The Steam Deck may be less powerful, but at today’s GPU prices, it’s a far better value. I’m not even sure if I’m going to upgrade that aging graphics card anymore. Playing games on the couch, in bed, or while rocking the baby to sleep beats out having maxed out graphics settings every time. You might say that’s what more powerful traditional game consoles are for, but the Deck’s Switch-like portability makes all the difference. I've grown to love having my library of PC games detached from the writing and video editing workstation that lives at my desk. It runs games at higher resolution with better graphic settings, but it’s wasted power. Yes, an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 64GB of RAM and a GTX 980 GPU can soundly outperform the Deck’s custom AMD APU. Online-only games like Final Fantasy XIV or Knockout City tend to disconnect the player when thrown into suspend mode - but I often still prefer playing them on Valve's portable than on my big gaming desktop. That isn't to say I haven't had longer play sessions on Steam Deck. A week or two later, I finally finished a game I abandoned when I was 16 years old. The suspend trick even works with non-Steam games and older titles: I spent hours experimenting in Lutris, an alternative Linux game launcher, getting the year 2000’s Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force to run smoothly on Steam Deck. Suddenly I was finishing games I never thought I would have time for. Picking it up for a few random battles in Final Fantasy IV after the baby fell asleep on my chest, doing a deep space cargo run in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw as I watched her nap on the baby monitor, or sneaking in a few puzzles in Baba is You before turning in for the night. I started using the Steam Deck to play games in the margins of my day. When that worked, I got more ambitious - finishing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order over the course of two weeks.

I spent my first day with the handheld slowly playing through the Deck’s showcase demo: Valve’s Desk Job, casually picking the handheld up for just 5 minutes every few hours. When my Steam Deck arrived four months later and the feature actually worked, it changed everything. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.

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