Saturday, July 30th 2022
Valve Confirms Steam Deck Customers to Receive Their Devices Within 2022
Valve's Steam Deck has been a resounding success by any metric, providing an impressive mobile gaming experience at Valve's first try. However, not all has been rosy: particularly for those customers that still haven't been able to receive their Steam Deck order. It's not just a demand problem; for a long while, Valve's hands were tied in the number of Steam Decks they could actually put together, due to continuing electronics component shortages that followed the COVID-19 tech race - paired with logistics nightmares fueled by constant lockdowns and limited transport operations around the globe.
But customers still awaiting their Steam Deck can now take a slight more hopeful outlook, as the company has confirmed via Twitter that all outstanding Steam Deck orders will be fulfilled before year's end. Through improvements to both logistics and manufacturing capacity, many of the reservations previously scheduled for 2Q2022 or later have been moved towards 3Q (July-September). All orders that weren't moved to 3Q are now solidly in Q4, according to the company. Valve has also confirmed that new orders will also be scheduled for 4Q. Do count on a hard limit to how many Steam Decks Valve can fit within it, though, so if you really, really want a Steam Deck before year's end, you better move fast.
Sources:
Valve @ Twitter, via Tom's Hardware
But customers still awaiting their Steam Deck can now take a slight more hopeful outlook, as the company has confirmed via Twitter that all outstanding Steam Deck orders will be fulfilled before year's end. Through improvements to both logistics and manufacturing capacity, many of the reservations previously scheduled for 2Q2022 or later have been moved towards 3Q (July-September). All orders that weren't moved to 3Q are now solidly in Q4, according to the company. Valve has also confirmed that new orders will also be scheduled for 4Q. Do count on a hard limit to how many Steam Decks Valve can fit within it, though, so if you really, really want a Steam Deck before year's end, you better move fast.
58 Comments on Valve Confirms Steam Deck Customers to Receive Their Devices Within 2022
I have a 200+ games Steam library and only two of them gave me trouble to play on Linux. Even then I could just buy a 512GB SD and play them on Windows whenever I want. I also have some games on Battle.net that run quite well. I've had mine for 4 months and couldn't be happier with it.
www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
Could be wrong, don't own one.
Trust me I have definitely looked into any and all alternatives over the last 5 years, on release it was beyond anything else that was out, now there are Finally better ones but they're 6th gen AMD and higher priced by far, anything near this price is not as good.
And again you Can put windows on it and use as a pc so DRM be gone if you want.
There's this thing called Proton that Valve forked from Wine to tailor it around Steam. The marvelous fact about it is that it is open source and anyone can use it so Wine itself benefits from it and other software like Lutris and specific community launchers like Heroic (for your free EGS games). There's even this madman that goes by GloriousEggroll that implements experimental patches and lets end users try the development down the road.
So by default everything runs on the Steam Deck except for some anticheat software. You just have to go to the desktop mode and install anything you want and then run it on the desktop mode or launch it through Steam in the Gaming mode. I've been playing D2R (battle.net launcher) in Gaming Mode since day one.
You should stop talking about this because you are dead wrong about everything. To the point of feeling insulted just by talking to you.
The Deck's configuration is in the middle of these two (6 CU/3 WGP on 660M, 8 CU/4 WGP on the Deck's GPU 12 CU/6 WGP on 680M) though the CPU side is closer in nature to Renoir on the Deck. However, given the objective is to primarily run triple-A games at 30 fps on this system, the CPU side weighs a lot less than the graphics on the vast majority titles, so the Deck's configuration comes out as rather balanced, and easily the fastest for the money. Mobile Renoir (and thus the Deck) will run any low-spec game such as Stardew Valley, Terraria or Source engine games at a 60 fps target within a 10W budget.
Anyway, there are other merits to the other devices, for example, despite still using Cezanne, the new Aya has an OLED screen, which is much better than the screen used on the Deck. The device also seems to be more ergonomic and imo pleasing to the eye, so that's also a reason to consider it.
