARM processor and not an x86 processor, meaning compatibility is zilch without questionable emulation?
 
Emails to complete purchase orders are out now. Hoping that after this weekend when the initial orders are processed that my timeframe gets updated to better than “sometime after Q2 2022”.
 
I'm really hopeful for this, it looks great.
 
Dinkin_Flicka said:
Emails to complete purchase orders are out now. Hoping that after this weekend when the initial orders are processed that my timeframe gets updated to better than “sometime after Q2 2022”.
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Same hope, that summer release is too damn far.
 
Neph said:
Isn't the Apple M1 an ARM processor and not an x86 processor, meaning compatibility is zilch without questionable emulation?
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Yeah, that's the point. ARM is no longer the red-headed stepchild it once was. Apple already integrated x64-bit support into ARM years ago, now. The M1 and the M1 Max are principally aimed at stuff like video editing (for both professionals and the casual market). In some of the most robust software that is often used for benchmarking on PCs it's competing with the highest-end desktop PCs you can build right now. For content creators like YouTubers it is a bit of a miracle. Review the video PEB shared earlier in the Hardware thread:
PEB said:
Before people start I just thought it was interesting.

Click to expand...
 
Madmick said:
Yeah, that's the point. ARM is no longer the red-headed stepchild it once was. Apple already integrated x64-bit support into ARM years ago, now. The M1 and the M1 Max are principally aimed at stuff like video editing (for both professionals and the casual market). In some of the most robust software that is often used for benchmarking on PCs it's competing with the highest-end desktop PCs you can build right now. For content creators like YouTubers it is a bit of a miracle. Review the video PEB shared earlier in the Hardware thread:
Click to expand...

Thanks man. Any idea if this will compete with desktop PCs for gaming? If so do you have a guess for when?

cheers
 
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