A nice upgrade, but this makes the Steam Deck easily more expensive than any console especially one after Black Friday sales that it’s going up against.
I honestly do feel like the product would benefit hugely from a broader refresh.
Really impressive upgrades overall. It’s telling that Rich feels this is the best portable gaming device on the market despite it coming in at nearly half the price of more premium offerings.
And that includes the switch too, given the library.
The Switch is a 7 year old device that’s up for a completely new replacement within a year, but I do agree that Nintendo’s refusal to ever lower prices is making the comparison a bit absurd at this point.
TBH, if the no reverse compat rumors for Switch 2 are true, this changes nothing about how bad the matchup is here.
That very much depends on what you mean by best portable gaming device. It will have the best display and best hdr, but most other handhelds will handily outperform Steam Deck since the apu wasn’t upgraded.
Those other handhelds also consume A LOT more power.
The reviewer is saying that the Steam Deck makes the best trade-offs, even if price isn’t a deciding factor.
That’s bullshit, gamers Nexus showed how bad the Ally perform at 10-15w, it only takes the lead when running at unreasonable wattage that screw battery life, the gpd and Aya stuff is vastly more expensive and lower quality overall, the steam deck is definitely the best handheld you can get
And thats before you account for the miles better support that you’ll get from Valve. From all the widespread availability of parts and replacement guides, to knowing that you have proper warranty support rather than the largely worthless warranty that you get with no name brands.
Can the steam deck stream GeForce Now at 4K120? It would make the perfect device for me for normal gaming on the go and hooking it to my tv at home.
I looked it up and I’m seeing mentions that GeForce Now is restricted to 1440p60 when running in the browser, which seems to be how people usually run it on the Deck
Well the screen is 800p/90hz so… no?
and hooking it to my tv at home.
Nope. GeForce Now only supports 4K120 on Windows and the latest Steam Deck Windows driver does not support the hardware decoding necessary. Windows-based handhelds will work for you.
Yeah but at $500+ might as well save for a gaming pc 🥲. Thanks for the info :)
The $399 base model only exists to make the $549 model look so much better now. But I guess some people simply can’t squeeze that extra $150 in.
Dropping the shitty 64GB of eMMC makes it a lot more appealing than the old lineup, imo. I think $150 is reasonable for the incremental improvements.
It also exists to clear out any more stock of the OG parts. While the Deck OLED looks mostly the same, most of the internals were reworked/refined. Even down to the joystick PCBs.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the OLED makes it to the entry-level price point in a year or two. It’s impressive that Valve is sticking with the $399 price point, despite inflation since July 2021 making that the equivalent of $450 today.
A possible theory is that they already have a bunch of stocks still in the warehouse, so sticking to that price point for now make sense because there is no way that its gonna move those units quickly out of the warehouse if its not.
Steam deck needed this. The new handhelds were pulling in every where except for the touchpads. Wish that they had upgraded the processing power as well tho. DF has shown many new games are too “big” for the deck. Battery life js important but it would have been nice to have the option of more power when plugged in. At least this should put some major pressure on Lenovo and Asus to cut prices.
A performance boost isn’t that necessary, that would push it into Steam Deck 1.5 or something. Gotta admit that the Steam Deck is at the perfect “sweet spot” of performance/optimization/power usage.
They really didn’t. The fact that Linus had to move goalposts to make the Ally look better than the Deck in terms of price to performance ratio is telling how busted the Deck was compared to its peers.
Yet they still did. Dave2D brought up a good comparison when he mentioned the PS5 refresh and the difference between both is night and day. What makes this comparison special is the fact that Sony and Valve are in a similar position wherein they can afford to sell their hardware at a loss since they subsidize those losses through their own stores, yet the Deck OLED has all these upgrades while the PS5 refresh barely has any to justify its price boost.
Better yet, Valve still kept the prices close to the OG Deck while cutting the prices of the OG Steam Decks at the same time.
really hurts us who jsut got the OG Deck lol
In most cases, an oled screen is less efficient than lcd screens and will consume more power. The scenario in which oled should consumes less power is if most of the screen is dark and it can take advantage of per pixel dimming.
OLEDs are less efficient than high-end, energy efficient LCD displays but Valve was using low color gamut garbage ones in the base steam deck model so that doesn’t mean they cannot save a few watts from the screen by switching to OLED.
They compensated with a battery increase
Pretty sweet. Looking forward to 2024 though, knowing what’s coming from Strix point and other similar apu products. I think handheld devices 12-24 months from now are going to be absurdly powerful by comparison, especially at resolutions like 1280x800.
Maybe in five or so years most persons will play PC games on handheld… You never know.
Other than just vague “moar power” type stuff, I’d like to see the proper Deck 2 integrate Thunderbolt 5 for both docking and eGPU purposes. I know it’s niche, but it’s very cool stuff. And TB5 apparently has a 120/40 asymmetric mode that might result in an effective tripling of bandwidth to GPUs over TB3/4 (and more than doubling relative to current Oculink). At that level the bandwidth might be enough for some seriously good eGPU performance.
There’s a lot of great design ideas out there for gaming handhelds now. I personally love the GPD Win 4’s slide out physical keyboard and slick PSP style design. I expect Valve will continue to focus on ergonomics first and foremost, which is cool, but I’m just very happy the market seems rich with ideas right now.