There had been rumours, rumblings and actual, solid reporting of a handheld from Valve for some time now, but the hardware has finally broken cover – and it’s looking promising. Steam Deck is built on the same architectural building blocks as the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, downscaled and refactored for a handheld. With up to 1.6TF of GPU compute power aimed at delivering circa 720p gaming, the idea is to break PC gaming free from the traditional limitations of the PC itself. It’s a handheld designed to be as liberating as Nintendo Switch, but tied into the openness and sheer size of the Steam ecosystem.
There have been outsize PC handhelds before, of course, and it should be stressed that the Steam Deck is a bit of a beast. It measures 29.8cm across, almost 6cm longer than a standard Nintendo Switch, which already felt somewhat on the larger side for a mobile console. Its size is almost certainly dictated by two factors – the amount of power flowing through the machine and the need to dissipate the heat generated. More area effectively gives the hardware engineers more possibilities in keeping the device cool. The second crucial factor concerns battery life: the processor alone tops out at drawing 15W of power, so a meaty 40WHr battery is included and that requires space. Thankfully, with this much real estate available, containing the 7-inch 1280×800 60Hz LCD panel is not too much of a challenge.
The size of the machine also serves to house the complex controller set-up. Dual capacitive sticks (the machine knows when you’re touching them) are paired with all of the controller inputs you’ll find on a standard joypad, along with twin touchpads and programmable paddles on the rear of the unit. From a controller standpoint, the idea is to ensure complete compatibility with the PC library – an extension of the philosophy of the original Steam controller. Beyond that, it seems that every element of I/O from displays to peripherals is all routed through the USB-C port on the top of the machine, with the option to purchase an additional dock.
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