# Valve Announces the Steam Deck Game Console



## btarunr (Jul 15, 2021)

Valve announces Steam Deck, the first in a new category of handheld PC gaming devices starting at $399. Steam Deck is a powerful all-in-one portable PC. With a custom processor developed in cooperation with AMD, Steam Deck is comparable to a gaming laptop with the ability to run the latest AAA games. Your Steam library will be on Deck to play games wherever and whenever you want. Steam Deck is also an open PC, adding the ability to install any software or connect with any hardware.

"We think Steam Deck gives people another way to play the games they love on a high-performance device at a great price," says Valve founder Gabe Newell. "As a gamer, this is a product I've always wanted. And as a game developer, it's the mobile device I've always wanted for our partners." Steam Deck starts at $399, with increased storage options available for $529 and $649. Reservations open July 16th at 10 AM PDT; shipping is slated to start in December 2021. 



 

 

 




Steam Deck details: 
Powerful, custom APU developed with AMD
Optimized for hand-held gaming
Full-sized controls
7" touchscreen
WiFi and Bluetooth ready
USB-C port for accessories
microSD slot for storage expansion
3 different storage options available
For more information, visit this page.

*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## FreedomEclipse (Jul 15, 2021)

I like the idea. The death of the Sony PSP left a pretty big gap in the market but hot diggity damn. that MSRP. Its gonna be tough


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## Rithsom (Jul 15, 2021)

FreedomEclipse said:


> I like the idea. The death of the Sony PSP left a pretty big gap in the market but hot diggity damn. that MSRP. Its gonna be tough



Indeed. For that price, it better be able to run the latest triple-A titles, as advertised.


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## TheDeeGee (Jul 15, 2021)

Don't we have 93820394824 handhelds on the market already?


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## R-T-B (Jul 15, 2021)

TheDeeGee said:


> Don't we have 93820394824 handhelds on the market already?


Not open PC ones.


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## Chomiq (Jul 15, 2021)

No info about resolution or the type of screens (yes, plural as the most expensive model has a different type specified). It seems a bit too wide.


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## Raendor (Jul 15, 2021)

Chomiq said:


> No info about resolution or the type of screens (yes, plural as the most expensive model has a different type specified). It seems a bit too wide.


The info is there. Search on site itself. 7 inch 1280x800


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## Cr4zy (Jul 15, 2021)

Chomiq said:


> No info about resolution or the type of screens (yes, plural as the most expensive model has a different type specified). It seems a bit too wide.


Display​ 
Resolution

1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio)

Type

Optically bonded LCD for enhanced readability

Display size

7" diagonal

Brightness

400 nits typical

Refresh rate

60Hz

Touch enabled

Yes

Sensors

Ambient light sensor


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## TheOne (Jul 15, 2021)

Can't wait to see people trying to play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.


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## Colddecked (Jul 15, 2021)

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)


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 15, 2021)

Do want but I couldn't warrant buying it, I wouldn't use it enough.
I will reserve judgement for now too, reviews.


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## Punkenjoy (Jul 15, 2021)

1280x800...

8 CU RDNA 2 shouldn't have too much problem to run these game at good framerate. I am mostly concern with UI size as some game require a minimum of 1080p, do all pc game will work or they will require specific version of games to run on these?

We will see, but with the spec, that should be WAY more powerful than a switch.


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## Mindweaver (Jul 15, 2021)

I can't believe they put an SD slot on it.. Why not a M.2 or Mini-SATA? They could have put an Express-SD slot at the very least.. I don't know what they expect to get installed on a $400 64gb handheld? You'll need to get the $649 model to even make it worth it. This will die like the Steam Machine due to the price point.


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## newtekie1 (Jul 15, 2021)

Mindweaver said:


> I don't know what they expect to get installed on a $400 64gb handheld?


I think they expect you to just use Remote Play constantly. But if you're going to do that, you might as well just buy a cheap laptop.

Luckily, it looks like even the cheap model uses NVMe storage, just really slow eMMC. So the saving thing might be if they are using a standard M.2 slot and not soldered on storage. So the user can replace the crappy eMMC with an NVMe M.2 SSD of their choice.  Of course that all depends on how easy it is to even open this thing.



Mindweaver said:


> This will die like the Steam Machine due to the price point.



And then there is the whole extra dock just to get HDMI out. And they haven't even told us the cost of the dock(I'm guessing over $100).


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## TheLostSwede (Jul 15, 2021)

Didn't someone make something like this already?




__





						Handheld PC Gaming Console | SMACH Z
					

Try the latest handheld console for PC gaming, powerful enough to play any PC game.




					www.smachz.com


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## Mindweaver (Jul 15, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> I think they expect you to just use Remote Play constantly. But if you're going to do that, you might as well just buy a cheap laptop.


I bought a Razer Kishi to play xbox and steam games using Steam link app and I've played it 3 times. I've owned the kishi for 3 months now. I don't see this as a good streaming device.



newtekie1 said:


> Luckily, it looks like even the cheap model uses NVMe storage, just really slow eMMC. So the saving thing might be if they are using a standard M.2 slot and not soldered on storage. So the user can replace the crappy eMMC with an NVMe M.2 SSD of their choice.  Of course that all depends on how easy it is to even open this thing.


I highly doubt they want you to open it up but someone will. I think 399 is high for what you are getting.



newtekie1 said:


> And then there is the whole extra dock just to get HDMI out. And they haven't even told us the cost of the dock(I'm guessing over $100).


This is Valve we will never see the dock.. haha



TheLostSwede said:


> Didn't someone make something like this already?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


The *Aya Neo*, but it's even more expensive.

*EDIT: TheLostSwede I didn't see your link. That looks interesting but I've never heard of it.*


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## samum (Jul 15, 2021)

SteamOS returns!


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## InhaleOblivion (Jul 15, 2021)

Instantly gave me PSP vibes.  My body and wallet are ready to reserve tomorrow.  Read through the specs and I already intend on getting the 256GB NVMe variant, plus all 3 have MicroSD support.  IGN has an interview with Gabe and a gameplay video.  Once I saw Control and Death Stranding playing just fine, that completely sold me.


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## Flying Fish (Jul 15, 2021)

ETA till Valve get sued by Corsair?

I mean......the name is pretty damn similar to the Elgato Stream Deck...every time i read Steam Deck I read it as Stream Deck...even the logo is...sort of similar...

And companies have been sued for less infringing names than that...recent example https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/news/oatly-sues-glebe-farm-over-trademark/


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## newtekie1 (Jul 15, 2021)

Mindweaver said:


> I bought a Razer Kishi to play xbox and steam games using Steam link app and I've played it 3 times. I've owned the kishi for 3 months now. I don't see this as a good streaming device.


I completely agree.  Buy a cheap laptop if you want to use Remote Play.



Mindweaver said:


> I highly doubt they want you to open it up but someone will. I think 399 is high for what you are getting.


I'm sure they definitely don't want you opening it. And I wouldn't be surprised if the storage is soldered to the board.



Mindweaver said:


> This is Valve we will never see the dock.. haha


LOL.  Considering we don't even have a marketing picture of it, I bet you are right.


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## Daisho11 (Jul 15, 2021)

Pretty powerful handheld, but I don't think they'll sell a lot of them for that much $$$. Also I predict Sega GabeGame Gear tier battery life.


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## persondb (Jul 15, 2021)

Am i the only one who think that button placement looks terrible? Not a fan of trackpads at all and they end up taking so much space...
That aside, the SSD models are pretty terrible.

Too bad that Valve went with Van Gogh instead of going for Rembrandt.


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## medi01 (Jul 15, 2021)

So, uh, what about Windows license?
Or can it run only non-windoz games?



TheDeeGee said:


> Don't we have 93820394824 handhelds on the market already?


I think this one is the most powerful
Also, Valve backing makes a difference.


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## FreedomEclipse (Jul 15, 2021)

TheDeeGee said:


> Don't we have 93820394824 handhelds on the market already?



Depends how much you see the Soulja console as a competitor


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## Space Lynx (Jul 16, 2021)

if it had that OLED screen the new Switch just got I'd buy this in a heartbeat at $399... it would honestly be my dream come true. playing all my fav steam indie games in gorgeous OLED all comfy in bed...  

Steam always has to mess something up... :/


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## Fourstaff (Jul 16, 2021)

Do they have a dock to play "desktop style"?


