When Valve unveiled the Steam Deck, comparisons were immediately made to the Nintendo Switch. This is especially since its reveal followed the relatively unimpressive Nintendo Switch OLED. In the same vein, you’d probably think that it could perform differently in its handheld and docked states. That doesn’t seem to be the case, as the Valve handheld performs similarly in either mode.
PC Gamer reports that Valve has designed the Steam Deck to not come with a higher power mode when docked. Rather than having to deal with two different modes, the company decided that it will focus on the Deck’s primary use case scenario, which is handheld.
Though if you choose to, you can still plug a Full HD TV to the dock, and play the Steam Deck that way if you don’t like the 800p resolution. That being said, chances are you’ll see a slight performance drop when you do so.
Valve has previously promised a minimum framerate of 30fps while in its 800p handheld mode. Ideally, you’d want to expect this to go up to 60fps, but that could be made more challenging if the Steam Deck was made to deal with more pixels than it was primarily made to deal with.
(Source: PC Gamer)
