Steam Deck PC GPU Equivalent

Ali_H. · July 18, 2021

With the Announcement of the Steam Deck, In its tech specs in terms of raw power, it's says it on Parr and even batter than the Xbox one (S) and PS4. What are some PC GPUs that are of equivalent power so I can have a reference on graphics levels for some of my games.

YetiSlav · July 21, 2021

On 7/18/2021 at 9:15 PM, Ali_H. said:

With the Announcement of the Steam Deck, In its tech specs in terms of raw power, it's says it on Parr and even batter than the Xbox one (S) and PS4. What are some PC GPUs that are of equivalent power so I can have a reference on graphics levels for some of my games.

There is none that I'm aware of unfortunately. The hardware seems one-of-a-kind right now (and I can't wait to play around with it).

There are two things I don't think were done before.

The first is the APU - we still don't have a Zen+RDNA2 APU in the desktop market. The 5000 series still uses the old Vega architecture. If you're after a discrete GPU - you'd have to cut a RX6700xt in five (40 CUs vs 8). This of course means nothing, because they don't scale FPS, power, etc. and CUs linearly.

The second is memory - the fact memory impacts the APU's performance is known, but I've not seen an AMD APU tested with DDR5, much less lpddr5. Maybe there are some laptops I don't know about?

The last but not least is firmware and software - there's no SteamOS3 yet. Sure, you can compare with regular Arch+KDE, but that's assuming Valve makes no effort to optimize the experience with that exact hardware in mind. I think they will, at least on the power-performance management front.

There's an approximation made here:

although not only does it not have the same type of memory, it also runs Windows. So very much too early to be sure.