Despite some stiff competition from the likes of Lenovo, Asus, MSI, and more, Valve’s Steam Deck has made its position as one of the best PC gaming handhelds in the market known time and again. And with the announcement that Nvidia’s GeForce NOW will introduce wider support for the Steam Deck, its dominance is even more assured.
There are two particularly excellent updates geared towards Steam Deck users. The first is a new beta installation method for GeForce NOW on the Steam Deck, which will automatically install Google Chrome to the device and add all necessary settings so users can immediately start playing after booting up for the first time.
And the second is a GeForce NOW update that lets users navigate on the browser with a gamepad, including on the Steam Deck. This makes finding and playing games on the handheld without worrying about system specs — including non-Steam games and titles with Nvidia DLSS support and ray-tracing.
Nvidia and Valve had been in talks since 2023 to add more support for the Steam Deck, so these updates were certainly a long time coming.
Steam Deck is charging full steam ahead in the gaming space
These latest updates from Nvidia help to smooth over some of the Steam Deck’s issues, mainly that its lack of power compared to other PC handhelds is becoming more apparent over time. The Steam Deck OLED fixes some of these problems, but certain titles cannot natively run without mods.
But being able to stream titles through GeForce NOW this easily is the best way to combat this issue (at least until the Steam Deck 2 finally launches, of course) since the hardware is completely irrelevant to how well the best PC games run. As long as you have a solid connection, framerate and general performance are as stable as it can be, even for titles that the system can’t otherwise play.
And with the added controller support coupled with the Steam Deck’s largest advantage over the competition — its excellent OS fully optimized for the handheld — it truly feels like it’s gotten meaningful enhancements that keep it competitive with its more powerful rivals.