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## Space Lynx (Jul 16, 2021)

Fourstaff said:


> Do they have a dock to play "desktop style"?




basically yes. steam is making a USB C type hub that will be released at a later date.  but in mean time you can just use any usb-c hub. for keyboard/mouse/monitor


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## Nordic (Jul 16, 2021)

I honestly really like this. It is an open source hand held gaming device pre loaded with my entire steam library. A lot of the indie games I like playing will work great with the controls and also have a small foot print. This will be amazing for emulating games too.

I don't think anyone should expect to play more performance intensive games like Cyberpunk. Be reasonable with your expectations and it will be a fantastic mobile platform.



FreedomEclipse said:


> I like the idea. The death of the Sony PSP left a pretty big gap in the market but hot diggity damn. that MSRP. Its gonna be tough


They probably are selling the hardware at cost too. I doubt they are making much if any profit of of the hardware sales.



newtekie1 said:


> I wouldn't be surprised if the storage is soldered to the board.


It is confirmed that the ssd is soldered and not upgradable.



Daisho11 said:


> Pretty powerful handheld, but I don't think they'll sell a lot of them for that much $$$. Also I predict Sega GabeGame Gear tier battery life.


Battery life is about 2-8 hours, depending on what you're doing. You can play Portal 2 for four hours on this thing. If you limit it to 30 FPS, you're going to be playing for 5-6 hours.



Fourstaff said:


> Do they have a dock to play "desktop style"?


They are supposedly going to release one but you can use any USB C dock. You don't need to pay for the official valve dock if you don't want to.


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## wolf (Jul 16, 2021)

Halo MCC on the go? sign me up. Looks like one hell of a gadget to play with.


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## Space Lynx (Jul 16, 2021)

wolf said:


> Halo MCC on the go? sign me up. Looks like one hell of a gadget to play with.



really is going to depend on that battery life though... and keep in mind, just like a phone, if your charging it every couple days... the battery will be almost useless within two years.


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## wolf (Jul 16, 2021)

lynx29 said:


> really is going to depend on that battery life though... and keep in mind, just like a phone, if your charging it every couple days... the battery will be almost useless within two years.


Definitely a consideration, however, if I got one I'd likely use it in places with power available anyway, and have a battery bank too.


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## AsRock (Jul 16, 2021)

HAHAHAHAHA


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## R0H1T (Jul 16, 2021)

lynx29 said:


> if your charging it every couple days... *the battery will be almost useless within two years*.


Which phone is that? I've got one that I charge daily, slight more in a single day these days, with less than 30% battery degradation over 3+ years now. If I'd charged it for 80% (level) in that time the degradation would be probably 15~20% at most. And I'm a pretty heavy user with that phone!


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## sam_86314 (Jul 16, 2021)

This seems too good to be true.

I want it.


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## Fourstaff (Jul 16, 2021)

lynx29 said:


> basically yes. steam is making a USB C type hub that will be released at a later date.  but in mean time you can just use any usb-c hub. for keyboard/mouse/monitor


Nice. Its essentially a PC Switch with steam library. Not sure if I will buy it though, I love my KB+M.


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## RoutedScripter (Jul 16, 2021)

This may explain why Nintendo's Switch Pro or the next Swith being nowhere to be seen, because it may got delayed for adjustments in response to Valve's competition. I think it's a good thing because Nintendo is perhaps busy beefing up the specs and building up other improvements and features to differentiate from Steam Deck.


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## kayjay010101 (Jul 16, 2021)

Fourstaff said:


> Nice. Its essentially a PC Switch with steam library. Not sure if I will buy it though, I love my KB+M.


You can use it with KB+M  USB-c port can be used with any USB-C dock.


medi01 said:


> So, uh, what about Windows license?
> Or can it run only non-windoz games?


You can install Windows on it if you want, it's literally just a PC.

As an aside, I am really quite excited for this. I could definitely see myself using this often, and with the dock functionality it can even act as a thin-client for general PC usage which is awesome. I could then use it for general desktop usage then remote into my actual computer for gaming/heavier workloads.
At the very least this means EAC will be supported in Proton which means MCC on Linux, finally. I might ditch my Windows parititon entirely at that point, it's really only there so I can play MCC  

Although, the base model should just be axed. eMMC is completely unusable and will die very quickly as it has very limited write endurance. What they need to do is remove the base model and only sell the 256GB or 512GB NVMe models, or introduce a 128GB model that is at least SATA if NVMe is too expensive. But no eMMC. Just no. I feel bad for the tech-illiterate that will go ahead and buy the cheapest model then wonder why their storage is bricked within the year, and why their games take so long to load when it did work. For the sake of those people I would hope Valve reconsiders using eMMC.


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## Nordic (Jul 16, 2021)

As far as I have seen, some people think it is too expensive, doesn't have enough performance, and has too little battery life.

This device is more than likely being sold at or near cost. To achieve a lower cost you would have to decrease performance and quality.

To achieve more performance you would increase costs and decrease battery life, and there isn't a lot of room to increase performance in this form factor.

To achieve better battery life you would have to increase costs and decrease performance, and there isn't a lot of room for a bigger battery in this form factor.

Somr people are suggesting that a gaming laptop is a better buy, but they don't recognize the appeal of a handheld device. Just look at the popularity of the Nintendo switch. This is a popular form factor.


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## Colddecked (Jul 16, 2021)

This device is amazing.  A "Steam Book" with this hw would be equally amazing.


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## The red spirit (Jul 16, 2021)

I bet it's going to be DOA. There's absolutely no way it's going to run full PC games well or be actually cheap or have any adequate battery life. It will only be relevant for some kind of game streaming. And knowing that it will have to run PC software, seals the deal altogether. That means there won't be any handheld optimizations and plenty of games won't support integrated gamepad. Also weak handheld hardware will be overburdened with software loads. So basically it's going to be e-waste version of Switch.


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## Colddecked (Jul 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I bet it's going to be DOA. There's absolutely no way it's going to run full PC games well or be actually cheap or have any adequate battery life. It will only be relevant for some kind of game streaming. And knowing that it will have to run PC software, seals the deal altogether. That means there won't be any handheld optimizations and plenty of games won't support integrated gamepad. Also weak handheld hardware will be overburdened with software loads. So basically it's going to be e-waste version of Switch.



Think of it this way, this thing has like a quarter of the power of a PS5, but its target resolution is about a quarter of the pixels of PS5's target of 4k...


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## f22a4bandit (Jul 16, 2021)

A more powerful version of the Switch with all of the flexibility of a PC. Can install basically anything you want on it (including other storefronts/launchers) as you're not pigeonholed into a specific environment. Play your Steam games, or use it as an emulator. Pretty impressive for the price point, I'm intrigued.


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## newtekie1 (Jul 16, 2021)

Nordic said:


> It is confirmed that the ssd is soldered and not upgradable.


Where was this confirmed? I couldn't find anything on it.


kayjay010101 said:


> You can use it with KB+M  USB-c port can be used with any USB-C dock.


Except then you can't charge it at the same time. You need Steams yet to be seen dock to charge and use the USB at the same time.

This thing needs a built in HDMI port and an extra USB C port and I'd consider it. And you can't say they didn't have room for the extra ports, the thing is the size of a skateboard.


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## The red spirit (Jul 16, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> Think of it this way, this thing has like a quarter of the power of a PS5, but its target resolution is about a quarter of the pixels of PS5's target of 4k...


I don't even want to see it that way. It's literally updated Vega 8. Weakest RDNA 1 GPU was RX 5500 XT and it had 22 CUs. 8 RDNA 2 CUs will be quite weak, much weaker than RX 5500 XT. And RX 5500 XT was no powerhouse, it's like RX 580, but with lower power consumption. If anything, I wouldn't expect anything more than RX 560 performance from this new iGPU. And that is really weak today.  Sure, you can play most games at lowest settings at 1600x900 and get 40-50 fps. But forget it running Cyberpunk or Watch Dogs Legion at anything more than 720p lowest. And if device like this is already this weak already, does it have any future potential with even higher requirements? Absolutely no, unless you wanna run games at 640x480 lowest settings and say that 20 fps is playable. BTW PS5 runs PS5 OS, this APU handheld will run some linux distro, which will be heavier and it won't have any proper console optimizations. I'm pretty sure that this will be e-waste really quickly.


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## newtekie1 (Jul 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> But forget it running Cyberpunk or Watch Dogs Legion at anything more than 720p lowest.


Hence the 720p screen. It's going to be like playing through a screen door.


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## The red spirit (Jul 16, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> Hence the 720p screen. It's going to be like playing through a screen door.


It will soon need mini CRT to stay relevant.


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## Nordic (Jul 16, 2021)

A lot of people have unrealistic expectations of performance both too high and too low. 

