The microchip supply crisis has hampered plans to exit Steam deck, Valve’s new portable console, which should have been released this December. Everything seems to indicate that it will finally come out next month of February 2022. Meanwhile, there is not a day that we do not receive new information with a dropper of this new and revolutionary portable console. The last thing we know is that we can get the console out of sleep in less than two seconds.
SSD isn’t everything
Steam Deck has a promising hardware and incredible power if we compare this console with other devices of its size, such as the Nintendo Switch. Many of you will think that equipping a SSD with good reading and writing rates, we will have solved the speed ballot and the loading times. However, this depends on other factors, how is he operating system, the architecture of the system and optimization team general.
According to Valve, their engineers have been working hard so you can resume your games in less than two seconds thanks to the last update of the operating system that they have compiled. In their tests, they have made uploads of all kinds of video games. Despite this, the popular modderDuring, who already has the console in his hands, has said in the MetaCouncil forum that he hopes Valve will do quizzes with the 100 greatest games of all time. In this way, they could ensure that the ports Windows for Steam Deck have the quality you expect from them. Despite this, this expert is pleasantly surprised by the speed of the console, and it shows very positive about Proton.
Architecture also influences
We are used to grabbing a handheld console, waking it up in seconds, and playing games. It is a key factor in a product of this type. However, there Steam Deck does not have it so easy. All portable consoles that we know of use ARM processors. And it’s funny how Valve swims upstream in this aspect. In the last year we have seen Apple make a transition from x86 to ARM with its range of computers. Steam Deck, for its part, does the opposite, and bet on x86, which, although they are processors that provide incredible power, require a lot of hardware and optimization. Exit a repose is a much more complex task on a processor of this type than on a console, smartphone or tablet that uses a SoC with ARM architecture. In fact, this is one of the most surprising factors about MacBooks with Apple Silicon, and that is that they wake up practically before you lift the lid.
SteamOS, a system that is staying in the bones
Of course the SteamOS optimization It doesn’t just influence loading times. Although the console has not yet been launched, Valve has managed to reduce its size from 24 to just 10 GB. This is certainly great news, as the entry-level Steam Deck with eMMC memory only has 64GB of storage. Little, if we talk about current games, but enough if we take into account that we can expand the space using microSD cards. This reduction in system weight will also translate into less resource consumption, especially RAM.
