[Hardware] Steam Deck Hands-On: PC Gaming in My Hands

[Warlock-]

 

Valve's gaming handheld makes a strong first impression.

 

Less than a month ago, Valve announced the Steam Deck, its AMD Zen 2-based take on portable PC gaming. The next day, pre-orders opened, making all of Steam, the company's launcher and game distribution store creak under the load, signalling vast interest in the Steam Deck, as it was swiftly backordered to Q2 2022. We had the opportunity to go hands -on with the handheld at Valve's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington to see what you'll get before you need to finalize that reservation when the device starts shipping this December. The major caveats to keep in mind are that what we saw was not the finalized hardware or software, but rather Valve's "EV2" prototypes, which will be shipping to developers as the official launch approaches. So while the device isn't finalized, it's pretty close. The biggest changes you might see, people who work on the console told me, are largely fit and finish, including the possibility of some different plastics, as well as a bunch of work to get the software done in time for launch. I primarily got to spend my time with the 512GB model, the high-end, $ 699 device with the etched-glass, anti-glare display. That being said, a unit with the glossy display was there, too. More on the display differences later. The games pre-installed on the units (I could not install games of my choice, nor could I log into my account) were on a mix of the internal storage and an SD card.

 

Wide, But Not Unwieldy

 

My first impression was that the Steam Deck is far larger than I expected. It is tall and it is wide. It feels surprisingly natural in the hands, though. Don't get me wrong. You can feel that 1.47-pound weight, but it's pretty evenly distributed across both sides of the system. If you've done most of your handheld gaming lately on a Nintendo Switch, you're going to feel a difference. The Steam Deck is far heavier, but that's the tradeoff for its capabilities.

 

My hands are a fairly average size for my stature (I'm not particularly tall or lanky), but Valve’s handheld still fit well in them. I had no trouble reaching any of the buttons. A developer, who I used as a hand model in the photos below, shows off how the Steam Deck looks with someone with larger hands.

 

Much has been made online about the placement of the buttons, directional pad and joysticks. I'm happy to report that, after about two hours with the system, that doesn't seem to be a big deal. While it's not the layout that I'm used to after playing for years with both Microsoft and Sony's controllers, as well as handhelds like the Switch, I didn't find myself making any unexpected mistakes due to button and control placement. That said, the touchpads are under both sticks and might take some getting used to. When I used the touchpad in first-person shooters like Doom Eternal and Halo 4, I had to reach a bit in a way I wasn't used to, over the sticks, to get to the ABXY buttons. I suspect this is something I could get used to, but I'll need more time with the system to know for sure. For anyone worried about stick drift, all I can do is tell you that these control sticks feel substantial. There's a sense of weight that makes them feel premium. There's the slightest bit of resistance, particularly when pushing them in as L3 and R3 buttons, like I did to run around in Control. The triggers and bumpers were comfortable, and the buttons felt nice and clicky. There are four mappable buttons on the back of the device, but those weren't quite working in the games I played. The only thing to get used to was heft, and I got over that pretty quickly.

 

Gaming on Steam Deck

 

One of the first things I was invited to do when I started playing with the Steam Deck was to unplug it. It was juiced up, and unlike gaming laptops, there's no extra power when the unit is plugged in. This creates a consistent experience, and the thermal design is optimized for it. Might as well sit back and relax.

 

The Steam Deck is powered by an AMD APU, using a Zen 2 CPU with 4 CPU cores and 8 threads and GPU power coming from 8 RDNA 2 compute units. It boasts 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. There are three storage options: 64GB eMMB (PCIe Gen 2 x1) in the $ 399 base model, a 256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4) in the $ 529 mid-range configuration, and a 512GB SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4) in the top-end, $ 649 version. The performance you get out of the Steam Deck will rely very much on the games you play and how you're willing to run them. Stardew Valley, the indie farming RPG, ran as well on Steam Deck as anywhere else I've ever played it as soon as I started it up. But when it gets to more intensive games, you may have decisions to make.

 

Games on display included Hades, Halo 4, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, The Ascent, Control, Dead Cells, Death Stranding, Disco Elysium, Doom Eternal, Guilty Gear Strive, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Sunset Overdrive, Prey, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Stardew Valley, Sea of Thieves, Death's Door, Factoria, Dying Light: The Following, The Outer Worlds, and Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered. I gravitated toward one of my favorite games of the last few years, Control, to see how it performed. In the opening sequences and some early battles, it was going well. I noticed, however, that the primary enemies in the game, the Hiss, had very little detail when I played at the autodetected settings: 1280 x 800 on low. It had seemed, to my eye, to be running at around 30 fps - perhaps a bit over. When I switched to medium settings, the game looked better, but got noticeably choppy in some sequences.