just a little more no we are finally ready to fully explore
the hardware of the steam deck that includes thermals battery life and even
performance in an assortment of valve approved titles that range from this is
a great experience to I am really surprised they wanted us to talk about
this I could not be more excited the
seeds of the steam deck were planted over a decade ago with the announcement
of Steam Big Picture Mode I love that this page is still up by the way you
guys and with all the Innovations packed into it whether you realize it yet or
not you are looking at what is arguably the most Innovative gaming PC in 20
years more maybe now a lot of the secret
sauce is software but given its current
rough edges we're not going to be showing that until valve lifts a
separate embargo but there is still a lot to jump into here starting with this
message from our sponsor project kill switch very punny Nam de by the way but
there's nothing fny about D Brand's upcoming case for the steam deck it kind
of looks like their grip phone cases and their horrible attitude had a baby and
then gave it a Cheesy name you can check out the teaser page at the link down
below while I can assume that most of you have watched our preview steam deck
coverage leading up till now I can't assume that you remember the details so
let's Blitz through the basics three configs with identical key specs varied
storage and aggressive conso like prices that valve CEO Gabe n described as
painful to hit the highlights are the custom amdoc featuring 4 zen2 processing
cores and rdna2 Graphics mobile ddr5
memory and what essentially amounts to an integrated steam controller giving
Gamers a whopping five Z inputs per side
including the joystick clicks and remap rear paddles that are in my opinion
perfectly tuned to be easy to press but nearly impossible to accidentally Mash
in games you're going to have the choice between analog sticks a d-pad a
haptically enhanced dual touchpad thing
and even onboard gyro controls that by default are activated by placing a
finger on the capacitive surface of the right joystick it is an impressive
arsenal of input options that promises to make everything from Shooters to
Mouse dependent games like Civ enjoyable with a little bit of kaj jiggering of
course promises mean nothing if the hardware doesn't live up to the hype and
I want to start with the controller since my rushed Hands-On and my initial
unboxing on ShortCircuit I have logged hours of gaming time on the steam deck
and while I can reach every button
comfortably from a neutral relaxed position I do find a number of them a
little awkward to use and I don't really know how to describe this other than to
say it's kind of like spooning someone taller than you cuddling is fine but
don't try and do anything too ambitious or you might strain a muscle if you have
larger hands you might not share these concerns but my wife and I both had
similar issues albeit with different buttons for example I struggled to reach
the shoulders without shifting my grip a little and she found the abxy was a
little bit awkward for her but Jake had no issues at all so your mileage may
vary and even for myself I think it's a small price to pay for the unprecedented
input flexibility afforded by valves design and did I even mention the
touchcreen yet did I even mention LTT Store.com yet get a water bottle and it
gets even better the feel of the sticks buttons triggers and even the d-pad
which I am very particular about are all
right up there with my favorite console controllers the joysticks in particular
are Miles Ahead of every other handheld that I have touched with the exception
of the I next and valves repair friendly approaching to the joysticks promises a
long gaming life for your deck of course a big part of Hardware longevity is
Cooling and I'm extremely pleased to say that temperatures were well under
control in all of our test scenarios the thoughtful design of the deck keeps
touch surfaces at or near skin temperature even during an extended
gaming session which is a big advantage over more compact portable gaming PCs
like the I Neo 2021 Pro and the 1X player mini and even though the fan
looked kind of wimpy in valves official ter tear down video get subbed by the
way cuz our own tear down is coming it managed to do its job effectively and
without complaint even in control a demanding AAA game on valves approved
list even in the most aggressive s so power profile which allows it to draw
its full 25 watts we saw both CPU and
GPU temps that were well within the range that we'd consider safe all while
remaining at the reasonable noise levels that we recorded in our tests one Oddity
we observed though the steam deck ran at its peak clock rate for about 15 minutes
after which it appeared to settle into a ever so slightly lower clock speed like
on the order of 10 to 20 MHz slower now
at this time we don't have a tool to measure fan RPM but one Theory we came
up with just now we have not verified this is that we might have reached
valve's Target GPU temperature and then when the fan ramped up maybe the system
was left with slightly less power budget for the S so hopefully we can dig into
this in more depth than our full review but but even if we don't I'm comfortable
saying that it's a non-c concern because performance was nearly identical after
it settled in also this difference was not nearly as significant as what we saw
on the iono 2021 Pro and that is just
the tip of the excite Berg when it comes to Thermal and power management valve's
promised TDP and clock controls mean that while you can just leave the S so
on auto and for most people we'd recommend doing just that and using FPS
limits to extend your battery life while offering predictable performance