"Oh my god, it can run Cyperpunk! My 4 year old PC can't even run Cyberpunk." Yes, it can run even the most demanding games but like Cyberpunk, it won't run it well. What it can do that consoles do not do is give you access to graphics settings so you can turn down the visual quality to get better performance.

Despite having hardware that performs between the PS4 and Xbox One, a lot of people think it won't be able to run any games at all. Any game that runs well on a PS4 or Xbox One should run as well or better with the Steam Deck because it has a lower resolution. With some graphical tweaking, you should be able to get all but the most demanding games working very well.

Where this will really shine is Steams vast library of small indie games and emulation. Dozens of these kinds of games will fit fine on the 64gb version and last 8+ hours on the battery.

Get real guys.


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## ShiBDiB (Jul 16, 2021)

The price point is what makes this intriguing. It opens up PC gaming at a presently less than console price point. I think if you look at the target audience as entry level PC gamers or people who want something portable to supplement their at home systems, it's not a bad concept..

But that's also not a terribly large target audience so I could see support disappearing quickly.


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## sam_86314 (Jul 16, 2021)

Been trying to reserve one for a while now. Anyone else having issues? My guess is their servers are getting hammered right now.

EDIT: Finally completed the reservation. Only took three billion tries.


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## The red spirit (Jul 16, 2021)

Nordic said:


> Get real guys.


That stuff doesn't matter. It will be very underwhelming device and if 400 Euros means nothing to you, then feel free to flush it down the toilet. I don't see any reason for such half assed product to exist.


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## Nordic (Jul 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> That stuff doesn't matter. It will be very underwhelming device and if 400 Euros means nothing to you, then feel free to flush it down the toilet. I don't see any reason for such half assed product to exist.


If that stuff doesn't matter, then why are you complaining about it?


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## Colddecked (Jul 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> That stuff doesn't matter. It will be very underwhelming device and if 400 Euros means nothing to you, then feel free to flush it down the toilet. I don't see any reason for such half assed product to exist.



Custom soc with rdna2 cores, half assed?  Being able to seemless play your windows games thru linux half assed?  Just because it doesnt appeal to you doesnt mean its half assed.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 16, 2021)

Arch Based OS... hah... now that is great.... Its a nice thing to have arch linux experience


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## Space Lynx (Jul 16, 2021)

night.fox said:


> Arch Based OS... hah... now that is great.... Its a nice thing to have arch linux experience


my 12 year old steam account, usa, with 1k games on it.... isn't it enough for them... says my account is to new to place a reserve for the $399 variant.

a ******* joke.  gabe can go eat more pizza, im done with steam


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 16, 2021)

lynx29 said:


> my 12 year old steam account, usa, with 1k games on it.... isn't it enough for them... says my account is to new to place a reserve for the $399 variant.
> 
> a ******* joke.  gabe can go eat more pizza, im done with steam


well couldnt even pre-order here in korea... so..


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## Space Lynx (Jul 16, 2021)

night.fox said:


> well couldnt even pre-order here in korea... so..



ye but that isn't the point, must be some kind of error... cause if 12 yo account isn't good enough then... eh... 

point is steam always has an error or issue, so I'm glad I couldn't reserve it. best to keep my $400 in the bank.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 16, 2021)

lynx29 said:


> ye but that isn't the point, must be some kind of error... cause if 12 yo account isn't good enough then... eh...
> 
> point is steam always has an error or issue, so I'm glad I couldn't reserve it. best to keep my $400 in the bank.


did a quick search. yeah seems like error or server got loaded and lots have received same issue as yours


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## Space Lynx (Jul 16, 2021)

night.fox said:


> did a quick search. yeah seems like error or server got loaded and lots have received same issue as yours



yeah but server has been getting overloaded for decade now on big sale days, etc. bit pathetic they haven't figured it out. you can rent servers for a short period of time from various companies... its really not that hard and probably not even that expensive for a big company with annual contract discounts.


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## Nordic (Jul 16, 2021)

I reserved a Steam deck. I am really excited about this. It will be a great platform for indie games and emulation.


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## persondb (Jul 17, 2021)

Valve updated their tech specs with details on RAM and Storage. So it actually _has a M.2 slot_ 2230 but still. Just not 'intended for end-user replacement'.




No clue on why Valve is saying that memory is dual-channel, obviously it shouldn't be as LPDDR5 channels are 16b and that would be a paltry 32b memory bus. I am guessing that it means that they are using two memory chips. I would hope that it has a full 128b memory bus but god knows, if it was DDR5 it would be 'quad-channel' for it to be 128b though.


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## TheOne (Jul 17, 2021)

Looking forward to the tear downs.


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## newtekie1 (Jul 17, 2021)

persondb said:


> No clue on why Valve is saying that memory is dual-channel, obviously it shouldn't be as LPDDR5 channels are 16b and that would be a paltry 32b memory bus. I am guessing that it means that they are using two memory chips. I would hope that it has a full 128b memory bus but god knows, if it was DDR5 it would be 'quad-channel' for it to be 128b though.


It is a little confusing how they name things. DDR4 used 16b "channels" too.  But that was referring to the DRAM chips themselves.  What we traditionally think of as a memory channel is referring to the DIMM package itself.  If you take 4 16-bit chips and put them on a single DIMM package, you get a 64-bit channel.


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## Liquid Cool (Jul 17, 2021)

A handheld that runs all of my steam games on linux? I hit the Pre-Order as fast as I could.  

It's not worth quibbling over $5, at least they didn't ask for the full amount up front?

Can't wait for mine!  Actually haven't been excited about a product in years until I saw this.

For me, a must buy!

Best,

Liquid Cool


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## persondb (Jul 17, 2021)

newtekie1 said:


> It is a little confusing how they name things. DDR4 used 16b "channels" too.  But that was referring to the DRAM chips themselves.  What we traditionally think of as a memory channel is referring to the DIMM package itself.  If you take 4 16-bit chips and put them on a single DIMM package, you get a 64-bit channel.


I mean, you aren't technically wrong, though DDR4 chips comes from x4 to x16. But that's more about it in desktop for DIMMs really. 

If you per example take at other places you will see it that it's different, per example Renoir supports quad-channel LPDDR4 and it says so explicitly in the Linux kernel








						linux/dcn21_resource.c at bfdc6d91a25f4545bcd1b12e3219af4838142ef1 · torvalds/linux
					

Linux kernel source tree. Contribute to torvalds/linux development by creating an account on GitHub.




					github.com
				



Four channels with each having 32 bits(actually 2x16) for 128 bits in total. 

The difference is that in the case of DIMMs, it's putting those DDR4 chips into a topology such as that they act like a single channel, which is what we normally know DDR4 as for.  

I believe that the most common in mobile and in those other applications it's really to just not tie them together like in DIMMs, unless you don't can't support that many memory controllers. Which honestly, there's no really no reason to not if you can. 

If you look per example at this, it's show a package solution for it and overall it's better and more performant to do it using 4 channels(4x16 bits memory controller) than to tie them into a single channel(so 64 bits memory controller). Though at this point, who the fucks knows. I would certainly hope for a full 128 bits bus though.


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## The red spirit (Jul 17, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> Custom soc with rdna2 cores, half assed?  Being able to seemless play your windows games thru linux half assed?  Just because it doesnt appeal to you doesnt mean its half assed.


It's just an SoC. with Vega 8 updated with RDNA 2. I'm telling you it's not going to run games well and you want it to do it through linux with overhead. It's just not going to end well. And it's portable, so forget proper battery life. And it's 400 Euros+ for poverty spec one, which can only store one game. You will pay more for actually usable version. And in the end it's going to cost you twice than desktop Ryzen computer and will be even slower. Considering that they sort of hacked together some linux and probably did bare minimum for controller support in games, it will be half-assed. It's going to be a terrible value.



Nordic said:


> If that stuff doesn't matter, then why are you complaining about it?


You surely love misinterpreting my posts, don't you?


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## tehehe (Jul 17, 2021)

I wonder if it supports Freesync Premium (VRR + LFC) on built-in display and on external ones when connected through dock. This would be a really welcome feature.


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## TheDeeGee (Jul 17, 2021)

I just saw someone call it the "GabeBoy"


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## newtekie1 (Jul 17, 2021)

TheDeeGee said:


> I just saw someone call it the "GabeBoy"


I would have gone with GabeGear instead. It looks more like a Game Gear to me, expect the engineers said "how can we make a Game Gear as big as a skateboard".


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## ShiBDiB (Jul 17, 2021)

Reportedly new reservations have been pushed back to mid 2022. And there's already Ebay listing from scalpers selling reservations for 2x+ MSRP.

I don't know a good fix, but scalping is becoming a serious issue.


