Valve's upcoming handheld system may be a pretty powerful piece of hardware when looking under the hood at the horsepower. A lot of social media has touted the Steam Deck as a "Nintendo Switch killer". The Nintendo IP exclusivity alone practically throws that argument out the window, but the comparisons are very opaque.

One of the largest differences is the Nintendo Switch may run on the old Tegra X1 chips and sacrifices graphical performance, resolution, and frame rate when playing handheld, but those specs can be increased when enjoying Switch games docked, some games hitting a native 900p and 60fps. The Steam Deck, however, will not be enhanced when docking it. In an interview with PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon, Valve Steam Deck designer, Greg Coomer, clarified when asked about a high-power mode when playing docked:

"Yes, but we didn't choose to make it a really high priority design target... we felt that it was actually better all things considered to not modify based on docked status or mobile status."

"We really wanted to prioritize for using it in what we thought would be the highest use case, which is actually mobile," Coomer explains. "And so since we were focusing on that, and we chose like a threshold where the machine will run well, and with a good frame rate with AAA games in that scenario. We didn't really feel like we should target also going after the dock scenario at higher resolutions. We wanted a simpler design target and to prioritize that."

This separates the Steam Deck from the Nintendo Switch, and pretty much other consoles, with its build. The Switch's architecture is fully optimized exclusively for video game development. And while the Steam Deck is utilizing a SteamOS, it's essentially a gaming PC in the hands. 30fps is the minimum for frame rate and will display a native 800p. With the ability to install Windows on it, it could be possible to overclock the AMD settings and squeeze more performance out of the Steam Deck.

For many, this may be a shortchanging lack of a feature to consider investing it. for the Steam community, it could still serve as a viable handheld alternative for PC gaming on the go. What do you think? Does this effect your opinion of the Steam Deck?

SOURCE: PC Gamer