Valve Steam Deck Hardware Review and Analysis [video: GamersNexus]

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41 points·WithinReason··5 comments

Very thorough runthrough (as expected from Gamers Nexus), and I'm surprised to see such impressive performance numbers from a handheld PC like this. I was worried that the device would suffer from heat distribution issues, but I watched another review earlier today that mentioned, even at peak heat levels, the device never became uncomfortable to hold- a problem I've experienced with some standard sized laptops. I'm very impressed so far, and congrats to the Valve team.

I wish it had 2 USB-C ports: - one for a displayport panel. - one for my mouse and keyboard.

Then I would not need to look for shmol AMD rembrandt APUs boards with such connectors for a "modular" laptop: 1 clever backpack + 1 displayport panel + 1 battery pack + 1 AMD rembrandt APU board (and its casing) + mouse + keyboard. Ofc, running my custom linux distro with the klugde required by the steam client (bash/dbus/etc) and some games.

I wonder if the latency difference compared to the aya neo is because of Wine/Proton. I've played through Journey on Wine and couldn't help but notice the camera input being 2-3 frames late.

The cost of translating input calls from Linux to Windows APIs through Wine/Proton is so much less than the cost of rendering a single frame that it's effectively 0. The only real overhead Wine/Proton might be adding is in the rendering pipeline.

As Steve explained in the video, the Steam Deck's input-to-photon latency is lower than the Aya Neo's simply because it has a much more powerful GPU.

The only real way to test if there's any extra input-to-photon latency would be to compare the exact same game on a Steam Deck running SteamOS to a Steam Deck running Windows.

I'm surprised no one tried to hook up a GPU to the NVME connection.

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