A store listing for the Steam Deck has appeared, and it looks like Valve is getting in on the action of creating handheld gaming PCs, but this time with the power to actually play your games.
The Steam Deck will be powered by a custom APU using AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures, which is roughly equivalent to an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card and a Ryzen 3000 processor. Valve claims that this hardware will be more than enough to play all the AAA games in your Steam library, something that current handheld gaming PCs simply can’t handle.
The APU will feature a 4-core/8-thread processor and a GPU with 8 RDNA 2 CUs. To put that in perspective, the weakest AMD RDNA 2 GPU right now is the Radeon RX 6700 XT, which has 40 compute units. That means that while this handheld PC should be able to play most games, it’s probably going to be limited to medium settings at its native resolution of 1,280 x 800 in the most demanding PC games.
It will also feature 16GB of RAM and will start with just 64GB of eMMC storage, with more premium models including more capacious (and faster) NVMe SSDs.
And, just like the ill-fated Steam Machines, this will also be running on SteamOS, which means that you won’t be able to play your whole gaming library natively, unless you can load Windows 10 or Windows 11 alongside the Linux-based native OS.
If you want to get your hands on the Steam Deck, it will ship in December 2021, but you can reserve one of your own here on July 16 at 10am PDT (1pm EST, 6pm GMT)
This is a developing story…