STEAM:STEAM ANNOUNCED A GAMING CONSOLE ,PC

valve been a giant in the industry for a long, long time. And sure games such as half-life portal left for dead have contributed to that. But without any doubt, their most significant success has been steam. The digital platform that has been synonymous with PC gaming for as long as it's been. And now that they've announced the steam deck, a handheld gaming PC, that seems like Valve's very own version of the switch.

There's plenty of excitement surrounding that product. A great deal has been revealed about the device since its recent announcement. And here we're going to go over the 15 biggest talking points.

STEAM OS

let's start with the basic, what exactly is the operating system that the steam deck is running on? Valve has confirmed that the steam deck runs on a new version of steam iOS, which has been modified and optimized specifically for handheld games built on Linux. Additionally valve also says the use of a proton compatibility layer in the.

No porting work for PC games is required for anybody, which means that any and all games you have on your steam library are automatically going to work on the steam deck right out of the box.

SPECIFICATIONS

So now the stuff that probably many of you have wondered as soon as this was announced, what about the specs? Well, they're not half bad. The steam deck has an AMD since CPU have four cores and eight threads running at 2.4 to 3.5 gigahertz at up to 448 giga flops. Meanwhile, the GPU is an eight rDNA with two compute units at one to 1.6 gigahertz at up to 1.6 terabytes.

The steam deck also uses a 16 gigabyte LP DDR five.

And what about the display and what resolution will the steam deck run games on? Well, for the ladder, the answer is seven 20 P or well, little over that the resolution is going to be 1280 by 800 at a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. Meanwhile, the screen is. Is LCD and seven inches in size, roughly the same as the upcoming switch.Oh, lit and bigger in turn than the base switch or the switch light. It's also a 60 Hertz display, which is of course a touchscreen and features. Ambient light sensors for detection and adjustment backlighting storage on the storage front. There's plenty to talk about as well. The steam we'll have three skews each with different internal members.

One we'll have a 64 gigabyte internal storage. The other we'll have 256 gigabytes of internal storage. And the third and final we'll have 512 gigabytes. Of course, as you might expect, the steam deck also comes with an SD card slot. So you can expand its storage by however much you want by simply plugging in an external SD card skew differences, the size of internal storage.

Isn't the only thing that will change across the steam decks. Three skews. Now, each is more powerful than the last several. The 256 gigabyte model for instance, uses an NBME SSD as opposed to the MMC drive of the base model. That in turn means that the 256 gigabyte model has faster speeds. This model comes with a steam community profile bundle as well.

Meanwhile, the 512 gigabyte model on top of all of that has even faster speeds along with the premium anti-glare edge screen, as well as a virtual keyboard. Each steam deck skew will also come with a carrying case, but it seems the 512 gigabyte models carrying case is going to be a bit more special than the other two inputs.

And what about the buttons and inputs of the device itself? Well, there's the usual stuff. Of course, the two analog sticks, the face buttons, a B X, Y the bumpers and triggers in the start and select buttons called options and view respect. On top of that seam deck also has the L four L five, our four and our five buttons on its grips on the back, which it seems are going to be programmable by the user.

Finally. And most crucially, the steam deck also has two track pads. One on each side of the screen below the analog sticks. Those who have used the steam controller will be familiar with is of course, but given the fact that the steam deck is claiming to be a portable gaming PC, those track pads are going to be.

Battery life

Battery life, it is a crucial aspect of any handheld device. And on this front, at least the steam deck seems a little underwhelming. Valve says the actual battery life of the device will obviously vary based on usage and what games you're playing. But the general range is about two to eight hours.

Speaking in an interview with IGN valves, peer loop, Griffin said, quote, there's a wide variety of experiences. It's about two to eight hours, depending on what you're doing, you can play portal two for four hours on this thing. If you limit it to 30 FPS, you're going to be playing for five to six hours.

doc, similar to the switch. The steam deck will also come with a dock. So you'll be able to connect your device to it, to play and use it on a bigger scale. There's much about the dock itself. That valve has yet to reveal such as what its price will be. We do know that it'll be sold separately, of course, but so far there is plenty that's up in the air.

As far as the dock is concerned. Ports, in terms of ports included in the handheld device, the steam deck seems to have most bases covered. There's also a type C port in addition to a micro SD card reader, which we've already spoken about. Meanwhile, there's also a headphone Jack and a built-in microphone for your multiplayer.

The dock also has several ports, including three USB ports in total, two of which are USB 2.0 with the third one being USB 3.1. Then there's the ethernet port. And HTMI 2.0 port and a display port 1.4 connectivity. In terms of connectivity, the steam deck is also doing about what you'd expect to device of this sort to do, which is the bare minimum.

It has wifi of course, with support for 2.4 gigahertz and five gigahertz. There's also a support for Bluetooth 5.0, which you'd assume was sort of a given in this day and age, but considering the fact that the Nintendo switch still doesn't have Bluetooth support, we are glad that the steam deck at least does valve has confirmed that there is no built-in cellular internet though.

Accessories, speaking of Bluetooth support as you'd expect, that means the steam deck is going to be compatible with plenty of accessories. What accessories? Exactly. Well, pretty much anything you can imagine. Headsets controllers, even air pods and the information to interview with IGN. Griffin has said that the devices, connectivity even allows for VR support though, as he put it, quote, you would need a lot to do that, but that's not really what we're optimizing the performance for.

Features crucially, the steam deck is going to boast all the features you'd expect to see in a device that's built around steam, the store itself, steam chat, remote play cloud saves, community features, notifications, and more have all been confirmed for the device. Additionally, and appropriately enough for a handheld gaming PC.

You're also going to have access to plenty of graphic settings and options. Speaking about that. Griffin told IGN quote, all the normal options that you'd get in PC games. That being said, most games start with a pretty balanced graphic setting that works pretty well out of the box. Other PC software velvet, the steam deck as literally a handheld gaming PC.

But that doesn't mean it's only good for gaming. According to them, it can pretty much do anything a PC can do. That means you could download and use other PC software and apps watch and stream videos, browse the internet and even download other game store. So, yes. In other words, you can totally use the epic games store on the street.

PRICING

Talk about an open platform, price, the steam, surprisingly reasonable pricing for all that it boasts and is capable of is perhaps one of its biggest strengths. There are three skews, of course, as we mentioned earlier, the 64 gigabyte model is going to cost $399, which is $100 costlier than a switch or an Xbox.

The same price as a digital only PS five and $100 cheaper than a disc drive, PS4 and Xbox series X. Then there's the 256 gigabyte model, which will cost $529. Finally the 512 gigabyte model is going to cost $649 launch. So when exactly is the steam deck launching soon, and you can start registering interest for the device on steam right now, but there is a cap.

The handheld is out in December, just a few months from now, but it'll be a limited launch December. We'll see. It released only in the United States, Canada, the UK and the European union valve has said that more regions are going to be added soon, but we don't know right now exactly what soon means.