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Valve confident Steam Deck is future proofed

Valve confident Steam Deck is future proofed

PC games giant Valve has said it is confident in how future proof its newly-announced Steam Deck hardware is.

Speaking to IGN, developer Pierre-Loup Griffais said that the company feels "pretty good" about how the console will handle games as the years go on, citing that the hardware already runs recently released titles to a high standard. Valve recently said that it is targeting 30 frames per second at an 800p resolution as the base performance for Steam Deck.

“Everything that's been coming out this year [that we've tried] has been running without issues,” Griffais said.

“I think this is largely a factor of industry trends. If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30Hz target really well. If people start heavily favouring image quality, then we might be in a position where we might have trade-offs, but we haven't really seen that yet.”

Hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat also said that Steam Deck's use of LPDDR5 RAM will also help the console handle future games for years to come, while the hardware's chipset supports AMD FidelityFX super sampling tech – the firm's equivalent of Nvidia's DLSS – which means that it will be able to output images far more impressive than the console is actually capable of on its own.

"We're using the LPDDR5, which is brand new to the industry," Aldehayyat said. "I think we might actually be one of the first products to showcase this new memory technology. So in that sense, that gives a lot of future proofing.”

Griffais added: “We've actually been working pretty closely with AMD on testing FSR, and giving them feedback throughout the development process. As you've seen, we've released a Dota 2 update that supports FSR. All these games that support FSR just work on this device, and FSR kicks in just the way you'd expect.”

Valve announced Steam Deck earlier this month with pre-orders becoming the third-highest purchased item on Steam the following week. The firm says that it has done a lot of reliability testing on the hardware, including its thumbsticks, to make sure they don't have the same flaws that Nintendo and Microsoft's controllers have had in recent years.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.