Valve has just confirmed that the Steam Deck PC handheld will officially launch on February 25th. Let us clarify right away that this isn't the date you can expect to get your device, though.

　　Rather, on February 25th the embargo for press reviews and impressions will lift. Additionally, Valve will send the first batch of order emails to reservation holders, allowing those users to finalize their purchase within the next three days. After that time, if no purchase has been made, the reservation will skip to the next person in the queue.

　　Valve expects to actually ship the first units starting on February 28th. It also aims to release new batches of order emails on a weekly basis. Of course, if you haven't even reserved a Steam Deck unit yet, your wait will be much longer.

　　A few days ago, we learned that some of the Steam Deck Verified games can already be seen through SteamDB. Take a look at the list below, including some titles that run with several issues and a handful that currently do not run at all.

　　Steam Deck Verified:

　　Aliens: Fireteam Elite

　　Ape Out

　　Castle Crashers

　　Celeste

　　Circuit Superstars

　　Cuphead

　　Dark Souls 2

　　Dark Souls 3

　　Death Stranding

　　Death's Door

　　Dishonored

　　Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster

　　Guacamelee! 2

　　Gunfire Reborn

　　Hollow Knight

　　Hot Wheels Unleashed

　　Into the Breach

　　Mad Max

　　Manifold Garden

　　Mark of the Ninja Remastered

　　Noita

　　Portal 2

　　Psychonauts 2

　　RAD

　　Record of Lodoss War -Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-

　　Remnant: From the Ashes

　　Risk of Rain 2

　　Rogue Legacy 2

　　Sable

　　Scarlet Nexus

　　Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

　　Super Mega Baseball 3

　　Tetris Effect Connected

　　The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Repentance expansion is NOT Linux native, however)

　　The Messenger

　　Total War: Warhammer 2

　　Tunche

　　Webbed

　　Have issues but run on the Steam Deck:

　　Among Trees

　　Black Skylands

　　Bravely Default 2

　　Cats in Time

　　Cookie Clicker

　　Crypt of the Necrodancer (default controller config doesn't work, controller glyphs don't match)

　　Dyson Sphere Program

　　Factorio

　　Farming Simulator 19

　　Inscryption

　　NieR:Automata

　　Plants vs. Zombies GOTY

　　RimWorld

　　Rise of the Tomb Raider

　　Season of Mystery: The Cherry Blossom Murders

　　Slay the Spire

　　Stormworks: Build and Rescue

　　Subnautica

　　Swords of Legends Online

　　The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

　　Tomb Raider 2013

　　Tribes of Midgard

　　Valheim

　　War Thunder

　　Does not run:

　　Arizona Sunshine (VR title)

　　Budget Cuts (VR title)

　　Job Simulator (VR title)

　　Persona 4 Golden

　　theBlu (VR title)

　　In other Steam Deck news, Phoronix reports that Valve engineer Samuel Pitoiset has been working to make some changes to the open-source Radeon Vulkan 'RADV' driver with the goal to improve power savings when using Variable Rate Shading. Pitoiset explained this will be enabled by default on Van Gogh (the AMD APU the Steam Deck is based upon, with some customizations).

　　For power saving.

　　This MR is composed by roughly 3 parts:

　　lower RADV_FORCE_VRS in NIR to avoid duplicating code in both compiler backendsrework it by add a new intrinsic to load the VRS rates dynamicallyadd RADV_FORCE_VRS_CONFIG_FILE and monitor it using inotifyIt's now possible to force per-vertex VRS dynamically by writing eg. 2x2 via RADV_FORCE_VRS_CONFIG_FILE (previously the VRS rates were hardcoded in the vertex shaders). This is enabled by default on VanGogh and the default rate is 1x1 if nothing else is set.

　　Are you excited about the upcoming release of the Steam Deck? Let us know below.