The portable Valve Steam Deck may get a dedicated dock for playing on a TV screen or monitor.

This is according to Valve designer Greg Coomer (via PC Gamer), who confirmed that the Steam Deck would not perform better in docked mode. The company considered it, but ultimately decided not to take that route.

Coomer confirmed this fact in response to PC Gamer's question, stating: "Yes, but we chose not to make it a really high priority design goal... We felt it was actually better all things considered not to make changes based on docked or mobile status.

That makes sense when you think about it. After all, the idea behind the Steam Dock is to be able to play PC games in a portable format. Those who want to play games on the big screen may have a dedicated gaming PC that can offer much better performance without compromising mobility.

Ultimately, Valve "chose a threshold where the machine would perform well with AAA games in that scenario and run at a good frame rate," Coomer said. 'We didn't really feel that we should also target the dock scenario at higher resolutions. It was a simpler design goal, and we wanted to prioritize that."

Another way in which the Steam Deck is similar to the Nintendo Switch is that the Switch's TV dock allows the console to play games at up to 1080p resolution, but does not actually increase the performance of the console. Similarly, Steam Deck does not increase performance in TV mode, but it can output content at higher resolutions.

Nevertheless, Valve appears to have designed the Stream Deck to be playable in portable mode. As such, the Steam Deck is built to provide a minimum frame rate of 30 frames per second, but that is only guaranteed when playing at the system's native resolution of 800p.

Any higher and you may experience performance issues, depending on what you are playing and how high a resolution Steam Deck outputs to your TV.

In other words, if you want to get the most out of Steam Deck, we recommend sticking with the handheld mode, as Valve has already confirmed that they want third parties to start making their own Steam Deck devices, and one day in TV mode There may be a handheld PC that offers something special. But it hasn't happened yet, so we'll have to wait and see.