The first previews of the Steam Deck come to light, giving us the first look at its performance, ergonomics, and more

After a two-month delay, Valve will start selling the Steam Deck on February 25, and as we get closer to the date, the various confidentiality agreements on the console are being lifted. In this case, the first previews of the console were allowed to be published, so GamersNexus, Linus Tech Tips, and The Phawx have already posted partial reviews of the handheld on YouTube, giving us their thoughts on ergonomics, performance, battery life and much more.

These Steam Deck previews should be taken with a grain of salt, as Valve only allowed them to test specific games, and they had to stay away from the operating system, so they will only be partial reviews. As we mentioned previously, the full reviews will arrive on February 25, so we will have to wait a little longer to see unrestricted content about the console.

The battery life

Both GamersNexus and The Phawx drained the battery in just 1.5 hours, playing Devil May Cry 5 and Control, respectively, on the highest settings without VSync, and neither was able to reach Valve’s suggested eight hours of light play/remote play no matter what they did. The final firmware and drivers are not yet in use, so this data should be taken with a grain of salt, although we don’t think it will change drastically in these few days before its release anyway.

These were the tests carried out and their obtained battery durations:

• 2 hours of Devil May Cry 5 on high settings with VSync (GamersNexus)
• 3 hours of VLC 4K 60fps playback at 50% brightness (GamersNexus)
• 6 hours of Dead Cells at 50% brightness (The Phawx, GamersNexus)
• 6 hours of Steam Link streaming at 50 percent brightness (GamersNexus)
• 5 hours and 40 minutes of Portal 2 at 30fps (The Phawx)
• 4 horas de Forza Horizon 5 a 30fps (The Phawx)
• 3 hours and 21 minutes of Ghostrunner at 30fps (LTT)

As we said before, none of the tests (which, by the way, were very varied) reached the 8 hours of play that Valve set as a limit, so we will have to see what the necessary conditions are to reach so many hours of play.

According to The Pawx, “it’s pretty easy to get four hours” with the Steam Deck but only if you run games at 30Hz, half the screen refresh rate.

For most titles available, sure, it’s fine, but a more demanding game, like Forza? We doubt it. Valve says it’s still working on possible power-saving techniques, so hopefully as firmware and drivers are polished it will extend battery life a bit more.

Performance, another essential feature of the Steam Deck

Interestingly, The Phawx says that the Steam Deck gives you quite a bit of leeway to tweak the Aerith chip’s settings, including the ability to disable some of the CPU cores if desired. By disabling two cores, he was able to see a 20 percent performance boost in an early scene in Control due to hitting a higher clock rate, so this can be beneficial in some cases.

So far, the Steam Deck seems to totally outperform other recent alternatives like the Aya Neo Next and the GPD Win 3. In the video, The Phawx includes 10 minutes straight of side-by-side footage with full performance stats for you to see for yourselves, and the truth is that it looks very good:

Regarding ergonomics, Linus Tech Tips focuses on this aspect of the console. During his video, he can be seen praising the joysticks, speakers, and display (which includes a number of brightness modes, including a dim mode for nighttime), but criticizes the haptic feedback from his joysticks. “At the moment, the haptic of this device is a poop stain on a crisp white sheet,” he says. Quite critical in that sense.

For now, although the previews are varied and should not be taken as definitive since they include only certain portions and certain games enabled by Valve, the balance is more than positive, although we will have to wait to see what happens when the reviewers can comment your full opinions, with no restrictions on content.

And you, what do you think of the Steam Deck? Does it meet expectations or does it fall short?

Source: TheVerge