As for size, it's not that much bigger than a switch.


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## Nordic (Jul 17, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> It's just an SoC. with Vega 8 updated with RDNA 2. I'm telling you it's not going to run games well and you want it to do it through linux with overhead. It's just not going to end well. And it's portable, so forget proper battery life. And it's 400 Euros+ for poverty spec one, which can only store one game. You will pay more for actually usable version. And in the end it's going to cost you twice than desktop Ryzen computer and will be even slower. Considering that they sort of hacked together some linux and probably did bare minimum for controller support in games, it will be half-assed. It's going to be a terrible value.
> 
> 
> You surely love misinterpreting my posts, don't you?


1) Anything a PS4 can play well, this can play as well or better. It is going to be AMAZING for emulation.
2) Battery life will be near 8 hours for indie games and emulation.
3) You can store dozens of indie games and roms on 64 GB. They are usually no more than 2 GB anyway. Those kinds of games won't care about the slow speed of the SD card add on either.
4) A full ryzen desktop is not remotely portable and comparing them is ignoring the appeal of a handheld device. Look at how popular the Nintendo DS and Switch have been. There is a market for handheld devices.
5) Hacked together some kind of linux? Please. You are assuming it is half-assed. Proton has come a long way from the first steam machine. Most windows games are playable on linux RIGHT NOW because of Valve. The games that just don't work are because of various anti-cheat implementations, of which Valve has announced they are working on.

Your opinions on the Steam Deck are objectively false or are unrealistic expectations. See 1-5.

Please explain to me like I am 5 hour I am misinterpreting your posts.


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jul 17, 2021)

I was talking to my mate today, he says the only problem is, steam support for their hardware stuff is cack. The steam controller has pretty much bombed, same for steam link, and steam machine. 

I really like the look and specs of this, i am hoping they will keep up the backup on it though.



newtekie1 said:


> I would have gone with GabeGear instead. It looks more like a Game Gear to me, expect the engineers said "how can we make a Game Gear as big as a skateboard".



I like that GabeGear, got a nice ring to it. Get that shit copyrighted now


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## xBruce88x (Jul 18, 2021)

Got one reserved, a 512GB model. I've got a year to come up with the money lol. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be a great alternative to the GPD Win. It's an upgrade to the system I have now, and portable on top of that! The etched anti glare screen will come in handy when I'm playing while waiting to load my work truck lol. The truck also has a 200w outlet so charging shouldn't be a problem hopefully. My phone has pretty good Hotspot capabilities so lack of mobil sim isn't an issue. It is unfortunate that storage is soldered but 512 should be enough for a few bigger games. Mostly play solo games anyway so things like gta online won't be a problem. Worst case if Steam support drops I'll either load Windows on it or get into RetroArch


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## TheOne (Jul 18, 2021)

I put in for the $400 emmc version, by the time my order comes up there should be plenty of information available about the device, I'm curious to see if the 64GB is soldered or if they are using the m.2 port.


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## Richards (Jul 18, 2021)

Its gonna flop.. does pre order  numbers are not looking  good


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## Nordic (Jul 18, 2021)

Richards said:


> Its gonna flop.. does pre order  numbers are not looking  good


Where are you seeing pre-order numbers?

Even if it does flop, it isn't like it needs Valve to support it like an Xbox would. It is linux. Any tech enthusiast can keep the software up to date themselves.


xBruce88x said:


> Worst case if Steam support drops I'll either load Windows on it or get into RetroArch


That is the nice thing about linux. Even if steam drops support, it will keep working the same.


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jul 18, 2021)

https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/valve-hardware-before-steam-deck/

Doomed...... possibly


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

Nordic said:


> 1) Anything a PS4 can play well, this can play as well or better.


Not really. PS4 had some console specific optimizations. GTA 5 wouldn't run well on AMD Bobcat cores on PC, but it does on PS4.



Nordic said:


> It is going to be AMAZING for emulation.


Yes and no. It has power, but it runs linux, so you lose some Windows only emulators. Also that gamepad limits emulation choices (Pretty much impossible to map Sega Master System, Wii, N64 gamepads to this thing without aftermarket gamepads). Weak CPU individual cores, mean that emulation will be limited to no more than PS2. Small storage means that you won't be able to store many games. If you want to play PS2 titles, well, you only have so much space left after Steam OS. On 64GB models, that will be only 10 games, excluding double disk games. And despite all the hype about emulation, I still feel that people just like idea more than actually running games through one.




Nordic said:


> 2) Battery life will be near 8 hours for indie games and emulation.


I very highly doubt that. Wouldn't expect more than 5 and more than 2-3 hours of AAA gaming.



Nordic said:


> 4) A full ryzen desktop is not remotely portable and comparing them is ignoring the appeal of a handheld device. Look at how popular the Nintendo DS and Switch have been. There is a market for handheld devices.


Sure there is, but Nintendo actually made specific OS for it, made UI work for handheld and made everything functional, meanwhile Valve tries to just put linux on handheld and it should work, I haven't even mentioned system requirements for games, about which Nintendo gamers don't ever need to care about. Buying this thing is essentially buying a small handheld PC, it's not a full console.



Nordic said:


> 5) Hacked together some kind of linux? Please. You are assuming it is half-assed. Proton has come a long way from the first steam machine. Most windows games are playable on linux RIGHT NOW because of Valve. The games that just don't work are because of various anti-cheat implementations, of which Valve has announced they are working on.


I don't doubt that, but like I said before, where's gamepad support for linux? Can you use a whole distro with just gamepad? Where are some other console optimizations? Where are Deck specific performance optimizations? Having a proton is just bare minimum, I'm talking about actually polished and finished linux distro, that is actually nice to use and can go head to head against Switch. Not just some cobbled together, "it kind of works" stuff. 



Nordic said:


> Your opinions on the Steam Deck are objectively false or are unrealistic expectations.


I think that realistic expectation is that sloppily developed console with small budget and zero ecosystem is going to suck, seems reasonable to me. It's not even a console, it's a PC and with thin client internals. Obviously a handheld console is marketable and desirable thing, but not some thin client with near zero software development and optimizations. I think that if Sony made PSP 3, it would sell more than Deck.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Not really. PS4 had some console specific optimizations. GTA 5 wouldn't run well on AMD Bobcat cores on PC, but it does on PS4.
> 
> 
> Yes and no. It has power, but it runs linux, so you lose some Windows only emulators. Also that gamepad limits emulation choices (Pretty much impossible to map Sega Master System, Wii, N64 gamepads to this thing without aftermarket gamepads). Weak CPU individual cores, mean that emulation will be limited to no more than PS2. Small storage means that you won't be able to store many games. If you want to play PS2 titles, well, you only have so much space left after Steam OS. On 64GB models, that will be only 10 games, excluding double disk games. And despite all the hype about emulation, I still feel that people just like idea more than actually running games through one.
> ...


Look I am not going to argue with all that but two points it uses steam OS and I have on a pc your PS4 or Xbox pad is all you need. ..
And the OS is swappable, win 10-11 should work fine.
And your regarding the lowest one as the norm 33% went high, most went 256Gb Soo ignoring 75% with more than 64GB is ignorance.
Also I would argue a fair few including me might get the low end one to put my OWN nvme in?!.


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> And the OS is swappable, win 10-11 should work fine.


Key word is should. Steam is surely not going to make any Windows drivers for it and generic drivers are mostly good for very common and usual hardware, which Deck isn't. 



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> And your regarding the lowest one as the norm 33% went high, most went 256Gb Soo ignoring 75% with more than 64GB is ignorance.


They can put even a zettabyte of storage, I won't care. I think that this handheld PC is going to have far more problems than storage alone. Remember Steam OS? It didn't turn out to be commercially viable. And Valve tried several times to make it real. I see no new reasons, why it shouldn't end up sucking this time.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Key word is should. Steam is surely not going to make any Windows drivers for it and generic drivers are mostly good for very common and usual hardware, which Deck isn't.
> 
> 
> They can put even a zettabyte of storage, I won't care. I think that this handheld PC is going to have far more problems than storage alone. Remember Steam OS? It didn't turn out to be commercially viable. And Valve tried several times to make it real. I see no new reasons, why it shouldn't end up sucking this time.


Steam didn't sell steam OS ,did you use it, you seam very neg on something I found to be significantly better and easier to use than Any other gaming OS including driver handling, it's that simple, I don't just game but your ideas on it won't pan out I assure you(the OS).

You see no benefit or point so no one's looking to change your mind just counter your less than objective negativity you're speaking like only God tier pc performance could possibly do for everyone when it's you and a fair few others, for some it will perform well lookup 5700G performance and that uses Vega , more power but drive's twice the pixel's.