for the hardc you can also expect to be able to fine-tune your power profile to
optimize for your exact use case want to
emulate PS3 games and need your CPU going hard for example you'll be able to
and I'm really excited to see what the community comes up with here and the
community for this thing do not kid yourself is going to be enormous like
I've seen haters out there that are like this thing is not going to take off you
are wrong and now that I can show you these performance numbers you are going
to see just how wrong you were it's
important to keep in mind that valve did hand select each of the games for our
preview embargo today but I also haven't seen anything to make me believe that
their goal was to mislead us about the deck's capabilities so kicking things
off control is a direct X game with no native Linux Port but a platinum rating
on proton DB meaning that it should run perfectly on Linux out of the box and
that's exactly what we saw more than
perfect I'd say given that the steam deck absolutely r and away with the
performance Crown here another worth mentioning side note is that on a screen
this size even at the low preset control looks absolutely amazing what a time to
be alive right continuing on Devil May Cry 5 is arguably an even bigger win for
the steam deck which basically never dipped under 70 FPS on medium settings
with anti-aliasing enabled okay it's Cheapo basic antialiasing but come on
and it looks great ghost Runner continues valve dominance here with the
steam deck putting up a clear win in directx11 and creating a new standard
for mobile gaming performance in directx12 I mean the decks lows here
managed to nearly outstrip the average frame rates of competing devices powered
by Intel XC graphics and AMD's last gen Vega architecture gpus but it also isn't
a completely one-sided fight here dead cells is the first of our why did valve
want us to look at this games on the surface it actually seems like the steam
deck put up an embarrassing fight here coming in dead last but we also observed
that even though we unlocked the frame rate s so power consumption was quite
low in this game we've got a couple of theories about this maybe around
optimization or valve doing something in the background to save power rather than
push past 150 FPS but we're not sure at
this time and we have no reassuring explanation for this next one massive
credit to Val first and foremost for getting forsa Horizon 5 a Microsoft game
running at all but while The in-game Benchmark reports industry-leading
performance here the gameplay experience does not hold up both Jake and I
experienced what I would describe as kind of a physics rubber banding effect
where the animation stays smooth true to
the frame rate report but the experience of playing the game is uneven and
jarring it kind of reminds me of when a video call gets buffered and then the
speaker's voice goes slow and goes fast to catch and slow and fast to catch up
but issues with forsa aside two things are clear one is that the hardware is
damn impressive I mean I'm sure that if we had a working Windows GPU driver in
time for this preview the steam deck would have peeled away from the competition infor as well and the second
is that valve software team and the open source Community are just s tier there's
no other way to put it the fact that any of this works at all is a modern
technological miracle there's a lot more to get aing than FPS however and
honestly this is where the steam deck both shines and loses some of its luster
I mean it speaks volume about the efficiency of the Apu that AMD's custom
s so division put together that in spite of its mere 40w hour battery that's
almost 20% lower than the competition the steam deck puts up better battery
longevity numbers than its competitors
that 8 plus hours under light loads is particularly interesting to me as a
retro emulation Enthusiast I'm going to put a lot hours on this thing but it's
not even the star of the show in my opinion compared to the 1X player mini
and everything that I've seen from ya including the limited edition next
preview unit that they sent me the screen on the steam deck stands out as
just plain better it's not shockingly vibrant like the switch OLED nor does
its 1280x 800 resolution give it the sharpness of the 1X player mini but it's
a very complete package deep enough
blacks that you won't find the glow of black bars distracting IND discernable
input leg and motion blur and outof the-box color performance that isn't
going to win any awards but didn't look off either until we'd run diagnostic
tests in a controlled environment the best thing about it to me though was the
excellent exemplary job that valve has done of making the display usable under
any conditions the anti-glare coding on the 512 gig version does a fantastic job
of minimizing Reflections in daylight without having any noticeable in my
experience effect on Shar Ness but I
should make it clear that I don't think I would personally spend the extra if I
didn't need more storage since I find myself doing the vast majority of my
gaming at night and regardless of screen finish the steam deck is by far the most
comfortable handheld that I own to look at in a dimly lit environment it just
gets so much dimmer than anything else
and details like that really illustrate the care and attention that valve has
poured into this project do not underestimate the difficulty of
producing a screen that manages acceptable color performance across such
a wide range of brightness settings and believe it or not the screen pales in
comparison to the speakers I was able to use Bluetooth or 3 and2 mm headphones no
problem they performed as expected but the speakers man the other devices that
I'm reminded of when gaming on the steam deck are the original HTC1 and the
latest generation M1 MacBook
like to be clear they're still tiny speakers valve can't bend the laws of
physics but I was genuinely surprised that a pair of drivers this small could
create a Sound Stage this wide as I've have cars ripping past me in Forza
Horizon 5 I mean I guess given the performance of both the nearfield
speakers and the microphone array on the index VR headset I shouldn't be that
surprised so Val can you hurry up and make a gaming headset already I promise
you it would immediately obsolete most of the other crap that exists and you
would sell millions seriously I promise
but I said it wasn't all good right I want to talk about haptics by valve's
own admission Rumble was an afterthought on the steam deck compared to the space
Power and cost downsides they felt that the benefit was too small and
respectfully I disagree even if I hadn't already experienced the tight responsive
linear Motors in the io Pro 2021 I would have immediately noticed the loose cheap
toy feel of the
touchpads both when using them as a mousing surface and when they're
providing pseudo haptic feedback for the rest of the controller there's just no
nice way to put this at the moment haptics on this device are a poo stain
on an otherwise crisp white sheet and
valve says they're going to fix it with software but we're going to have to wait
for the full review embargo to find out if I need to stop mashing X for doubt
over here sorry here's my x button though valve hasn't given me much reason
to doubt them yet they claimed at the Hands-On that both the internal SSD and
the micro SD card would manage similar load times and I didn't believe them but
so far it appears as though I was wrong I still do need to get more detail from
them about whether this involved some kind of fancy trickery or if you can
actually just copy paste a game folder off of your other desktop onto the steam
deck and I also need to find out what's going to happen as game titles that are
optimized for the Blazing fast storage of the PS5 and the Xbox serieses start
to arrive but for the time being I can say this you can expect to slot a
terabyte of storage into your steam Deck with very little compromise to the
experience and what that means is that if you're brave enough to tear down your
deck and upgrade it with the latest from Micron you could rock as much as 3
terabyt of storage in this thing it's not as much as the 8 terabytes that I
have in my IU next right now thanks to its support for full-size 22 adm. two
drives but that kind of brings up an awkward
conversation that we needed to have at some point I have spent a lot of this
video talking about the steam deck compared to competing handheld gaming
PCs but the truth is that there aren't
any competing handheld gaming PCs I mean obviously there are other handheld
gaming PCs we showed them in the video it's just that they don't compete with
the steam deck in the same way that a BMW M5 doesn't compete with a Tesla
Model 3 sure they both have four wheels and they get you from point A to point B
and quickly but those vehicles are built for very different customers and at very
different price points that's the bottom line here starting at $400 the steam
deck is less than half the price of anything else we looked at in this video
so I could complain that the tactile feel of the Steam and quick access menu
buttons are poo poo or that the width of the deck means that playing in unusual
positions like lying on my side in bed
is a little uncomfortable cuz my top ARM is up and the blood drains out of it but
I'm not going to complain about those things because it is half the price and
even the top spec one has a pretty compelling value proposition with the
anti-glare screen and the surprisingly nice included carrying case and this is
the real kicker if valve follows through on even half of their game compatibility
promises the steam deck is protected to have more titles available at launch
than any other game console in history
so it's time to order a steam deck ladies and gentlemen is what I would say
if I was irresponsible because the software is still make or break for this
puppy and valve has some big questions to answer about funky stuff like the
game engine rubber banding that we saw in for of horizon 5 game compatibility
across the steam library and things like
their autor resuming gameplay let's say your steam deck wasn't online the last
time you were playing are you going to override a bunch of your progress when
you switch to your desktop we're going to have a lot to talk about next time
when we get to look at the software and I have a lot to tell you about project
kill switch that's right dbrand made a case for the steam deck I have no idea
how they got their handson one to prototype this thing but it looks like
kind of like their grip case it's got this sort of ruggedized rubberized
finish to it looks like it's going to be extremely comfortable and one of the
features I'm really looking forward to is the kickstand in the back because
that is one thing valve did not include that I think Nintendo made pretty clear
is a good feature to have having a little kickstand you can plug in your
dongle get a wireless controller plugged into this thing and that is going to be
a freaking awesome experience on the plane that valve just doesn't really
have an answer to out of the box so guys
you can check out the product page on D Brand's website we're going to have that
link down below they're bad people that make good products that's all you really
need to know about them JK JK JK love you
dbrand and lots of love to valve for
sending this over for the preview I look forward to covering it in more depth as
we go forward did I include an LTT Store mention in this video no oh crap let's
go back and find a spot