Steam Deck Review in Progress

ign.com:

The Steam Deck is easily one of the most anticipated pieces of PC gaming tech since… well, maybe ever? The promise of carrying the entirety of your Steam library wherever you go on this bulky but well-designed and relatively powerful handheld gaming device is massively alluring, especially to those of us who continuously fatten our backlog with each passing Steam sale. And after a couple of weeks of gaming on Valve’s ambitious handheld PC I can say that a lot of the time it does live up to that hype, but right now, trying to review the Steam Deck is like hitting a moving target. For one thing, whether or not specific games work at a level you'll find acceptable, or at all, is a case-by-case basis. Additionally, I’ve found myself confronted with technical dead ends far too often for a device that starts at $400 and only goes up from there, but it’s already showing signs of improvement as Valve and various games roll out rapid-fire patches leading up to launch. In other words, the Steam Deck experience I had when I first booted it up a few weeks back is not the same as the constantly improving one I have in front of me today, and it’ll likely get significantly better soon.

That brings us to the main reason this review is still in progress: AMD hasn’t yet delivered the Windows graphics driver for the Steam Deck’s GPU, which means that while I can install Windows 11, I’ve been unable to run games or the suite of benchmarks we use to test out gaming PCs. And that’s a big issue. Just about every problem I’ve had comes down to the fact that by default, Steam Deck runs on Valve’s SteamOS – a custom version of Linux that can run a lot of Windows games using software called Proton. It’s actually really cool when it works, but a lot