In an interview with PCGamer Greg Coomer — someone who helped design Valve’s new toys — says it was a conscious decision not to create performance differences between the handheld and docked modes. According to the team, that was better than a difference between the two playstyles as there is on the Nintendo Switch.
That means you don’t have to expect a performance dip if you decide to play a game on the go instead of via the TV. “We wanted to prioritize how we think the Steam Deck will be most used, which is handheld.”
Because of that focus, and the fact that the devs had in mind a threshold for the device to run well (with a good frame rate), they didn’t think it was a good idea to boost performance with docked gameplay: “[..] we didn’t think it was necessary to enable higher resolutions in docked mode. We wanted a simpler design goal and prioritized it,” said Coomer.
It was very difficult for the Guard not to make “handhelds” jokes with someone called Coomer, but they did it!
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