While no one is seriously calling the Steam Deck a perfect console,
you can't deny that it's been a pretty big hit since it released in early 2022.
But here's the elephant in the room. The Steam Deck is, really, a miniature PC.
It's just crammed into a chassis with joysticks and runs SteamOS instead of Windows.
And it's no secret that PC hardware ages in the minds of gamers much more quickly than consoles do.
The typical console has a lifespan of around five years, give or take a year or so,
but PC gamers tend to upgrade their hardware every two years, or at least this was the case
before the pandemic. So despite the current excitement around the Steam Deck, does the fact
that it's really a PC doom it to a disappointingly short lifespan? It's like this. When you go and
buy a console game, you know that the game should run properly in that console unless the developer
royally screwed up somewhere. Even if the console isn't as powerful as a current gen PC and the
graphics look a bit dated after a few years, you can still be confident that any title worth
its salt is still going to run as intended, or mostly free at bugs, because these games are
supposed to be written specifically for that console, or at least get ported over and tested
before release. But the Steam Deck is primarily built to run PC games off of the Steam Store.
And due to the virtually infinite hardware and software combinations that can exist on any given
PC, there is much more variation in how well a given PC game will run, meaning there's no guarantee
that the Steam Deck will be able to smoothly run new titles a few years down the road. However,
the Steam Deck does have a few tricks up its sleeve to give it more longevity than you might
have thought. Since the Steam Deck is designed primarily to be an on-the-go system instead of
a true hybrid console like the Switch, it can get away with having a screen with a resolution of
only 1280x800. The display is only 7 inches diagonally, so while it's not quite a retina display,
if you hold it like a foot away from your eyes, it's still pretty close. And why am I talking
about this? The relatively low resolution means that the GPU doesn't have to push too many pixels.
Good thing, as the AMD GPU inside only has about 1.6 teraflops of raw power.
Might sound like a lot, but it's roughly the same as the GTX 950. Right now, some notably
demanding AAA titles run on the Steam Deck at around 40 frames per second at medium-ish settings
at 800p. But that doesn't mean you should just dismiss the Steam Deck as an already outdated piece
of hardware that's only as powerful as a 7-year-old graphics card. The GPU inside the Steam Deck uses
AMD's RDNA2 architecture, which supports modern features like FidelityFX Super Resolution, allowing
smart upscaling that increases the framerate and battery life. It can even do ray tracing, and
although it most of the time only works when you dual boot with Windows, there's a good chance that
ray tracing will get more official support, making the Steam Deck even more compelling. Additionally,
expandable NVMe storage is available, and the Steam Deck itself comes with 16 gigs of RAM built
in. Enough for virtually any game out there right now, especially if you're running them at lower,
Steam Deck-friendly settings. Now, with all that being said, it still lacks the power of most gaming
laptops, but it's not trying to be a gaming laptop. Although it's targeting a slightly different
crowd than Nintendo's Switch, there's a lesson to be learned from the Switch. That console has been
going strong for nearly six years, with much less powerful hardware and older too, because it was
built to provide a specific kind of experience that wasn't centered around having the very best
graphics available. Similarly with the Steam Deck, Valve understood that while people would
certainly want to play the latest and greatest titles on it, there is also a massive library
of games on Steam that are still very popular despite being significantly less demanding.
And being able to play that huge library on the go is why the Steam Deck exists,
not to give you the same experience as your desktop battle station 6900 that you have at home.
Of course, the current iteration of the Steam Deck will be outdated one day. We're just saying that
it most likely isn't going to just die a premature death, especially as Valve continues to work on
its proton compatibility layer in order to make more of Steam games play nicely with the Steam Deck.
Remember that the Steam OS that it runs on is Linux-based. Valve has also all but confirmed that
there will be new versions of the Steam Deck in the future for when the current hardware just gets
long in the tooth. It's just worth remembering that not every gamer is chasing the most realistic
hair physics possible, pleasing as they may be. Thanks for watching guys, like,
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