It’s been a few days now since the reveal of Valve’s Steam Deck. Pre-orders have been taken, sell-outs have happened, but we’ve still yet to see much about the device beyond some very short snippets of footage from the platform holder, plus some off-screen footage from IGN – we have an of what this machine can do, but much of its make-up still remains a mystery. However, some additional details about the device have emerged, and the official tech specs page has been slightly expanded, giving us more good news about the hardware.
At the core of Steam Deck is an AMD processor that has been widely rumoured but with no official confirmation, though some believe it had been cancelled in the meantime. Codenamed ‘Van Gogh’, specs for the mobile-orientated APU have been known for some time now, verified to a certain extent by disclosures within Linux drivers. At the core of the chip is the Zen 2 architecture in a quad-core configuration, backed by eight RDNA 2 compute units – a match for Steam Deck. However, a long-term issue with AMD’s all-in-one chips and their performance has been constraints on memory bandwidth, and the initial specs from Valve only gave hints at what the chip could deliver in this area.
One of two spec points to have been expanded upon since the reveal concerns the AMD processor’s memory controllers – the quad channel configuration effectively confirms 88GB/s of bandwidth, and in terms of the balance of GPU compute vs memory throughput, the good news is that Steam Deck is well within the ratios defined by Xbox Series consoles and PlayStation 5 – and the hope is, of course, that the handheld will scale down gracefully from these machines.
In the DF Direct Special we’ve prepared, we try to set some expectation levels for the Steam Deck, firstly with a tiny little snippet of performance analysis based on Valve’s clips – which show Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order running at between 30-40fps, Doom Eternal running very closed to a locked 60fps and with less demanding games running at the full 60Hz refresh of the inbuilt display. What we’ve seen so far looks promising – the processor does seem capable of running triple-A games, bolstered no doubt by the 1280×800 resolution. This may be very, very low for a desktop or laptop machine, but it’s just fine for a mobile device.
In our video, we also show the Ryzen 9 4900HS APU running key titles shown in the reveal. On the one hand, this is a good yardstick of PC integrated graphics performance in the mobile space. However, despite operating with a sustained 1.8TF of GPU compute, performance is more Xbox One-like in nature than PlayStation 4 (note: this is still a highly impressive achievement for a mobile unit!). In terms of comparisons to Steam Deck, this Renoir-based Ryzen processor is running on a less capable graphics architecture with less memory bandwidth, but has a 35W power budget up against Steam Deck’s mere 15W maximum. On the one hand, comparisons with Steam Deck will be tangential – but on the other it demonstrates that console comparisons based on specs may be problematic.