Everything you need to know about Valve's Steam Deck ahead of this week's release

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Valve shocked the industry back in July last year with the announcement of its upcoming portable gaming PC, the Steam Deck.  With its upcoming release now this week - February 25th 2022 - bumped a couple of months from its original launch date of December last year - what do we know about the Steam Deck - and can it succeed where its competitors failed to gain traction?

The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming pc that enables users to play games from their Steam library on the go.

PC giant Valve has revealed how it is judging which games will work on its Steam Deck console. On its website, the firm says that there are four tiers of compatibility for games with the upcoming hardware. 'Verified' titles will work fine on Steam Deck right off the bat, while 'Playable' games might require users to mess around in the settings for a little while. 'Unsupported' titles don't work on Steam Deck, while 'Unknown' simply means that Valve hasn't checked how it runs on the console yet.

For a game to be Deck Verified, it needs to have full controller support, have no compatibility warning, boast a default resolution of 1280x800 or 1280x720 and should run on the Proton software.

"With Steam Deck, we're bringing your Steam Library to a new form factor—a portable gaming PC," Valve wrote. "While many games run great on Deck out of the box, this shift means there are some games that, while they may be great on a desktop PC, aren't a great experience on Steam Deck.

"We want it to be easy for you to find great gaming experiences on Steam Deck, so we’ve designed a system to do just that."

Note that some titles will not be supported by the gaming PC - emphasis on 'gaming PC'. This is not a console. Users can plug their Steam Deck into a monitor,