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Steam didn't sell steam OS ,did you use it, you seam very neg on something I found to be significantly better and easier to use than Any other gaming OS including driver handling, it's that simple, I don't just game but your ideas on it won't pan out I assure you(the OS).


It's not about me, it's how it did in the market and it pretty much failed to be even a minor player.




TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> You see no benefit or point so no one's looking to change your mind just counter your less than objective negativity you're speaking like only God tier pc performance could possibly do for everyone when it's you and a fair few others, for some it will perform well lookup 5700G performance and that uses Vega , more power but drive's twice the pixel's.


I often defend really cheap and weak hardware, but not this time. This time the hardware is cheap and weak, but sold at massive premium and you get tried and failed product, which is a handheld computer. Many other brands tried to make these and they failed, Valve did nothing special and thus there's no reason to think that it's going to be good.


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## Nordic (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Not really. PS4 had some console specific optimizations. GTA 5 wouldn't run well on AMD Bobcat cores on PC, but it does on PS4.





The red spirit said:


> I very highly doubt that. Wouldn't expect more than 5 and more than 2-3 hours of AAA gaming


We will have to wait for real hands on reviews to resolve this disagreement.


The red spirit said:


> despite all the hype about emulation, I still feel that people just like idea more than actually running games through one.


I am not an average gamer, but emulation is one of the primary reasons I want one of these. I have reserved one and will be emulating games on it.


The red spirit said:


> Sure there is, but Nintendo actually made specific OS for it, made UI work for handheld and made everything functional, meanwhile Valve tries to just put linux on handheld and it should work, I haven't even mentioned system requirements for games, about which Nintendo gamers don't ever need to care about. Buying this thing is essentially buying a small handheld PC, it's not a full console.





The red spirit said:


> I don't doubt that, but like I said before, where's gamepad support for linux? Can you use a whole distro with just gamepad? Where are some other console optimizations? Where are Deck specific performance optimizations? Having a proton is just bare minimum, I'm talking about actually polished and finished linux distro, that is actually nice to use and can go head to head against Switch. Not just some cobbled together, "it kind of works" stuff.


Running steam on almost any distribution of Linux is easy. SteamOS has all the power and functionality of Linux but uses Steams big picture mode as the default UI. Big picture mode is a very well designed UI. Controller support is there. I agree with @TheoneandonlyMrK on the functionality of Steam on Linux being very usable.


The red spirit said:


> It's not even a console, it's a PC and with thin client internals.


I am so excited about this device because it is not a console, but a PC with Linux and console tier hardware. 


The red spirit said:


> I think that if Sony made PSP 3, it would sell more than Deck.


I think it would, by quite a large margin. Sony has quite a fan base and the business network to make it a success. I don't think that makes the Steam Deck any less impressive from a hardware and software perspective.


The red spirit said:


> It's not about me, it's how it did in the market and it pretty much failed to be even a minor player.


I don't think anyone, not even valve expected that or this to have market penetration like mainstream consoles do, nor does it need to in order to be successful.


The red spirit said:


> Valve did nothing special.


I think valve put together a very well balanced handheld device. It is special because no one else would even consider trying to do this. The most impressive thing is the improvements to gaming on Linux that Valve has developed for this device. The hardware will be temporary but the software will improve the experience of everyone trying to game on Linux, while being a stepping stone to future improvements. Gaming on Linux is getting into a really good position now.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> It's not about me, it's how it did in the market and it pretty much failed to be even a minor player.
> 
> 
> 
> I often defend really cheap and weak hardware, but not this time. This time the hardware is cheap and weak, but sold at massive premium and you get tried and failed product, which is a handheld computer. Many other brands tried to make these and they failed, Valve did nothing special and thus there's no reason to think that it's going to be good.


We disagree, clearly.

Many other brands were not valve, many other brands did not have such a powerful soc , it's in my eyes beyond a Nintendo and if you think AMD can't bring some of the optimisation of a console to a pc you must not have been paying attention ala Vulkan.

As I said we disagree, and all your now doing is regurgitating the same opinion.

Your opinion IS ALL About you, that's clear.


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

Nordic said:


> I am not an average gamer, but emulation is one of the primary reasons I want one of these. I have reserved one and will be emulating games on it.


Okay, it's just that emulation can be done on basically anything else and if you want to emulate PS3, then you absolutely need something with very good CPU single threaded performance.




Nordic said:


> I think it would, by quite a large margin. Sony has quite a fan base and the business network to make it a success. I don't think that makes the Steam Deck any less impressive from a hardware and software perspective.


I clearly mentioned much better UI and gamepad integration, but if that isn't important to you, then my reasoning is lost on you.



Nordic said:


> I don't think anyone, not even valve expected that or this to have market penetration like mainstream consoles do, nor does it need to in order to be successful.


It has to be successful. What's the point for corporation to make something that doesn't sell? There's no point in that. Corps want money and to make money their products have to sell. To date, pretty much all Steam hardware has been mostly commercial failures or very meek successes. 




Nordic said:


> I think valve put together a very well balanced handheld device. It is special because no one else would even consider trying to do this.


Until 9 months later, you will see someone else ripping off the idea with exactly the same Ryzen SoC. This is tech world, innovation barely matters, if it doesn't translate into something. And if something is successful, then few months later there will be others trying to cash in.



Nordic said:


> The most impressive thing is the improvements to gaming on Linux that Valve has developed for this device. The hardware will be temporary but the software will improve the experience of everyone trying to game on Linux, while being a stepping stone to future improvements. Gaming on Linux is getting into a really good position now.


This isn't specific to Steam Deck and linux gamer still say that for a long time and linux gaming still barely exists.



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Vulkan.


It wasn't all that great, on older hardware it increased CPU requirements and reduced performance. 




TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Your opinion IS ALL About you, that's clear.


And what does the market think about it? So far I haven't really heard about any truly successful linux gaming thing (be it console or computer). Linux users are often very extreme fanboys drunk on linux Koolaid and think that linux is the big next thing and it's been decades and linux in consumer space is still a tiny niche just like it always has been.


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## Nordic (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I clearly mentioned much better UI and gamepad integration, but if that isn't important to you, then my reasoning is lost on you.


I don't think you understand how good the UI and gamepad integration currently is. These are not things we need to wait to test. It is fully functional and testable now.


The red spirit said:


> It has to be successful. What's the point for corporation to make something that doesn't sell? There's no point in that. Corps want money and to make money their products have to sell. To date, pretty much all Steam hardware has been mostly commercial failures or very meek successes.


Valve doesn't want to be in the hardware business. They are trying to slowly build gaming on Linux because they are worried about Microsoft forcing Valve out of the market via the windows store. They have been developing the software necessary to make this happen. This device is meant to demonstrate how far gaming on Linux has come.


The red spirit said:


> Until 9 months later, you will see someone else ripping off the idea with exactly the same Ryzen SoC.


This is Valves stated goal from the various interviews. They want others to copy and improve upon the steam deck. They would be very happy if Epic forked SteamOS and made a similar or better device that had the epic game store by default. Valve isn't trying to become a hardware manufacturer. They are trying to build infrastructure for a market where their game store would thrive.


The red spirit said:


> This isn't specific to Steam Deck and linux gamer still say that for a long time and linux gaming still barely exists.


That is what is so special here. Valve is almost single handedly making gaming on Linux viable. They have made serious strides and the Steam Deck is going to show how far it has come.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Okay, it's just that emulation can be done on basically anything else and if you want to emulate PS3, then you absolutely need something with very good CPU single threaded performance.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I'm far from drunk on Linux coolaid and the first one mentioning fanboys in my eyes shows his thinking, well done.

But I still disagree and obviously you can't make a console /pc without an OS so wouldn't that make Steam OS an essential step to this Anyway, then hardware isn't made in a minute but go you, neg on, I'm out.
I don't even think the price is That mental thinking about This market.


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

Nordic said:


> I don't think you understand how good the UI and gamepad integration currently is. These are not things we need to wait to test. It is fully functional and testable now.


People weren't really into how Steam OS handled gamepads. As for me, does whole OS work with just gamepad, can you access linux and control it with just gamepad? Are linux UI elements properly scaled?



Nordic said:


> Valve doesn't want to be in the hardware business. They are trying to slowly build gaming on Linux because they are worried about Microsoft forcing Valve out of the market via the windows store. They have been developing the software necessary to make this happen. This device is meant to demonstrate how far gaming on Linux has come.


