Warning! Rampant speculation ahead!

Nvidia are out of the running for a Steam handheld: they don't have an x86 licence, ARM wouldn't be suitable for what Valve needs, and while Optimus-on-Linux isn't "go stick your head in a pig" like it was for a decade it's still pretty poor.

But they could be getting their ducks in a row for being the cloud side of a Steam Cloud service. Their dGPU performance on Linux is perfectly fine, they already have experience of filling datacentres with gaming machines from Geforce Now and their machine learning rigs, and nvenc is pretty darn good (and already supported by Steam streaming).

Valve-run Nvidia machines streaming games over the Internet could definitely be a thing, provided Nvidia had got their Linux gaming house in order.

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Quoting: BeamboomYeah that is as far as I can tell the one single argument for it. But the question remains: What PC game would someone with a full gaming rig at home (who I would presume is the case for any gamer with a solid Steam library) rather play on the portable? Because that's the real scenario here. What would we prefer to play on the small screen?

My 30-inch monitor is awesome. It's big, clear, and has brilliant colour reproduction. What it isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, is comfortable to curl up with on the sofa, or in bed.

I love my mechanical keyboard and high-precision high-speed mouse. I've been using KB/M for gaming for some 30 years; I am comfortable and familiar with them. They are entirely terrible for racing games, fighting games, or any kind of platformer.

My high precision speakers and 10-inch subwoofer are amazing. For the spectacle and bombast of big explosions and dramatic cutscenes, or loud reggae, they can't be beaten. For the background music in Stardew Valley they are complete overkill.

My computer chair provides perfect support for sitting upright with arms extended in the correct position for hours on end, day after day, without any discomfort or injury. It actively resists any other configuration. Having your feet higher than your head with a controller? Forget about it.

Would the average gamer invest in another gaming device when they already got a modern smart phone sitting right there?

I'm probably not the average gamer; however, my smartphone has a 4.6“ diagonal and zero buttons. That's exactly what I want from Internet-in-my-pocket, but would be entirely unsuitable for any PC game I might want to play.

The speculated Steam handheld would likely be able to play some 80% of my Steam library without troubling my gaming rig, and would be the superior platform for a solid chunk of that independently of the convenience factor. I'm unlikely to try Stellaris on it, but I'd be willing to give Two Point Hospital a go if the touchscreen implementation is decent.

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Quoting: HoolyWith Thunderbolt coming to AMD boards, I could even imagine them selling a docking station with an AMD GPU in it.
From what I've heard, GPU hot-plugging might work better with Wayland compared to X11.

That's a good solution, actually.

If people are going to be able to plug it into a telly, they're going to want to be able to plug it into a 4K telly. Either they're limited to 1080p gaming with upscaling, or the SoC is a unicorn that can scale performance up to 4K if given sufficient power. Even if the SoC were capable, you'd need to cool those 100-200 W in a chassis that was designed for 15 W.

Having the rendering power coming from the dock itself, with its own entirely separate cooling, sidesteps the problem.

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Oh! One more thing that hasn't been discussed here yet.

If they can square away a Steam Cloud service - like In-Home Streaming, but from Valve's machines - that would strengthen the proposition for a portable machine. Light gaming locally, as a complement to a beefy machine if you already have one, and using Steam's service if you don't, or if you have good bandwidth where the handheld is but not where the beefy machine is.

It's not something I'd use, probably, but I expect it would be very useful to some.

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Quoting: ObsidianBlkhobbiest

A mild nitpick, because this really annoys me whenever I see it. That word would mean that you were "the most hobby." The word you're looking for is "hobbyist" - someone who participates in a hobby.

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I'd also like to see them sort out Family Sharing so that you can share your library with your family. Not having to put Steam into offline mode when you're playing something on the desktop and your family wants to play something on the handheld would be sensible. It's a completely unnecessary pain point currently.

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Quoting: on_en_a_grosBut honestly I'm absolutely not interested in a handheld console / pc, and I don't really see what the target audience is for these product.

I'm very interested in this. I have a beefy gaming rig where I do most of my gaming. I also have a laptop and a NUC where I do some other gaming that favours a controller, either light games that run locally or games streamed from my desktop machine. This device could replace both of those, and be more portable and convenient to be able to play more games more often. People playing more games more often is good for Valve.

Anecdotally, with people having done more working from home recently, they don't necessarily want to be tethered to the same machine for entertainment. Being able to do PC gaming while flopped on the sofa could be quite attractive to them.

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Quoting: 0aTTI read in an article with this new AMD APU ("Van Gogh"), it should have the performance of a PS4 (slim). Can that be true and how power hungry would such a device be?

Based on the rumours, I think Van Gogh (or its successor, Dragon Crest) is likely. It's a thing that exists in engineering samples and has Linux support already, but the rumours were that AMD hadn't finalised a decision on whether to mass produce it because they were waiting for a decision from a customer.

The configuration is really weird for a general purpose machine from AMD in 2021/2022, since it uses brand-spanking-new RDNA2 and old Zen 2, but would be a very good fit for a dedicated gaming device. It's the same configuration as the PS5 and new Xbox, but way lower TDP. The rumours say a bit lower than the Switch in power draw, at around 7-12 Watts.

If they can also use their new cache stacking technology on it, that would be awesome. Better performance and lower power draw because you don't need as high bandwidth to main memory. But cutting edge fabrication techniques might be too expensive. The engineering samples don't have any L3 cache at all which you'd expect if the final chip doesn't have L3, but you'd also expect to see that if the L3 is entirely in a separate layer whose inclusion hasn't been finalised yet.

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On shader compilation: Steam already downloads pre-compiled shaders if your machine has a familiar configuration. This would definitely have a familiar configuration, so it shouldn't have to compile its own shaders for games from Steam.

On streaming media: BPM has easy access to a browser using the shoulder buttons. Valve will likely just lean on that rather than picking and choosing services unless the providers of those services put something in the Steam Store. They will have to make sure they have hardware accelerated playback and decryption for DRM out of the box, though.

On the OS: gamescope has features that are perfect for this kind of device. In particular, automatic decoupling of render resolution and refresh rate from display resolution and refresh rate, with automatic upscaling. I expect the device will be running Wayland and gamescope for those features.

On the size: I think that bigger than the Switch will be the sweet spot. 8 inches and 1080p. That gives more room for battery and cooling, and game designers struggle with low resolution interfaces. 1080p is a resolution that they already test for. I'd personally prefer 1920×1200, and there is movement back to 16:10 displays, so that would be good, too. That combination would have a sharper image than the Switch, but not so tiny that it's hard to see, and not so high a resolution that you're burning battery for things you can't see.

One thing that they really have to change from what we've heard is the name. "Steam Pal" is a terrible name. It sounds like something made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

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I find myself wondering how much these changes represent the other Liam and team being given some autonomy internally, and how much represents a culture change at Nvidia as a whole. It's getting results for us either way but, as we saw with Croteam, the former is fragile with respect to personnel changes.

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