TheSteam Deckseems to be going from strength to strength as Valve continues to add support for Steam’s top games. At the beginning of the month, theSteam Deckhad over 2,000 supported games, and this number seems to only be growing as the days go by.
The2000 supported games on the Steam Deckconsist of around 1,000 verified and 1,000 playable games. Steam Deck verified games have generally been extensively play-tested on the handheld gaming PC and are able to run on the system without issue, whereas playable games may have some compatibility issues that arise. At the beginning of March, the Steam Deck had 559 verified games and 498 playable games in its library, which means that Valve has impressively doubled the number of games playable on the system in the space of only one month.
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Just over 50 of these 2,000 games are on Steam’s top 100 games list, which shows that Valve seems intent on bringing the best games to the handheld gaming PC. The list includes three FromSoftware games —Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Dark Souls 3,and the wildly popularElden Ring— and, surprisingly,The Witcher 3,which was once a game that many desktop PCs struggled to run.
Interestingly,Valve initially struggled to getElden Ringto run well on the Steam Deck. The game had multiple performance issues on PC that translated to the Steam Deck. The performance dip issues revolved around the game’s shader pipeline and were not easy to solve due to how diverse PC hardware can be. However, thanks to the Steam Deck having a standard hardware configuration, Valve was able to get the game running smoother on the its device than on some high-end PCs.
While many PC games have been optimized to run well on the handheld device, onemodder connected a Radeon graphics card to their Steam Deckto see if they could get even more power out of the portable platform. The graphics card improved performance in a few titles but was ultimately bottlenecked by the Steam Deck’s CPU.
Valve recently discussed the future of the Steam Deckand noted a few interesting plans for the handheld. The company’s plans seem to be based on adding even more games to the system by adding support for various anti-cheat services. Valve also seems interested in adding more support for Windows 11 on the device.
