I'm really glad to see more Linux in the space and a more competitive price to the currently dominating device. That said, the controller layout looks beyond terrible. Even worse than joycons.
They are touchpads thankfully “Equipped with a Dual Intelligent Touchpad, immerse yourself in seamless gaming with precise touch points and intuitive swipe gestures. Enhance your gaming precision and immersion with native mouse simulation and gyroscope support.”
Taking lessons from Nintendo. At least it’s not backwards/downwards firing, but doing this kind of shit requires a manufacturer to be as daft as Dell. That’s not an easy feat to achieve
Most of the handheld benchmarks have been 3% or 4% higher compared to the Steamdeck at 15 watts, which often is a 1 to 4 FPS difference. This would explain why Valve isn’t in a hurry for a Steamdeck 2. If you plan of playing on battery, then that is what you’ll probably running around that if you plan on playing a while. The main advantage of these newer chips is when used plugged in.
The Steam Deck is already a couple of years old, so it’s not that hard to do. This thing has better specs across the board, with even the base model having twice the cores and threads as the Deck.
Steamdeck performance is still pretty good though, imo the most important factor in the handheld pc market is battery life. If games take a 5% hit to performance for an extra 40 minutes of battery life, the tradeoff becomes obvious to me.
Exactly. That's what nearly all of the competitors fail at. Sure, they might have more performance, are slimmer, have this feature or that advantage, but when it comes to actually getting games to work with them and the user experience, none are as good as Valve's handheld.
Avoid the OLED model (due to the danger of burn-in) and get it. It's a great device for portable gaming, both for games running directly on it and emulation up to and including Switch. It's fantastic for rediscovering games in your library. Just be aware that the slick user interface gets replaced by bog-standard (and extremely unpleasant to use on the small display) Linux clunkiness the moment you need to tweak anything outside of Steam and games.
Burn in? I've not seen anywhere that it's an actual concern. Any testing on the subject has had to push the screen far beyond what any normal user will do in order to see anything. The OLED model is superior to the original. That's not to say the original isn't worth it, but there's no need to actively avoid the new one outside of cost.
This is terrible advice. The OLED model is better across the board. The risk of burn-in is also wildly overstated.
The only reason to get the original model would be price.
Don’t get me wrong, I have an original and it’s great. I don’t consider the OLED model enough of an upgrade to justify the extra cost but I wouldn’t think twice if I was getting my first.
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