Steam Deck developer day to examine the capabilities of AMD's "Van Gogh" APU

We’ve just had a huge month of product launches across the month of Techtober, but there are still some eagerly awaited product launches ahead of us. Chief among these is Valve’s upcoming launch of the Steam Deck, its PC-based gaming handheld console. With the console set for release in December, Valve is hosting a Steamworks Virtual Conference on November 12 that is free to members of its Steamworks developer program.

One of the key topics will be an “APU deep dive with AMD” which should yield more information about the capabilities of its "Van Gogh" chipset. Its Zen 2-based CPU will produce 448 GFlops while its RDNA 2 GPU will produce 1.6 teraflops for a total of 2 teraflops of compute. This puts it on a similar footing to the original Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Other sessions will explore topics including “Development without a dev-kit” and “Proton Support”.

In the first instance, the Steam Deck will ship with Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS onboard with support for Windows-based games via Valve’s translation layer Proton. However, users can also opt to install and run Windows on it if they choose. Naturally, though, the event will be focused on SteamOS and Proton with initial titles expected to either already be available on SteamOS or compatible with Proton. No doubt Proton compatibility will be on the minds of a lot of developers looking to get their titles on the platform.

It will, of course, be interesting to see how many titles are made specifically for the Steam Deck with its 7-inch 1280 x 800 LCD display, and if Valve itself has anything up its sleeve ready for launch. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the Steam Deck will only be available in the US and the UK. Even customers living in those countries will be waiting into the middle of next year to get their hands on one if they pre-order now.

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