From Windows 11 support to the battery life of streaming games, Valve has said a couple of things about its portable PC, Steam Deck.

 

Windows 11 will require you to pass the TPM (Trusted Compatibility Module) test, which can give you a red flag, even though you have a good PC, making Microsoft’s initial check perhaps a touch too sensitive. “There’s work looking at TPM just now. We’ve focused so much on Windows 10 so far that we haven’t gotten that far into it.

We expect that we can meet that. It’s also a conversation going on with AMD to make sure that we can accommodate that at the BIOS level. So there’s nothing to indicate to us yet that there’ll be any issues with Windows 11,” Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer told PCGamer. If by the end of the year (when the Steam Deck begins to ship), Valve can have every game work on the Proton/Steam Play compatibility layer, then SteamOS, the default OS, could be a solid idea.

What about upgrading, replacing its components? “We’re getting questions about upgradability of components, replacement parts. Like, ‘can I take it apart?’ We’re going to start answering more of those questions. There’s a relatively nuanced set of answers around all those things because of many details that have to do with what happens when you take it apart, what all the trade-offs are in the components that we’ve selected.

We’re about to announce all those things. Instead, talk about all those things in a way that hopefully includes all that nuance so that people can understand more fully. There are three components that we especially want to talk about. Things related to thumbsticks, things related to batteries, and things associated with SSD storage,” Coomer added.

What about other colours? (The Steam Deck will be available only in black for now.) “There was a lot of debate,” Tucker Spofford, a Valve product designer, said. “And also genuinely fun exploration around that stuff, and even discussions like ‘well, can we have lots of colours?’ We had all those discussions. We are continuing to have those now. It’s essentially like a logistics thing. Having a lot of SKUs in the market is just a lot more complicated. There isn’t a better reason than that for right now. We might do a lot more with that in the future. If this gets off the ground the way we hope it does, there’s just tons of opportunity to do that later,” Coomer added.

Coomer also said “You can play for something like 8 hours of Death Stranding, or a high-performance game, on this unit if you’re streaming it rather than playing it locally.”

“At the same time, we’re trying to give people options because if you’re at 30,000 feet on an aeroplane, and not going to be able to stream Death Stranding probably through Gogo Wi-Fi. Well, you can still play it on this. And the same purchase that you’ve made from Steam in both places,” Spofford added.

“So a lot of it was just creating a piece of hardware that can hold all those things in one spot. The same as a PC gaming experience, where you might want to customize what you get out of it, we tried to put enough types of input and ways to play on there and make it all easy to use so that anybody can find a comfortable way to play the game they want to play,” Coomer explains.

There will also be a Steam Deck API, which would offer an automatic optimization feature similar to that found in Nvidia’s GeForce Experience control panel. “We’ll have something similar to that. There will be an API that game developers will be able to call to say, ‘Is this Steam Deck? If so, use these settings.’ There’s a lot of stuff that game developers are already using to sniff out, like, monitor resolution settings. A lot of times like these games, they just do the right thing off the bat. Like, oh, it says 1280 x 800; I have a 16:10 mode; I’ll just start in that. But something like that is already… is something that we’re planning on doing.

One benefit of us having control over the hardware, the software, everything is that we know the exact specs. Hence, as a developer, making a thing that you want to make sure runs excellent on this, you know exactly the specs of it and can precisely tune in for that if you want to. As a side benefit… you never have to worry about googling driver updates and having a lot of standard PC stuff that you would expect. We get to handle all of that ourselves, with an easy, seamless package, and everything just works well,” Andrew Yang, a designer of Valve, said.

The Steam Deck will begin shipping in December.

Source: PCGamer, PCGamer, PCGamer, PCGamer, PCGamer