The one thing I can assure you though: No Vega-based configuration is going to beat any of these RDNA 2 options, be it the 660M, the Deck's or the 680M, even on an H-series processor and ample power available to the graphics engine. My laptop's 5600H (Vega 7, 1800 MHz on DDR4-3200) has a 54 watt power budget in comparison, and it will still be slower than the 660M in any game you can possibly test.
And this is a Arch Linux install. You can install all the gamelaunchers you want to. Just learn to use and maintain Linux, then all the doors are open on the device.
In fact, you can install Arch Linux on your day to day computer (obligatory: I use Arch btw:D), install KDE Plasma with the Steam UI icons and themes on top and then try it for yourself.
Valve does a really good job in helping the linux gaming community, just by using a Linux Distro as OS, let alone developing Proton and helping with Wine development.
BTW: I bet you can dual boot on the Steam Deck, just looked into the last bios extract. It is just a simple Insyde H20 Bios with normal UEFI DXE. So the the same BIOS core many laptop manufacturers use.
Valve does not limit you to just your Steam library. Other game launchers are easily installed and functional. Lutris or Heroic Game Launcher are both examples of this. One shouldn't expect the same hand holding Valve does with steam games, but those other game launchers are very functional.
On performance, very few games have unacceptable performance on the Steam Deck. Running games at low settings, 40 fps, 40 hz, and at the native 720p resolution can make even performance heavy games like Control feel smooth. I prefer 120 fps ulmb when possible on my desktop as well. 40 fps on on a handheld device feels fine.
Most your objections are not practical in nature. They are misinformed. You seem to have an absolute opinion on DRM. The rest of your objections are not what you are making them out to be.
I just turn off the Deck, swap the SD card, turn it on while holding the volume down button, and boot into Windows.
While the controls are clunky, Windows itself runs surprisingly well off of the SD card I have.
What you do is throw the DRM-free game on your SD card or internal storage (I use Warpinator to transfer files from my main PC to my Deck), and then add the game as a "non-Steam" game. Set it to use the latest Proton version, maybe install DirectX dependencies if you have issues, and it should work.
Then, you can just keep your Deck in offline mode. As long as you don't go back into online mode, it'll never prompt you to log back in. And as I said before, client and OS updates still work in offline mode.
usebottles.com/
You know when there are too many things to do and download and things gets lengthy and tiring? then someone steps in to make things simple and easy, especially for someone who just want to use/play a Windows app/game or won't bother spending much time tinkering?
There comes Bottles!
It will install and manage mostly if not all the needed stuff for your PC Linux to run apps/games (even fonts), whether it is just downloaded single folder of a game or for a launcher. Just look at the screen shots of Bottles in the main web page.
davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/
[SIZE=4]ProtonUp-Qt[/SIZE]
[SIZE=4]Supports Bottle. Manages and install various community builds of Wine and Proton like GE-Proton or Wine-GE.[/SIZE]
It runs well and everything (for those games optimized for it at least) and extremely well if you use it to stream from your local PC to it. So in general nice to have besides the Steam-Box I still have when my wife blocks my TV and I don't want to be gaming downstairs alone but be beside her on the couch without having to watch "her series-es" :D .... but this also shows how often I'll actually use this and besides the first excitement about the possibilities it's like so many gadgets .... really nice, but hell, how much money did I blow on this thing? :D ...
still thinking about selling it (as I'm past the return time) though. Like I said. I like it. Just not "enough" for the price range. But mostly out of personal reasons / usability point of view, not the hardware itself (and yes, I could have known that earlier, but hey .... what don't we do when we're excited even though we SHOULD know better :D )
This has twice as many cores twice the cache per-core; Zen3+ also offers faster GPU:
www.tweaktown.com/news/86197/ayaneo2-handheld-ryzen-7-6800u-apu-gpu-is-2x-faster-than-steam-deck/index.html
Its telling when valve is adding SteamOS support for the 6800u ( but very likely wont be shipping it until 2024 at the earliest - they still haven't released this first-gen worldwide, so add another year for full release, then another to implement the refresh. )
You do you, leave us to do ourselves, because you are entitled to a opinion .
But it's not shared by all.