Hard to say for sure without seeing a timeline where Nintendo didn’t make a hybrid console and seeing if the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds still happened the same way. I’d be surprised if the success of the Switch had absolutely nothing to do with the Steam Deck’s creation, however.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
samus12345@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I wouldn’t consider the GPD Win in the same category because it was not designed to easily switch between being hooked up to a big screen or used portably. It’s a palmtop computer with a controller embedded in it, not a hybrid. Being able to hook it up to a screen is an afterthought.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
samus12345@lemm.ee 5 days ago
It didn’t come with one, no, but plenty are available and I use mine just like a Switch with no problems. From plenty of experience having to fiddle with running laptops on bigger screens, it shows when a device was made with seamless screen switching in mind. I don’t have experience with the other popular PC handhelds - are they as easy to swap between big screens and portable as the Switch or Steam Deck? My assumption is that they all have that in mind, but maybe they don’t.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.