ASUS announced a potent Steam Deck competitor May 11th and released the spec sheets for two models that vary in more ways than the different Steam Deck options from Valve. We’ll be looking at the official tech specs for each device and comparing them side by side. There’s some juicy differences ahead, so let’s get started!
In this comparison article, we’ll briefly examine three solutions that let you game from the comfort of your very own couch. We’ll be taking a look at dockable handhelds, including the Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck; home consoles, including the Xbox Series S/X and the PlayStation 5; and a full-blown home theater and gaming PC right smack in your living room.
The pros and cons of each category of system will be weighed to help guide you to the best partner for your big living room television. Let’s begin!
Valve has released the Steam Deck specifications, and they have spawned a storm of excitement. Essentially, the Steam Deck is a handheld gaming PC built around SteamOS. The Steam Deck is poised to be a fairly unique product, looking like a hybrid of a handheld console like the Switch and a conventional desktop PC (like the ones found in our main chart). Indeed, Valve’s Deck is being marketed as a “Gaming PC” with the intention of providing all the features that framing entails, for everyone from tech enthusiasts to gamers.
It’ll have a native SteamOS interface with (mostly) complete support for your pre-existing Steam library (limited to games that have either been ported to Linux or which can be run with Proton and Steam Play), and it’ll also have the ability to replace SteamOS with another option, such as Windows, in order to run just about any other title you can think of.
The Steam Deck specifications and features allow you to run anything and everything on it—and its the combination of that openness; controls including a touchscreen, capacitive pads, and back-grip buttons; the ability to ‘dock’ it to play on a TV or monitor; and a priority placed on ergonomics that (altogether) makes the device more interesting than something like a Nintendo Switch or a GPD Win3. There are just so many features all at once!
As for the hardware itself, Valve has released a very comprehensive spec sheet on the Steam Deck website. We’ll know exactly how this hardware will perform in games once the first units make it into the hands of reviewers, but until then we can take a close look at the provided specs and discuss how they stack up against current desktop hardware!
How well does Valve’s new Steam Deck hold up against Steam’s own library?
The announcement of the Steam Deck in July 2021 introduced Valve’s latest excursion into the complex world of gaming hardware. No doubt inspired by Nintendo’s success with the Switch console, the Steam Deck aims to let you take your entire Steam library wherever you go. Well, most of your library, anyway (more on that soon enough). But how will the Steam Deck handle Steam’s current most popular games? Will they run like a well-oiled machine, or break down faster than a 3DS running Crysis?
Let’s look at Steam’s current top 10 games on Steam Charts, and do a little predicting! We’ll be looking at the 10 Steam games with the highest player counts in August 2021.
Since well before Valve launched SteamOS in late 2013, some PC gamers have been interested in replacing their living room gaming devices with a computer solution that can play PC games and pack more graphical power than a console. Valve later introduced Big Picture Mode and the concept of the Steam Machine: a small PC you use to game in your living room in place of a console.
Every year, Steam has several sales, usually coinciding with the various holidays. Two days ago, Steam’s Winter sales started, bringing down the prices of over 10,000 different games.
Some people would say that 10,000 is a large number of games, and we would agree. We have combed through the sales, and picked out about 60 titles that we liked the most. We split the recommendations in bigger and smaller titles. Since there are so many games on sale, we only looked at games with discounts of 50% or more.
Dota 2 is a very popular game at the new Logical Increments office, and it’s becoming an increasingly popular game worldwide, now consistently topping the list of most played games on Steam.