Steam Deck to Officially Launch on February 25th, Says Valve

Valve has just confirmed that the Steam Deck PC handheld will officially launch on February 25th. Let us clarify right away that this isn't the date you can expect to get your device, though.

Rather, on February 25th the embargo for press reviews and impressions will lift. Additionally, Valve will send the first batch of order emails to reservation holders, allowing those users to finalize their purchase within the next three days. After that time, if no purchase has been made, the reservation will skip to the next person in the queue.

Valve expects to actually ship the first units starting on February 28th. It also aims to release new batches of order emails on a weekly basis. Of course, if you haven't even reserved a Steam Deck unit yet, your wait will be much longer.

A few days ago, we learned that some of the Steam Deck Verified games can already be seen through SteamDB. Take a look at the list below, including some titles that run with several issues and a handful that currently do not run at all.

Steam Deck Verified:

• Aliens: Fireteam Elite

• Ape Out

• Castle Crashers

• Celeste

• Circuit Superstars

• Cuphead

• Dark Souls 2

• Dark Souls 3

• Death Stranding

• Death's Door

• Dishonored

• Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster

• Guacamelee! 2

• Gunfire Reborn

• Hollow Knight

• Hot Wheels Unleashed

• Into the Breach

• Mad Max

• Manifold Garden

• Mark of the Ninja Remastered

• Noita

• Portal 2

• Psychonauts 2

• RAD

• Record of Lodoss War -Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-

• Remnant: From the Ashes

• Risk of Rain 2

• Rogue Legacy 2

• Sable

• Scarlet Nexus

• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

• Super Mega Baseball 3

• Tetris Effect Connected

• The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Repentance expansion is NOT Linux native, however)

• The Messenger

• Total War: Warhammer 2

• Tunche

• Webbed

Have issues but run on the Steam Deck:

• Among Trees

• Black Skylands

• Bravely Default 2

• Cats in Time

• Cookie Clicker

• Crypt of the Necrodancer (default controller config doesn't work, controller glyphs don't match)

• Dyson Sphere Program

• Factorio

• Farming Simulator 19

• Inscryption

• NieR:Automata

• Plants vs. Zombies GOTY

• RimWorld

• Rise of the Tomb Raider

• Season of Mystery: The Cherry Blossom Murders

• Slay the Spire

• Stormworks: Build and Rescue

• Subnautica

• Swords of Legends Online

• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• Tomb Raider 2013

• Tribes of Midgard

• Valheim

• War Thunder

Does not run:

• Arizona Sunshine (VR title)

• Budget Cuts (VR title)

• Job Simulator (VR title)

• Persona 4 Golden

• theBlu (VR title)

In other Steam Deck news, Phoronix reports that Valve engineer Samuel Pitoiset has been working to make some changes to the open-source Radeon Vulkan 'RADV' driver with the goal to improve power savings when using Variable Rate Shading. Pitoiset explained this will be enabled by default on Van Gogh (the AMD APU the Steam Deck is based upon, with some customizations).

For power saving.

This MR is composed by roughly 3 parts:

• lower RADV_FORCE_VRS in NIR to avoid duplicating code in both compiler backends
• rework it by add a new intrinsic to load the VRS rates dynamically
• add RADV_FORCE_VRS_CONFIG_FILE and monitor it using inotify

It's now possible to force per-vertex VRS dynamically by writing eg. 2x2 via RADV_FORCE_VRS_CONFIG_FILE (previously the VRS rates were hardcoded in the vertex shaders). This is enabled by default on VanGogh and the default rate is 1x1 if nothing else is set.

Are you excited about the upcoming release of the Steam Deck? Let us know below.

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