We can no longer even go on vacation in peace. Valve has launched a press release announcing its portable “console”, the Steam Deck, which is none other than a PC under AMD architecture in a Switch template. It is announced as available in the 1st quarter of 2022, but reservations are already open.
It's a dramatic turn of events. Valve has launched, in a fairly discreet way, a new gaming platform: the Steam Deck. Make no mistake, this is a true gaming-optimized PC, capable of launching your Steam library in a resolution, according to early testing, of 720p without flinching at the default settings. The Nintendo Switch-like beast is powered by AMD's Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture, supported by 16 GB of RAM.
Its USB-C port will allow you to use a dock (not yet presented), and more generally, to connect keyboard, mouse, monitor or any other supported PC peripheral. The home OS Steam OS takes care of managing everything, but you are free to install Windows there. When we tell you it's a Pocket PC, we're not lying to you.
Our colleagues IGN France, who were able to test the Steam Deck before their time, have published a long article and tells us a little more about ergonomics, both hardware and software. They say to each other "Impressed" by the console and by its price, “Attractive to people entering the PC world, or looking for a more powerful alternative to the Nintendo Switch. "
3 models, with 3 different capacities, available for pre-order: € 419 for the 64 GB eMMC model (we cannot even put Train Sim World and its DLCs…), € 549 for the 256 GB (faster NVMe storage), € 679 for the 512 GB (NVMe also + glass with anti-reflective treatment).