I think that they certainly want to be in hardware business. Otherwise that wouldn't explain their involvement in VR, Steamboxes, Steam Link and basically everything else that they have made. They want to be in hardware, but competition is fierce and thus is why they end up with small marketshare. I don't think that they are worried about Microsoft. At least about just them specifically. I think that they want monopoly, because right now people often use Origin, Epic store, GOG and MS Store for certain games and Valve probably wants to reduce fragmentation and become a monopoly and they are doing it on linux, because there's no need to partnership with their software competitors and pay licensing fees. Linux is just the cheapest and easiest way to do that. But at the same time it's a major problem for them, because linux doesn't natively run many games and they still have to create "compatibility layers" and emulators to make games run and it will always come at performance hit. That hurts them, because when people hear linux, they expect higher performance and that's due to many videos of linux reviving some otherwise old shit. And another big problem, is beyond breaking away from competitors, they are stuck to objectively worse platform. And it is worse, because all Steam games work on Windows PC, meanwhile on linux only what runs natively there and what works with proton and other compatibility tools. And most people, aside from hardcore nerds don't give a shit about linux being cool and all that, it's not a selling point for them to have their game libraries cut to just 20-30% (or even less). 




Nordic said:


> This is Valves stated goal from the various interviews. They want others to copy and improve upon the steam deck. They would be very happy if Epic forked SteamOS and made a similar or better device that had the epic game store by default. Valve isn't trying to become a hardware manufacturer. They are trying to build infrastructure for a market where their game store would thrive.


If they seriously think that way, then they will go bankrupt. The less competition they have, the better is for them and if others like Epic make Epic portable and outcompete Valve, well then Valve doesn't get money from that. And if they keep saying bullshit like that and being lunatics in service market, then they will surely go bankrupt. 



Nordic said:


> That is what is so special here. Valve is almost single handedly making gaming on Linux viable. They have made serious strides and the Steam Deck is going to show how far it has come.


I don't think so, too many games are still incompatible and there's no benefit to run them on linux, instead of Windows. It's still very early days for making something that is actually cool and not just cool in small niche community, but to any PC gamer. All they are trying to do now is to just be as good as Windows and there's shit ton of work left to do.



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> But I still disagree and obviously you can't make a console /pc without an OS so wouldn't that make Steam OS an essential step to this Anyway, then hardware isn't made in a minute but go you, neg on, I'm out.
> I don't even think the price is That mental thinking about This market.


My problem with portable is simply the sheer amount of failures. So many Chinese OEM's make some one-off portable and then do next to nothing for it to work properly with gamepad and it end up being very expensive disappointment. And unsurprisingly many go under. And this stuff has been happening for like 2 decades. UMPCs died, PDAs died, many gamepaded tablets died. And the biggest reason for that is just shoddy software integration of hardware or cost being so high that getting the damn thing isn't worth it. Does anyone remember Razer Edge Pro? Or specific models of other Windows, Android handhelds? No and that's the problem. They were either too expensive or didn't have any proper hardware-software integration. And sometimes even when you have all these work out, it still fails to sell well. That was the fate of Sony Vita. It still somehow failed to sell and it even had a proper ecosystem and many good exclusives. I just don't see any interesting feature of such handheld that could warrant it not ending up like another Vita. And now with everyone with phone in their pocket, it's harder than ever to make handheld gaming system that sells well.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> People weren't really into how Steam OS handled gamepads. As for me, does whole OS work with just gamepad, can you access linux and control it with just gamepad? Are linux UI elements properly scaled?
> 
> 
> I think that they certainly want to be in hardware business. Otherwise that wouldn't explain their involvement in VR, Steamboxes, Steam Link and basically everything else that they have made. They want to be in hardware, but competition is fierce and thus is why they end up with small marketshare. I don't think that they are worried about Microsoft. At least about just them specifically. I think that they want monopoly, because right now people often use Origin, Epic store, GOG and MS Store for certain games and Valve probably wants to reduce fragmentation and become a monopoly and they are doing it on linux, because there's no need to partnership with their software competitors and pay licensing fees. Linux is just the cheapest and easiest way to do that. But at the same time it's a major problem for them, because linux doesn't natively run many games and they still have to create "compatibility layers" and emulators to make games run and it will always come at performance hit. That hurts them, because when people hear linux, they expect higher performance and that's due to many videos of linux reviving some otherwise old shit. And another big problem, is beyond breaking away from competitors, they are stuck to objectively worse platform. And it is worse, because all Steam games work on Windows PC, meanwhile on linux only what runs natively there and what works with proton and other compatibility tools. And most people, aside from hardcore nerds don't give a shit about linux being cool and all that, it's not a selling point for them to have their game libraries cut to just 20-30% (or even less).
> ...


I've owned most of those, Gameboy, gamegear PDA , never a handheld quality built pc, and valve does make good hardware.
And they all served they're purpose fine, some better than others like the Switch ffs , valve sold out yet it's pointless , okay.


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> never a handheld quality built pc


These have been there for a while and LowSpecGamer makes videos about latest ones.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 18, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> These have been there for a while and LowSpecGamer makes videos about latest ones.


None I have seen perhaps you have an example?!.


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## The red spirit (Jul 18, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> None I have seen perhaps you have an example?!.


GPD Win 3


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> GPD Win 3


Yeah fine example two thirds less performant in games I would imagine, but we will let reviews decide.

11th gen Igpu?! Right.I wouldn't buy that and it's going for 8-900£.


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## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Yeah fine example two thirds less performant in games I would imagine, but we will let reviews decide.
> 
> 11th gen Igpu?! Right.I wouldn't buy that and it's going for 8-900£.


You only asked for example of small handheld computer. You can probably find something cheaper, I'm just saying that these things do exist and with minimal success have existed for a long time.


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## TheOne (Jul 19, 2021)

PC handhelds are usually kickstarters and pretty expensive, well at least from what I've seen in Youtube reviews over the years.

Personally I think Valve should have done 128/256/512GB m.2 NVMe.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> You only asked for example of small handheld computer. You can probably find something cheaper, I'm just saying that these things do exist and with minimal success have existed for a long time.


You just demonstrated how wrong you are, let's see any logical analysis of its performance verses that then or something powered by a similar setup, fine example of why what came before made this look good, did you believe I hadn't checked out many of these devices for the right type of thing , it's not running all triple AAA with ultra but it's going to run pretty much anything IMHO, most using a PC to game on are running mid to low tier GPu so would they be That disappointed, you would, not others.

I just put down on the big one Q3 22 wow can't wait though.


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## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> You just demonstrated how wrong you are, let's see any logical analysis of its performance verses that then or something powered by a similar setup, fine example of why what came before made this look good, did you believe I hadn't checked out many of these devices for the right type of thing , it's not running all triple AAA with ultra but it's going to run pretty much anything IMHO, most using a PC to game on are running mid to low tier GPu so would they be That disappointed, you would, not others.
> 
> I just put down on the big one Q3 22 wow can't wait though.


That doesn't change anything. If 720p lowest settings at sub 30 fps is what you think is a decent experience, more power to you. While it's cheaper than other handhelds, it doesn't mean much. It's still expensive in terms of TCO. The total cost of ownership of this thing is quite as it will be quite obsolete after 3 years and won't run many latest games on really low settings. If Valve releases the second and third Deck, then TCO of this platform would be more or less equivalent of 1200-1400 Euro PC, which today would run anything at 1080p Ultra, if you buy everything at MSRP. And PC like that will pretty much last you more than 9 years and would be usable as PC. Meanwhile with Deck, today you are getting quite low end experience today, piss poor experience next year, barely scrap by on 3rd year, until you hopefully replace it with Deck 2. And then keep replacing Decks every 3 years. Sure it is portable, but if you want a proper gaming experience, desktop is better and if you are into portable computing, then you probably already have a laptop, which likely has more powerful APU and still could be realistically used as computer, not just a gadget for gaming. BTW have you thought about storage size? 64GB model is already almost obsolete. After OS, it can't store a single AAA game. What will happen after a year or two? Then probably even indie titles won't fit on Deck. And if you buy a higher end model than base, it suddenly starts to cost a lot more and suddenly it just becomes a very expensive handheld, just like many others. Before 'rona 600 Euros could buy you a Ryzen 3100, 16GB DDR4, GTX 1660 Super, 512GB SSD desktop. And now, after price inflation, our heads have surely turned into mush, thinking that overpriced portable thin client is worth the same cash as a proper desktop computer.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 19, 2021)

TheOne said:


> PC handhelds are usually kickstarters and pretty expensive, well at least from what I've seen in Youtube reviews over the years.
> 
> Personally I think Valve should have done 128/256/512GB m.2 NVMe.


isnt it 256 and 512 models are nvme?


