We may not have gotten the Switch Pro, but Valve’s Steam Deck isn’t too far off from what Nintendo’s mythical console was supposed to be. While the features and specs for the console seem pretty impressive, one particular entry confused prospective buyers. The feature in question was one which mentioned that the Steam Deck was “targeting 30 FPS.”
This rather vague phrasing by Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais in an interview troubled a few as it could have suggested that the console was just about reaching its 30 FPS target. However, as spotted by GameRant, Griffais took to Twitter to clarify his statement, saying that 30 FPS is the minimum target that the Steam Deck will be targeting.
“The "30 FPS target" refers to the floor of what we consider playable in our performance testing; games we've tested and shown have consistently met and exceeded that bar so far,” said the tweet. They further added that the console will come with an optional in-built FPS limiter in order to hit that fine balance between performance and the handheld’s battery life.
Griffais previously also talked about how the Steam Deck could essentially have a removable Steam library thanks to the SD card. As of now, games can only be loaded onto the SD card via the Steam Deck, but that could change in the future.
"I think that there's gonna be opportunities to build more software there to get to a point where you can pre-load games on an SD card with a different device but we haven't really explored what could be done there,” they said. “Right now everything is done from the device and it's a pretty good experience where you can just install the games the way you'd expect and load them up and it's just like if they were on internal storage.”
Valve is pretty confident of the Stem Deck’s performance as well. While talking about gauging the system’s performance, Griffais said, “All the games we wanted to be playable is, really, the entire Steam library. We haven't really found something we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle."