With Steam Deck, Valve is bringing your Steam library to a new format: a handheld PC. While many Steam games will run flawlessly on the Steam Deck, others may not offer the optimal experience you’d expect from a standard PC.
But before you buy a Steam Deck, how do you know which game console yours supports?
To answer this, Valve has created a Steam Deck Compatibility page. This shows you all the games from your Steam library and how playable they are on the Steam deck. Here’s how to use this handy feature.
How to use the Steam Deck Compatibility Checker
To see how compatible your Steam library is with Steam Deck, go to Valve’s Your Library on Deck page and sign in with your Steam account. Here, you’ll find all the games in your Steam library sorted into four categories, as determined by Valve’s testing team.
That’s right – Valve has a team testing every single game in the Steam catalog to determine how well it plays on the Steam deck. That’s a lot of games.
Thus, don’t be surprised to see potentially hundreds of games in your library classified as unknown. This doesn’t mean that the Steam deck won’t play these games perfectly from day one, it just means that Valve hasn’t verified it.
You can hover over each game and click Steam Deck Compatibility. It shows you why a game has or hasn’t checked out on Steam. Valve maintains high standards here. For example, Life is Strange: Before the Storm is considered playable, not verified, simply because it “occasionally shows a mouse, keyboard, or non-Steam-deck controller icon”.
For those unsupported games, Valve notes that it is currently adding support for more games over time. For example, Fall Guys is currently unsupported because the game’s anti-cheat is not configured to work with Steam Deck. You can imagine that could change in the future. On the other hand, all VR titles are unsupported as Steam Deck has zero support for VR.
Once you have a Steam deck, you will be able to check the deck compatibility of Steam games directly through the console’s interface.
Valve’s quality control is commendable
It’s great to see Valve taking their quality control so seriously. The fact that the company is manually reviewing each game and assessing its compatibility speaks to a level of care from the company that we’ve come to expect is matched in hardware.
Valve has taken everyone by surprise by launching a new handheld gaming device called the Steam Deck. It aims to compete against the likes of the Nintendo Switch and grab a chunk of its market share. Considering the Switch Pro isn’t coming anytime soon, we’d say Valve has a good chance.
Steam Deck has created such a stir in the gaming industry that even PC gamers are excited about it. This is because it is different from any other handheld available in the market. Here, we’ll take an in-depth look at what a Steam Deck is and answer all of your most important questions.
Valve’s Steam Deck is a handheld gaming machine that you can use to play any game on the Steam store. Yes, we are talking about full-blown PC games here and not specific ports of games. At first glance, it looks like a bigger, chunkier Nintendo Switch, but there’s more to it than just looks.
For starters, the Steam Deck sports a 7-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels (yes, no 1080p!). Under the hood, it houses a custom AMD APU that brings together the Zen 2 CPU architecture and RDNA 2 GPU. It also packs 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and comes with NVMe SSD storage options.
Steam Deck doesn’t fail to impress on paper, but it’s worth pointing out that graphical horsepower maxes out at 1.6 TFlops (teraflops), which isn’t much better than the 1 Tflops on the Nintendo Switch. Battery life isn’t exceptional, according to Valve, as it can fluctuate anywhere between 2-8 hours depending on the game and your graphics settings.
