When Valve and IGN revealed last Thursday that the new Steam Deck handheld will target 30Hz gameplay, not everyone was impressed with that low bar — but Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais has taken to Twitter to clarify his original comment, and reveal a new feature of the portable console.
First, he says 30 fps is more of a minimum bar than anything else:
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22739341/steam_deck_30_fps_clarify.jpg)
“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,” he writes.
In other words, when Griffais said in that IGN video interview that “We haven’t really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn’t handle,” you shouldn’t take it to mean that every modern game runs at 60 fps. Expect less.
