Valve Left Me Unsupervised: Steam Deck Hardware Review

[Sprawlie]

On 2/7/2022 at 1:18 PM, DANK_AS_gay said:

Latency is bad enough as it is, I'm not sure the additional VRAM would really benefit the APU with the bandwidth and latency issues you get from using the far slower system RAM vs GDDRX.

That’s not the problem

 

it would still be advantageous to load be to load more texture in vram. It is orders of magnitude faster to use RAM than have to load texture off storage, than I to memory while rendering 

[DANK_AS_gay]

2 hours ago, Sprawlie said:

That’s not the problem

 

it would still be advantageous to load be to load more texture in vram. It is orders of magnitude faster to use RAM than have to load texture off storage, than I to memory while rendering 

That's assuming that the Integrated graphics are powerful enough to push enough pixels to fill a 2GB frame buffer already. And they may be now with RDNA2, but with VEGA?

[Sprawlie]

7 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

That's assuming that the Integrated graphics are powerful enough to push enough pixels to fill a 2GB frame buffer already. And they may be now with RDNA2, but with VEGA?

Lets not over think it and just pour a shot for our lost gaming comrades who are stuck gaming on integrated GPU's.

 

 

[DANK_AS_gay]

6 minutes ago, Sprawlie said:

Lets not over think it and just pour a shot for our lost gaming comrades who are stuck gaming on integrated GPU's.

 

Mate.... My most powerful GPU  space heater is a GTX 480. Or maybe the mobile 1650 equivalent integrated graphics in the M1.

[Sprawlie]

Just now, DANK_AS_gay said:

Or maybe the mobile 1650 equivalent integrated graphics in the M1.

Don't sell that short. It's better than whats in most iGPU's. (i'm very happy with my M1 iPad)

[DANK_AS_gay]

5 hours ago, Sprawlie said:

Don't sell that short. It's better than whats in most iGPU's. (i'm very happy with my M1 iPad)

Yeah, I can safely say that my MacBook Air while drawing 15W can double (or more if you include the neural engine) the performance of a Fermi card from 2011 drawing 500W. In theory. I tried PS3 emulation, and it was either buggy as hell, or was super slow. Others were getting better performance out of a desktop 1050 (non-ti) and a Ryzen 5 1600. The problem is that nothing takes advantage of the GPU properly. No-one likes Metal, and no-one is going to put that much effort in to such a small part of the market. The most annoying part is that I know that the integrated graphics are capable of crazy performance (for me, remember that GTX 480? I wasn't kidding) at low wattages, but the GPU just sits there. Doing nothing. All of the programs I do use that use MoltenVK or OpenGL run through Rosetta. At least in windows I know that it is running off of the bare metal(haha joke).

By it I mean some other GPU, I know Windows on ARM sucks, and would be the opposite of the experience I was referencing.

[gluttonyx]

Can anyone confirm if steamdeck does anything funky when it comes to the format of the microSD card? e.g. does it leave it as EXFAT so a potential dual boot windows partition on the NVME can access the same microSD

[Needfuldoer]

I suspect we'll have to wait for the software embargo to lift before we'll get an answer to that question.

[GeekPower0]

I think I just found GeekBench results for the Steam Deck: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10001092

 

In addition to that one from September, there are several from this week (presumably now that they are in reviewers hands)

[M2704]

On 2/8/2022 at 4:11 PM, SolarNova said:

An impressive looking 'handheld' for sure.

The hype for it reminds me of the original PSP. I bought that thing from japan as soon as it released and got it imported..still remember the bemused faces of my fellow college students when i sat down during lunch playing Ridge Racer on it lol.

 

That said, i have no use for such a device nowadays. but for those always on the go, students, and professionals who's higher end careers have them constantly taking trips to other parts of the country or other countries entirely..something like this would be great.

 

Being an effective 'PC' also puts it ahead of traditional handheld consoles, the emulation side will be much easier to do. My old PSP 1000 was frequently used to create what was known as 'pandoras batteries' to jailbreak the software to run homebrew on newer versions. It was a right pita to get emulation running on those in the early days.

 

Price ..well.. its no handheld console from the early 2000's thats for sure. i cant recall exactly how much by PSP cost me but i think it was around £300.

£400-£650 is a good deal more expensive,,but for what it is ...i think thats a very good price. Thats effectively a budget APU PC .miniaturized into a handheld with peripherals and software included all for at most £650... Not cheap ..but great value.

Is it really more expensive though? The PSP launched for around 300; But if you factor in inflation for the past 16 years, I’m sure it would be at least 400 in 2022 money. 
 

 

[SolarNova]

2 minutes ago, M2704 said:

Is it really more expensive though? The PSP launched for around 300; But if you factor in inflation for the past 16 years, I’m sure it would be at least 400 in 2022 money. 
 

 

Well it was ~£300 due to me importing it prior to release outside of Japan. Official release price was around 200-250 iirc. At £250 that would make about £400 today.

Though to be fair u cant always go on inflation, average worker income hasnt increased near as much in that same time period.

 

Anyway,, its still more expensive than a traditional handheld console ..but its still a great price considering its NOT a console , its a computer.

[M2704]

59 minutes ago, SolarNova said:

Well it was ~£300 due to me importing it prior to release outside of Japan. Official release price was around 200-250 iirc. At £250 that would make about £400 today.

Though to be fair u cant always go on inflation, average worker income hasnt increased near as much in that same time period.

 

Anyway,, its still more expensive than a traditional handheld console ..but its still a great price considering its NOT a console , its a computer.

Well, I regularly see the Switch OLED go for 450 to 500… 

 

I think the Deck is a great deal. I don’t think it will be ‘mainstream’ any day soon, but can’t wait to get mine somewhere in Q2.