The first benchmarks of the Steam Deck handheld console in several AAA and eSports games have been published by a Chinese user. The performance was benchmarked on a development kit that more or less matches the specifications of the final variant however performance may improve in the final retail variant.
Steam Deck Performance Benchmarks Reveal 60 FPS In AAA Games With Decent Quality, 30 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at Native Resolution
The Steam Deck is one of the most anticipated handheld consoles that is being developed by Valve & will run on the Steam OS. We already detailed the specifications of the console here but to recap, they are listed below.
Valve Steam Deck Specifications at a Glance
The Steam Deck console features the AMD Van Gogh APU with 4 cores and 8 threads. The CPU will operate at a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz and will turbo up to 3.5 GHz. As for the GPU, you are getting the AMD RDNA 2 architecture with 8 Compute Units for a total of 512 stream processors which will clock up to 1600 MHz. The CPU will offer 448 GFlops while the GPU will offer 1.6 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower for a total of over 2 TFLOPs performance, making it faster than the original Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.
- Processor: AMD APU
- CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
- GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
- APU power: 4-15W
- RAM: 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s)
- Storage: 64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
- 256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
- 512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
- All models include a high-speed microSD card slot
For display, the Steam Deck handheld console features a 7-inch LCD that supports a resolution of up to 1280 x 800 at 60 Hz in handheld and up to 8K/60Hz or 4K/120Hz in dock mode. The gaming benchmarks were measured in handheld mode. The OS version for the development kit is Steam OS 3.0 and supports the entire Steam library without any issues.
The benchmarks start off with Shadow of The Tomb Raider where the user managed an average of 36 FPS at High Quality but using a custom settings configuration, the game was able to run at more than 60 FPS at the native resolution. The user also states that despite running at 30 FPS at the high settings profile, he didn’t experience any stutter or lag.
Moving over the DOOM Eternal, with medium settings, the game was able to deliver around 60 FPS on average, and improving the visual quality dropped the FPS down to 46 but it was still playable & ran smoothly according to the user. Of course, we also have eSports titles such as DOTA 2 where it was able to 140 FPS on the heroes selection menu but with the highest image quality, the average FPS dropped to 47 and 80 FPS with low image quality.
One of the heaviest titles in terms of visual quality, Cyberpunk 2077, was also tested and that delivered around 20-30 FPS at the high preset. The performance is very good considering that Valve’s Steam Deck is the first attempt at a handheld console and the company is already talking about a successor that will be able to do 4K in the next couple of years.
Steam Deck Gaming Performance Benchmarks:
- Shadow of The Tomb Raider (High) – 30+ FPS Average
- Shadow of The Tomb Raider (Custom) – 60+ FPS Average
- Doom Eternal (Custom) – 46 FPS Average
- Doom Eternal (Low) – 60 FPS Average
- DOTA 2 (High) – 47 FPS
- DOTA 2 (Low) – 80 FPS
- Cyberpunk 2077 (High) – 20 – 30 FPS
The user also measured the temperatures and Steam Deck managed to hover around 43C on the backside and 29C around the grips during gaming. As for battery timing, the console dropped from 100% to 46% after three hours which is decent enough for the handheld console. It looks like most users will be able to get around 4-5 hours of gaming time easily with the console in handheld mode.
We also recently detailed how the Steam Deck handheld console is ready to support the Windows 11 operating system and can also be used as a controller for your PC via Remote Play. Valve’s device will start shipping in December 2021 for those lucky users that got in the first wave of pre-orders. The rest will have to wait for 2022. The console will cost $399 for the base variant with 64 GB of eMMC storage capacity, $529 US for the 256 GB, and $649 US for the 512 GB NVMe variants.
[ad_2]