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## Nordic (Jul 19, 2021)

When most of my game collection on steam are 10 year old games, I think the performance will match my needs just fine.


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## TheOne (Jul 19, 2021)

night.fox said:


> isnt it 256 and 512 models are nvme?


They are.


----------



## kayjay010101 (Jul 19, 2021)

night.fox said:


> isnt it 256 and 512 models are nvme?


Yeah, but the 64GB eMMC model should also have been NVMe and 128GB is what they're saying. Frankly, I agree. eMMC is worthless.


----------



## persondb (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Buying this thing is essentially buying a small handheld PC, it's not a full console.


Honestly, that's what exactly why I want this or other PC handhelds. And I think a lot of people feel the same.
It's about having the PC experience in a handheld, not the console experience so many of the things that you said don't really matter to me.
Plus also getting your PC game library and not needing to rebuy a lot of stuff.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> That doesn't change anything. If 720p lowest settings at sub 30 fps is what you think is a decent experience, more power to you. While it's cheaper than other handhelds, it doesn't mean much. It's still expensive in terms of TCO. The total cost of ownership of this thing is quite as it will be quite obsolete after 3 years and won't run many latest games on really low settings. If Valve releases the second and third Deck, then TCO of this platform would be more or less equivalent of 1200-1400 Euro PC, which today would run anything at 1080p Ultra, if you buy everything at MSRP. And PC like that will pretty much last you more than 9 years and would be usable as PC. Meanwhile with Deck, today you are getting quite low end experience today, piss poor experience next year, barely scrap by on 3rd year, until you hopefully replace it with Deck 2. And then keep replacing Decks every 3 years. Sure it is portable, but if you want a proper gaming experience, desktop is better and if you are into portable computing, then you probably already have a laptop, which likely has more powerful APU and still could be realistically used as computer, not just a gadget for gaming. BTW have you thought about storage size? 64GB model is already almost obsolete. After OS, it can't store a single AAA game. What will happen after a year or two? Then probably even indie titles won't fit on Deck. And if you buy a higher end model than base, it suddenly starts to cost a lot more and suddenly it just becomes a very expensive handheld, just like many others. Before 'rona 600 Euros could buy you a Ryzen 3100, 16GB DDR4, GTX 1660 Super, 512GB SSD desktop. And now, after price inflation, our heads have surely turned into mush, thinking that overpriced portable thin client is worth the same cash as a proper desktop computer.


What version of crack are you on.

So in three years nowt will play on it and indie games won't fit on it, gtfo.

I have many games that would work on it as long as I own it.

You have no clue how I or others would use this so stop spouting balls, Presumptuously.
No one said it's the next f£#@&£ epoch of gaming, however it'll do me.

Not once have you replied to any of my actual well reasoned reply's( on point) so I'm done with this stop replying to me ,we disagree.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> So in three years nowt will play on it and indie games won't fit on it, gtfo.


Even fricking CS:GO today is big storage hog. It takes 25GB. GTA 5 is almost 100GB. Indie games like The Witness, require 5GB now. Minecraft can function on 1GB, but really needs 4GB and can grow in size. Genshin Impact takes up 23GB. Journey and Firewatch take 4GB each. Meanwhile, definitely not an indie title, COD MW Remastered takes up a whopping 231GB of space. Considering all those trends, it seems that 64GB may soon not be enough even for indie titles.



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> No one said it's the next f£#@&£ epoch of gaming, however it'll do me.


No, but hardware is really weak. I see no reason, why it couldn't had been a bit more expensive and have 12-14 CUs in there, so that it actually has some graphics muscle and now it's way worse than RX 5500 XT, which people said was weak sauce. And likely it is even weaker than RX 560, which nearly nobody bought (except me). I also don't think that any Ryzen APU was actually not and not in a sense of "I expected nothing, but it does something". And for that matter, no APU was truly nice. Gaming at 720p lowest and at sub 30 fps isn't my idea of having fun. I don't see why that 8 CU APU should perform well in Deck, where it's going to be severely power limited and CPU limited. Basically, Deck will be only good for older AAA games and indie games, but it's not a great budget solution. You also are limited by Steam OS (Nobody said that it will have Windows drivers) and by games that aren't terrible to play on gamepad, which are just limited amount of genres. It would be ideal for racing games (but there's no Forza, so that's a big fail), fighting games, platformers, sports games (but people usually only play latest sports games and toss old stuff in garbage as soon as it's not the latest anymore), point and click adventures. That's pretty much it. Any fps, strategy or open world game on it is going to feel bad to play, because nobody likes to aim with sticks or try to click on tiny objects on small touch screen. You won't have a good time, if you want to play Vicky 3, Europa Universalis 5, GTA 5, or even some Call of Duty. 




TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Not once have you replied to any of my actual well reasoned reply's( on point)


There haven't been any. Well reasoned reply to you seems to be very biased for Deck replies. You just don't like criticism about Deck.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Even fricking CS:GO today is big storage hog. It takes 25GB. GTA 5 is almost 100GB. Indie games like The Witness, require 5GB now. Minecraft can function on 1GB, but really needs 4GB and can grow in size. Genshin Impact takes up 23GB. Journey and Firewatch take 4GB each. Meanwhile, definitely not an indie title, COD MW Remastered takes up a whopping 231GB of space. Considering all those trends, it seems that 64GB may soon not be enough even for indie titles.
> 
> 
> No, but hardware is really weak. I see no reason, why it couldn't had been a bit more expensive and have 12-14 CUs in there, so that it actually has some graphics muscle and now it's way worse than RX 5500 XT, which people said was weak sauce. And likely it is even weaker than RX 560, which nearly nobody bought (except me). I also don't think that any Ryzen APU was actually not and not in a sense of "I expected nothing, but it does something". And for that matter, no APU was truly nice. Gaming at 720p lowest and at sub 30 fps isn't my idea of having fun. I don't see why that 8 CU APU should perform well in Deck, where it's going to be severely power limited and CPU limited. Basically, Deck will be only good for older AAA games and indie games, but it's not a great budget solution. You also are limited by Steam OS (Nobody said that it will have Windows drivers) and by games that aren't terrible to play on gamepad, which are just limited amount of genres. It would be ideal for racing games (but there's no Forza, so that's a big fail), fighting games, platformers, sports games (but people usually only play latest sports games and toss old stuff in garbage as soon as it's not the latest anymore), point and click adventures. That's pretty much it. Any fps, strategy or open world game on it is going to feel bad to play, because nobody likes to aim with sticks or try to click on tiny objects on small touch screen. You won't have a good time, if you want to play Vicky 3, Europa Universalis 5, GTA 5, or even some Call of Duty.
> ...


you can't make a console /pc without an OS so wouldn't that make Steam OS an essential step to this Anyway, then hardware isn't made in a minute but go you, neg on, I'm out.

I repeat.


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## Colddecked (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Even fricking CS:GO today is big storage hog. It takes 25GB. GTA 5 is almost 100GB. Indie games like The Witness, require 5GB now. Minecraft can function on 1GB, but really needs 4GB and can grow in size. Genshin Impact takes up 23GB. Journey and Firewatch take 4GB each. Meanwhile, definitely not an indie title, COD MW Remastered takes up a whopping 231GB of space. Considering all those trends, it seems that 64GB may soon not be enough even for indie titles.
> 
> 
> No, but hardware is really weak. I see no reason, why it couldn't had been a bit more expensive and have 12-14 CUs in there, so that it actually has some graphics muscle and now it's way worse than RX 5500 XT, which people said was weak sauce. And likely it is even weaker than RX 560, which nearly nobody bought (except me). I also don't think that any Ryzen APU was actually not and not in a sense of "I expected nothing, but it does something". And for that matter, no APU was truly nice. Gaming at 720p lowest and at sub 30 fps isn't my idea of having fun. I don't see why that 8 CU APU should perform well in Deck, where it's going to be severely power limited and CPU limited. Basically, Deck will be only good for older AAA games and indie games, but it's not a great budget solution. You also are limited by Steam OS (Nobody said that it will have Windows drivers) and by games that aren't terrible to play on gamepad, which are just limited amount of genres. It would be ideal for racing games (but there's no Forza, so that's a big fail), fighting games, platformers, sports games (but people usually only play latest sports games and toss old stuff in garbage as soon as it's not the latest anymore), point and click adventures. That's pretty much it. Any fps, strategy or open world game on it is going to feel bad to play, because nobody likes to aim with sticks or try to click on tiny objects on small touch screen. You won't have a good time, if you want to play Vicky 3, Europa Universalis 5, GTA 5, or even some Call of Duty.
> ...



