Steam Deck rivals coming back with a vengeance as they aim to dethrone Valve’s top selling Handheld Gaming Computer.

Ever since its reveal, Valve’s Steam Deck has taken the World by storm. For Gamers it seemed like the dream device, allowing them to play AAA games on the go anywhere humanly possible at their convenience. All this seemed like a good Marketing ploy by Valve, however with the Steam Deck’s release, it quickly became apparent that the Device was definingly everything that it was hyped up to be months prior to its official release, with Users experiencing an almost stable 60 frames per second on medium settings on almost all of the recent AAA game titles. All this resulted in making Steam Deck the undisputed King of all Handheld Gaming Computers, but is the competition really out of the equation?

Staying in the Game

As the Steam Deck kept growing in popularity, this spelled bad news for its rival Companies, most notably GPD, Aya Neo and OneXPlayer, all of whom have been in the Handheld Gaming Computer Market longer than Valve’s eventual entry with the Steam Deck. Surviving initially on a Niche Audience, these aforementioned companies immediately found themselves in a much more prolific spotlight with the Entry of Valve in their Market. A major Company such as Valve’s introduction of the Steam Deck immediately opened the possibilities of owning a portable Computer to a much wider audience than what these 3 Companies had initially expected and prepared for. This along with being significantly smaller companies with a similarly miniature budget compared to Valve, this most certainly laid weight to the fact that all odds were inevitably against them. Therefore, in keeping with these facts, all 3 of these Companies have decided to step up their game by implementing AMD’s Ryzen 6000U chips within their future handheld devices, most notable of which is the Ryzen 6800U around which their next generation of Handheld Gaming Computers will be built on. All 3 of these Companies are currently well underway into testing the Ryzen 6800U in their prototype machines, with their graphical performance being powered by the Radeon 680M.

The Difference in Performance

With the implementation of AMD’s Ryzen 6800U chip, the expectations are directed towards the fact that it will almost certainly blow Steam Deck’s semi-custom Aerith SoC out of the water, as the Ryzen chips have indicated performance numbers that look extremely promising and could potentially allow the 3 aforementioned Companies to completely future-proof their devices for more than just a couple of years. Moreover, in terms of graphical performance, the Radeon 680M is ably capable of pushing out 3.38 teraflops of performance, more than double the 1.6 teraflops of the Steam Deck’s RDNA 2 Graphics Processor. On paper this portray grand tidings for Steam Deck’s 3 rival companies, however with all of this massive performance inside a handheld form-factor, it is not beyond the realm of uncertainty that there will almost certainly be thermal constrains to the devices, which would inevitably lessen the overall gaming performance of the devices and that could eventually put these devices on par with, or even worse than the Steam Deck.

The Valve Advantage

With all of the above information considered, Performance of all of these devices can be worked upon further and is most certainly going to be the deciding factor for most people when purchasing either a Steam Deck or one of the Devices from the 3 rival Companies. However, where Valve really outshines against their competition, is in the different price points of their different Steam Deck models. Valve was able sell all three models of the Steam Deck at an attractively low price compared to the competitors, as they themselves state that their own Handheld usually cost two to three times the price of the Entry-level Steam Deck that Valve currently sells in the Market. This along with the fact that Valve had access to better hardware compared to the competitors, is something that these 3 Companies need to consider moving forward with the development of their new devices.