Yeah, just today I observed my 256Gb disk and thought about moving some games that might need the speed from SD card to SSD (wanted to check out Total War games on deck and you know how much time these games spend on loading screens) and I’ve marveled on the sight of 60Gb shader cache.
That reminds me of an interesting feature I happened to observe when installing a game on my Deck recently - if you have the same game installed on another machine on the LAN (in this case, my gaming PC), it will copy the game from there rather than downloading it from Steam’s servers.
Yes, that’s a nice addition to Steam. It has some options in Settings → Downloads → Game file transfer over local network.
Substantially more expensive, but also correspondingly more performant. Pricing is fine. Again the real question will be how well Windows can work in a handheld.
Is it substantially more expensive?
The 512gb steam deck is 649.99
Seems like an incredible deal, but the issue will be with how windows is, and what the battery life looks like. Also, how well will Asus support the device. Steam has been amazing with support for their device.
I would never buy that model, though. I’d buy the $399 model and add a $120 1TB SSD, so the real price is $520. And that’s with double the storage, too.
I mean, the real answer is, you wouldn’t buy any model :)
But, there is speculation there will be a cheaper version (AMD Z1) available to compliment the more high end model, so we will see how competitive the pricing is when that is announced.
The AMD Z1 has only 4 RDNA3 CUs on its GPU, so it should offer roughly one third the performance of the Z1 Extreme with 12. In comparison, the Steam Deck has 8 CUs of RDNA2 so I would expect it to be much faster. The Z1 version is really only for streaming, emulation, or playing old games.
699 seems like a great price for what it offers. I do wish it had 720p screen instead of useless 1080 though.
It’s a fine price for the hardware agreed, just nowhere near as attractive as that lowest-end steam deck.
1080p screen is appropriate for its performance; it’s capable of that resolution and of course you can always scale up with FSR1 or 2, depending on the game. The only impact would be a minor amount of battery life to light up those additional pixels.
Also I didn’t see a touchpad. You need a mouse on occasion even on steamOS. Probably much more on windows. This will have to use a joystick which sucks in comparison.
I can think of some applications for 1080p screen, but not a lot. You need a game with good UI scaling thay is also old or simple enough to run well in 1080p on a handheld device. It’s nice to play Slay the Spire in 1080p but in that game it hardly matters.
It’s fast enough to render at 1080p for realsies but yes UI could be too small at that screen size.
I have been really impressed with the engineering and thoughtfulness in the design of the ASUS ROG G14, which is my personal laptop. If anyone can make a real Deck competitor, I don’t see why it couldn’t be ASUS. I don’t really need much more power, but if it has a better battery life, I would upgrade. That’s my only real pain point with the Deck.
I would be a great deal more optimistic if it ran SteamOS.
It’ll probably have less battery life than the Steam Deck, since it’s going for higher performance, but also bigger screen with higher refresh rate, runs Windows 11 and has a much higher TDP.
All theoretical of course, and if one can do similar stuff to what the Deck does, to lower consumption, who knows, although it very much sounds like they’re going for “it’s more powerful” as their advantage, and not “lasts longer”.
The chip is built on a smaller process and has IPC improvements too-- and it has fifty percent more GPU cores. I would expect it to outperform the steam deck at every TdP. The screen will use more juice, but likely not enough to be consequential.
Ultimately, unless Asus screws it up, the success or failure of this product will likely be down to Windows.
The lack of touchpads is really going to hurt the Asus’s usability. I use them very frequently with Steam Deck games. I’d have considered the Asus if it had them, but without them, it’s a non-starter for me.
Corsair just launched their own 1TB NVME for steam decks, retails at $110:
This sort of thing is how you know the Steam Deck is truly a successful product.