As part of the launch event for the Steam Deck In Asia, Valve has shown a collection of playable prototypes of the console / mini-PC that show how the device has evolved from mid-2019 to the design that has finally been marketed. Pierre-Loup Griffais, a company employee and member of the team responsible for the Steam Deck, posted images of some of the prototypes via Twitter after the device was shown off at the Tokyo Game Show.
In the images you can see that Valve has been clear about the concept and the general lines of the design of the Steam Deck for a long time. However, notable differences can also be seen, with some prototypes having a more rounded finish and others more rectangular. Possibly the ones that are attracting the most public attention are those that include circular trackpads, which has been interpreted by more than one as reminiscent of the late Steam Controller.
If we say that the prototypes are playable, it means that they work. In fact, Griffais has taken it upon himself to publish a video through his Twitter account in which shows one of them running what appears to be an immature version of SteamOS that boots directly into Big Picture as a GUI. Once the operating system and Steam client loaded, the Valve employee booted up Half-Life 2, all with a seemingly quick and seamless response.
The prototype put into operation by Griffais uses a Picasso generation APU, which, according to the Valve employee, is half as powerful as the one used by the Steam Deck, which stands out for using RDNA 2 technology for graphics processing . It is likely that Valve preferred to wait for AMD APUs to employ graphics technology that offered better guarantees for running triple-A Windows games, albeit at reduced quality.
The best part is that they (mostly) all still boot, serving as an exciting reminder of how far things have come since.
This one has a Picasso APU, at about half of the GPU power of the final Deck. The flatter ergo was an interesting experiment and taught us a ton about comfort. pic.twitter.com/yLwTtDDYlo
— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) September 12, 2022
The history of the many prototypes developed to create the Steam Deck is not new, since Valve itself has exposed images of them in a book that it has recently published and in which it not only explains the creation process, but also his future plans, in which he has said that he will launch new versions/generations of his consolidate/mini-PC, that he will continue betting on SteamOS (Linux) and that he has his eye on ChromeOSGoogle’s desktop operating system.
If you want to know all the answers as to why the Steam Deck is capable of running some Windows games with good performance despite running on Linux, we invite you to see the special that we have dedicated to it.
