Steam Deck is one of the most talked about tools in the PC gaming community. It’s a handheld device capable of playing desktop video games like Doom Eternal and Cyberpunk 2077. However, the device’s specifications have not been fully disclosed by the developers, and board game enthusiasts may be looking for more information before buying.
Steam Deck uses a system-on-chip (SoC) design based on AMD’s Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures. This design combines CPU and GPU on a single chip, making its computing power difficult to match with traditional desktop graphics cards.
Steam Deck does not include a lot of computing power
Valve’s game console is not a very powerful device. The graphics processor is better than a typical smartphone, but less than a desktop GPU. This is understandable since Steam Deck is a handheld device.
Official specifications of the device
As for the specs on paper, the Steam Deck has a quad-core AMD Zen 2 processor with a base clock of 2.4 GHz and a maximum clock of 3.5 GHz. For graphics processing, the RDNA 2 chip has 8 CUs and a base clock of 1.0 GHz, which can be scaled up to 1.6 GHz.
In addition, it has 16GB of LPDDR5 memory based on a 32-bit bus with a speed of 5500 MT/s.
Blocking desktop GPU equivalents
The Steam Deck’s graphics processor can’t compete with modern GPUs. Its closest equivalent is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, which was released more than a decade ago and has now been discontinued.
Other Green GPUs that could be considered comparable to handheld console GPUs are the GeForce GTX 295 and GTX 480, both of which have also been discontinued. These cards are hard to come by on the used market.
GTX 650 Ti Boost is a very weak GPU. The card was released in 2013 as part of the Kepler suite and has just 768 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. According to TechPowerUp’s GPU computing power aggregates, the 650 Ti Boost is 480% slower than the RTX 3060, a modern GPU for 1080p gaming.
Conclusion
The deck does not include competitive hardware by today’s standards. However, it should be noted that the console runs the game at a lower resolution.
While the minimum resolution for PC games is 1080p, Steam Deck runs games at 1200×800 resolution, allowing developers to optimize the name for the device. This ensures smooth performance without lag, and the console can easily offer a better experience than a gaming PC based on the same GPU, even if it’s as powerful as the GTX 650 Ti.
