- Just a little more. (clock ticking)
(bell rings) Now!
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,
(vinyl record scratches) 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 out 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 gonna 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 Killswitch,
very punny name, dbrand, by the way.
But there's nothing punny
about dbrand's upcoming case for the Steam Deck.
It kinda 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.
(bright electro music)
While I can assume that most of you have watched,
our previous Steam Deck coverage leading up 'til now,
I can't assume that you remember all the details.
So let's blitz through the basics.
Three configs with identical key specs, varied storage,
and aggressive console-like prices
that Valve CEO, Gabe Newell, described as painful to hit.
The highlights are the custom AMD SoC,
featuring four Zen 2 processing cores,
and RDNA 2 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 re-mappable rear paddles
that are, in my opinion, perfectly tuned to be easy to press
but nearly impossible to accidentally mash.
In games, you're gonna have the choice between analog sticks
a D-pad, a haptically enhanced dual touch pad 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 kajiggering.
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 Short Circuit,
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 touch screen yet?
Did I even mention lttstore.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 Aya Neo Next
and Valves repair-friendly approach to the joystick,
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 Aya Neo 2021 Pro and the OneXPlayer Mini.
And even though the fan looked kind of wimpy
in Valve's official tear down video,
get subbed by the way 'cause 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 SoC 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 slightly lower clock speed,
like on the order of 10 to 20 megahertz 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 SoC.
Hopefully we can dig into this in more depth
in our full review,
but even if we don't,
I'm comfortable saying that it's a non concern
because performance was nearly identical
after it settled in.
Also, this difference was not nearly as significant
as what we saw on the Aya Neo 2021 Pro.
And that is just the tip of the exciteberg
when it comes to thermal and power management.
Valve's promised TDP and clock controls mean that,
while you can just leave the SOC 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 hard cores,
you can also expect
to be able to fine tune your power profile,
to optimize for your exact use case.
Wanna 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 gonna be enormous.
Like I've seen haters out there.
They're like, this thing is not gonna take off.
You are wrong.
And now that I can show you these performance numbers
you're gonna 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 DirectX game with no native Linux port
but a platinum rating on ProtonDB, 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 ran 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 anti-aliasing, but come on!
And it looks great.
Ghostrunner continues Valve's dominance here
with the Steam Deck putting up a clear win and DirectX 11
and creating a new standard
for mobile gaming performance in DirectX 12.
I mean the Deck's lows here,
managed to nearly outstrip the average frame rates
of competing devices powered by Intel Xe 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
puts up an embarrassing fight here,
coming in dead last.
But we also observed
that even though we unlocked the frame rate
SoC 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 Valve first and foremost,
for getting Forza 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 then goes fast to catch up,
and then slow and fast to catch up.
But issues with Forza 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've peeled away
from the competition in Forza 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 gaming 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 SoC division put together
that in spite of its mere 40 watt hour battery,
that's almost 20% lower than the competition,
the Steam Deck puts up better battery longevity numbers
than its competitors.
That eight plus hours under light loads
is particularly interesting to me
as a retro emulation enthusiast.
I'm gonna put a lot of hours on this thing.
But it's not even the star of the show in my opinion.
Compared to the OneXPlayer Mini
and everything that I've seen from Aya,
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 1280 by 800 resolution
give it the sharpness of the OneXPlayer Mini,
but it's a very complete package.
Deep enough blacks,
that you won't find the glow of black bars distracting.
Indiscernible input lag in motion blur,
and out of the box color performance
that isn't gonna 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 coating on the 512 gig version
does a fantastic job of minimizing reflections in daylight
without having any noticeable,
in my experience, effect on sharpness.
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 three and a half millimeter 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 HTC One
and the latest generation M1 MacBook.
(engine revving)
(car crashes)
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 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, Valve,
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 wanna 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 Aya Neo Pro 2021
I would have immediately noticed the loose, cheap,
toy feel of the touch pads,
(motor whirring)
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 gonna fix it with software
but we're gonna 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 microSD 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 the game folder
off of your other desktop onto the Steam Deck.
And I also need to find out
what's gonna happen as game titles,
that are optimized for the blazing fast storage
of the PS5 and the Xbox series,
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 three terabytes of storage
in this thing.
It's not as much as the eight terabytes
that I have in my Aya Neo Next, right now,
thanks to its support for full size 2280 M.2 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 US$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,
'cause my top arm is up and the blood drains out of it.
But I'm not gonna 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 projected
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 Forza Horizon 5,
game compatibility across the Steam library,
and things like their auto resuming game play.
Let's say your Steam Deck
wasn't online the last time you were playing,
are you gonna overwrite a bunch of your progress
when you switch to your desktop?
We're gonna 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 Killswitch.
That's right,
dbrand made a case for the Steam Deck.
I have no idea how they got their hands on 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 dbrand's website.
We're gonna 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, 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 on this video?
- No. - Oh, crap.
Let's go back and find a spot to put one.