Will WoW be playable on the Steam Deck?

[Ursidae-laughing-skull]

Feel like leveling an alt while chilling in bed would be a very relaxing way to play.

[Netes-bloodsail-buccaneers]

I asked that question yesterday. Sounds like ‘no’.

How well will WoW work on Steam Deck?

Valve is coming out with a “handheld gaming PC” for around $400: https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-valve-announces-handheld-gaming-pc-2021-release Just wondering if you guys have done any evaluations/prototyping on the platform on which you can comment. That device is quite interesting.

[Chroesire-bleeding-hollow (Chroesire)]

Personally, I’m pretty dubious of that answer.

Yes, the CPU in the Deck is “custom” in that it’s not something one can buy off that shelf, but it’s not that bizarre. It’s a Zen 2 CPU that’s in the same family as the Ryzen 3000 CPUs you can buy freely, except it’s got a few GPU cores stuck on it. The RDNA 2 GPU cores are in the same family as the Radeon RX 6000 series, so they’re not weird either. Furthermore, the current generation Xboxes, which run a gaming-optimized variant of Windows, use a very similar CPU (Zen 2 + RDNA 2) with the main difference being the level of power. I would be very surprised if the Windows Radeon drivers don’t support the Deck’s integrated GPU, because it’s functionally the same as a RX Radeon 6000 series card.

I’m also dubious that it’ll be necessary to install Windows at all. WoW has run under WINE/Proton quite well for a long time now, with minimal performance loss. There’s no reason to think it’d be any different in the case of the Deck.

Now of course, you aren’t going to be able to run retail WoW with super high settings on this thing, but I think it should be able to push medium settings at its native rez of 1280x800 at a solid 60FPS in most areas. It’ll almost certainly be able to run Classic with maxed out settings no problem… even the Tiger Lake iGPU in my ThinkPad X1 Nano can do that much.

[Foxmumbler-westfall]

Not being a techy, if it’s anything like the Max M1 chip; it should work. Obviously the OS is important.

That being said I’m not a tech person. All I know is my mac runs Wow and FF just fine. Then again it’s set up for photo and video editing so the power is more than enough for these games.