The Steam Deck has been announced. A PC in the body of a Switch. A mobile gaming device
with experimental controls, AND enough power to handle latest titles. Equipped with a 4
core, 8 thread Ryzen processor, and 8 RDNA2 Compute Units… it can even do a spot of
raytracing. Starting at £350.
I’m already thinking up all of the torture tests I could run this poor device through.
Links to some videos in the description if you want to know more about it. In this video
I’m going to focus on the HARDWARE. Because the Steam Deck contains the APU we’ve all
been waiting for. And that we all desperately need right now.
APUs are a budget gamer’s dream come true- these beautiful little things feature a processor
and graphics card, rolled into one, historically sold at low prices, but still with just enough
power to drive modern games. I have a Ryzen 2200G- the first APU ever to
be actually rather quite good. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on the market,
waiting for the next APU that’s worth upgrading to. The 3000 series wasn’t worth it, because
it was practically identical to the 2000 series. The newly released 5000 series of APUs is
a bit more interesting, since it sports up to 8 CPU cores based on the improved Zen 3
architecture! …but then they go and ruin it all with something really stupid like some
Vega cores.
I’m tired of Vega. My Ryzen 2200G already has 8 Vega Compute Units, so the idea of upgrading
to the latest APU which still only features 8 Vega Compute Units is a bit boring. Looking
at the benchmarks, it doesn’t deliver enough of a performance lift to be worth upgrading
to.
Especially since AMD’s already got an exciting new architecture, in the form of RDNA 2! This
powers the latest Radeon 6000 series graphics cards. It drives the new generation of consoles.
And now it’s been revealed that it’s powering the Steam Deck.
It’s funny, because up till now, every time a new APU is announced containing Vega cores,
it starts a conversation that goes something like this: ‘I’m sad it’s still using
Vega’ to which somebody will reply with ‘For all we know, RDNA 2 doesn’t scale
down as well. I’m sure AMD knows what they’re doing by sticking to the Vega architecture.‘
And then it descends into boredom as people go on about optimisation, and chip shortages,
and consoles getting priority and all that.
Enter: the Steam Deck! This device is DEFINITIVE PROOF, once and for all, that RDNA 2 makes
Vega its bitch. Which we all knew already. It contains 8 Compute Units, so you can expect
plenty of exciting tech videos where people compare them with 8 Vega Compute Units to
see how much better AMD’s latest architecture is.
So what sort of performance can we expect from it?
Well, a flagship Radeon 6900 XT graphics card features 80 Compute Units, so it’s like
1/10th of that. Further down the line, a Radeon 6700 XT still has 40 Compute Units.
So assuming it performs like 1/5 of a 6700 XT- which it won’t- then it will theoretically
perform at these framerates at 1080p. And, because the Steam Deck has an 800p screen
with roughly half the pixels of 1080p, we COULD multiply results, getting these figures.
We shouldn’t do this, but we will. Now of course, performance might not scale
linearly with CUs. A handheld device has less cooling than a dedicated graphics card does.
And while desktop GPUs can happily consume 200 watts of power, the Steam Deck has only
15 watts to play with! So it will also be clocked lower. So there are many reasons why
I SHOULDN’T have calculated these figures. But I did. So there.
Well, these results aren’t bad! Especially given that they’re using ultra settings,
giving us plenty of room to wiggle here! And given that many of these titles were being
CPU limited in the first place, or simply aren’t worth playing, it makes the Steam
Deck look like a capable little device. Another device to compare it to would be the
Xbox Series S. not the X! The S. Which has 20 CUs. All else being equal -which it won’t
be- this means the Steam Deck is almost as fast at 800p as the Xbox Series S is at 1080p!
Of course, it would be irresponsible of me to throw speculative performance figures around
like this, because the actual performance will likely be entirely different. But since
we’ve gone this far already, we might as well multiply these figures by 2.25 to account
for the additional pixel drop from enabling FSR Quality mode.
Awesome! Now let’s multiply it all by 7.
So I’ve had my fun. I WILL be trying Half Life Alyx on a Steam Deck. And I will be raytracing
stuff. And nobody- apart from release-day scalpers- can stop me!
16 GB of DDR5 RAM is a lot for a handheld device! But remember that some of this WILL
be allocated to the graphics card. So this makes the Steam Deck similar to the new consoles
in that regard, which use a similar system.
And lastly is the Steam Deck’s processor, which is a 4 core, 8 threaded Ryzen, which
is based on the previous-gen Zen 2 architecture. I know a lot of you will be complaining that
it’s a ‘slow’ architecture or whatever, because, obviously, the moment a new generation
comes out, everything before that instantly becomes rubbish. But… obviously it isn’t-
the new consoles use Zen 2. I myself have a Ryzen 3700X as my main PC and suspect it
will be capable for some time to come. To think the Steam Deck contains half of that,
even if it’s clocked lower, still sounds suited for what it’s intended for. The Steam
Deck isn’t intended as a 144 Hz device- it’s 60, and even first gen Ryzen is more
than capable of hitting that. So no, I’m fine with Zen 2 being used.
My bigger concern is the core count. My Ryzen 2200G with its 4 cores already gets bottlenecked
in some games. So the Steam Deck will be relying on improved IPC and multithreading to avoid
this. At the end of the day, it’s still an 8-threaded CPU. I was going to joke that
it’ll be fine, provided you don’t try rendering stuff on it. But actually, you probably
can do that as well! Ideally, we would have had a 6 core, but as
Gabe says, it was kind of important that they stuck to certain price-points for this device,
which I commend them for. Especially how nothing else seems to do that these days. I’m sure
they know what they’re doing. But hitting that price-point has led to compromises.
The base model’s 64 GB of storage is… limited. Very limited. Any newer games, or
applications of any sort will quickly eat that up, and once you factor in the price
and hassle of an expansion SD card then you might as well have opted for a bigger (and
faster) drive in the first place. But at the same time, for the cost of the Steam Deck
to be inflated so much, and by such a boring, necessary feature, is infuriating. I’m expecting
some cool tech videos where the best expansion cards for this device are benchmarked.
In conclusion: the Steam Deck contains the APU I’ve been waiting for. The budget hardware
that we desktop users have been denied in our moment of need- so in that regard, its
timing has been perfect. Even without the screen and device it’s housed in, the APU
inside the Steam Deck is practically worth its price already! It’s effectively a capable
gaming APU that’s bundled with a free mobile device. So looking at it like that, it should
be a desirable device for PC users everywhere.