Your first complaint sounds more like a problem with game/app sizes.  Anyways, if 64 isn't enough, just expand it with SD, use a external drive, or get a 256/512 gb version?  If you want more storage you have to pay, which seems pretty normal to me so its kind of weird to have a complaint there...

"The HW is to weak".  PORTABILITY is the game here, not power.  If you want to run your games on ultra settings, 4k, 144hz... get a laptop.  This form factor can not support that kind of power yet, simple as that.  And you are greatly underestimating the RDNA 2 cores and LPDDR5.  Games will run much better than 30 fps.  Seems like your penalizing the Deck for something its not being made for, and panning it's performance when you have no idea how well it will perform.  If you don't value portability, that's fine, but ALOT of people do.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 19, 2021)

kayjay010101 said:


> Yeah, but the 64GB eMMC model should also have been NVMe and 128GB is what they're saying. Frankly, I agree. eMMC is worthless.


yeah wonder that as well. But anyways, not available in my country anyway so didnt really bother. If I will to buy, ill get the 512gb probably but that would be next year...most likely available locally and hopefully bugs are fix


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## Nordic (Jul 19, 2021)

Why the Steam Deck won’t flop like Valve’s Steam Machines
					

Valve knows what it needs to be




					www.theverge.com


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> Your first complaint sounds more like a problem with game/app sizes.  Anyways, if 64 isn't enough, just expand it with SD, use a external drive, or get a 256/512 gb version?  If you want more storage you have to pay, which seems pretty normal to me so its kind of weird to have a complaint there...


That pretty much makes 64GB version useless. And expanding storage officially is expensive, meanwhile DIY way it's cheaper, but that's beyond the point. The point is that such device loses a lot of value proposition if it becomes expensive or is useless at base config. 256GB should have been the base config, meanwhile 512GB mid tier and 1TB flagship. And BTW base version is eMMC, which is a lot slower than NVMe version and eMMC usually means soldered. That makes base config impossible to upgrade and even worse.




Colddecked said:


> "The HW is to weak".  PORTABILITY is the game here, not power.  If you want to run your games on ultra settings, 4k, 144hz... get a laptop.


It certainly wouldn't be all so impossible for them to put there at least 12 CUs (512 cores). That's what 2400G had (11, but close enough). If they just shrank it, reduced clocks, they probably could have made it into 15 watt or, at worst, 20 watt chip. Which could had been actually quite nice. We are not talking here about something stupidly overpowered, but at least about something that isn't going to run games at 720p lowest and 20-30 fps. 720p medium at 45 fps should be the goal, not lowest at 20-30 fps.




Colddecked said:


> This form factor can not support that kind of power yet, simple as that.


Any reason why? 



Colddecked said:


> And you are greatly underestimating the RDNA 2 cores and LPDDR5.  Games will run much better than 30 fps.  Seems like your penalizing the Deck for something its not being made for, and panning it's performance when you have no idea how well it will perform.  If you don't value portability, that's fine, but ALOT of people do.


Portability is only fine if it meets the performance target, otherwise it's a waste of time. I highly doubt that it will be adequate (not fast, just adequate) in demanding games.


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## Colddecked (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> That pretty much makes 64GB version useless. And expanding storage officially is expensive, meanwhile DIY way it's cheaper, but that's beyond the point. The point is that such device loses a lot of value proposition if it becomes expensive or is useless at base config. 256GB should have been the base config, meanwhile 512GB mid tier and 1TB flagship. And BTW base version is eMMC, which is a lot slower than NVMe version and eMMC usually means soldered. That makes base config impossible to upgrade and even worse.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



If you want 256, get 256 lol... why you want to take away options from people?  Anyways, the eMMC is still faster than a disc or a spinner.  Not everything has to be bleeding edge...  but guess what with a little elbow grease you can add your own storage, so you really have 0 legs to stand on here.

Putting more cores in?  You do realize the RDNA 2 cores have like 2x ipc than vega cores?  So in reality, you're getting ~14 vega cores.  Anyways, the biggest issue with performance on APUs is memory bandwidth.  What's the point of putting more cores in than the memory bandwidth can support?  I'll take 16gb of LPDDR5 over 4 more cu.

I get that you wish it was a more powerful device, but what you are getting is the most powerful device of its kind in its price range.

edit:
It can't support it because its already almost 1kg.  Switch is like 455g in comparison.  You want to add more mass/weight, or a fan that could fail?

Why would performance not be adequate?  You are missing the point that you can adjust settings to make performance adequate.  

Honestly, you want a device that's more like 1000, not 400.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> If you want 256, get 256 lol... why you want to take away options from people?  Anyways, the eMMC is still faster than a disc or a spinner.  Not everything has to be bleeding edge...  but guess what with a little elbow grease you can add your own storage, so you really have 0 legs to stand on here.


eMMC is slow. It's only used in really low end phones and maybe some bottom of the barrel tablet. In sequential operations, it's as fast as HDD, but in IOPS is stomps hard drive. It's an okay storage, but 64GB of it is not enough. If you install Windows on 64GB Deck, there's literally less than half of that eMMC left for games. It's just too little of it in 2021. 128GB model at minimum should had been the base model.



Colddecked said:


> Putting more cores in?  You do realize the RDNA 2 cores have like 2x ipc than vega cores?  So in reality, you're getting ~14 vega cores.  Anyways, the biggest issue with performance on APUs is memory bandwidth.  What's the point of putting more cores in than the memory bandwidth can support?  I'll take 16gb of LPDDR5 over 4 more cu.


Why not just add L4 cache, which could act as vRAM? 




Colddecked said:


> I get that you wish it was a more powerful device, but what you are getting is the most powerful device of its kind in its price range.


Maybe, but running games at 720p lowest isn't acceptable for new device which will be launched in winter. 720p lowest is only acceptable for a computer, which you have owned for a long time and trying to squeeze more life out of it.




Colddecked said:


> Edit:
> It can't support it because its already almost 1kg.  Switch is like 455g in comparison.  You want to add more mass/weight, or a fan that could fail?


I'm pretty sure that if some extra thinking was done, it could weight no more than 800 grams.




Colddecked said:


> Why would performance not be adequate? You are missing the point that you can adjust settings to make performance adequate.


Please, don't edit post after I already posted a reply. Anyway, no there's not much you can do if you are at 720p lowest. You can reduce resolution, maybe disable shadows, but 720p lowest is pretty much the rock bottom.


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 19, 2021)

My last edit was 40min ago and you posted 33 min ago so my edit was first ;p

Anyways I think at this point its clear you want something more premium than the Deck is being positioned as.  And thats fine. 

Its kind of silly to trash the performance though lets just wait and see about that.  Maybe it will be trash?  But compare it to mobile devices in the same price range.

Being able to hit that 399 price point was clearly one of Valves main objectives.  Compromises have to be made.  We will see I guess if they made the right ones but it seems to be generating alot of hype despite your low opinion.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> But compare it to mobile devices in the same price range.


For that much cash, you can get 800 series Snapdragon devices. Not sure how that compares to x86, but at ARM that's as good as it gets.


----------



## Nordic (Jul 19, 2021)

@The red spirit you do know that the chip is already 15w, right?

720p is totally fine for a 7 inch screen. The ppi is really high even for being 12 inches from your face.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

Nordic said:


> @The red spirit you do know that the chip is already 15w, right?


Yes.



Nordic said:


> 720p is totally fine for a 7 inch screen. The ppi is really high even for being 12 inches from your face.


Except one thing. The screen is 1280x800, so 800p. So we get 921600 pixels vs 1024000 pixels. That's a 10% increase in pixel count, that this handheld will have to cope with. And it already is just barely handling 720p. Remember, going below native resolution on LCDs results in lots of bluriness, that can only be alleviated by running 4 times less pixels, then you have blockiness and 640x400 resolution. I think that they either should have increased gpu power or reduced screen resolution. 576p is seemingly the most balanced resolution for handheld of such power.


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Yes.
> 
> 
> Except one thing. The screen is 1280x800, so 800p. So we get 921600 pixels vs 1024000 pixels. That's a 10% increase in pixel count, that this handheld will have to cope with. And it already is just barely handling 720p. Remember, going below native resolution on LCDs results in lots of bluriness, that can only be alleviated by running 4 times less pixels, then you have blockiness and 640x400 resolution. I think that they either should have increased gpu power or reduced screen resolution. 576p is seemingly the most balanced resolution for handheld of such power.



Like I said, you are selling RDNA short, it's pretty much 2x GCN core for core.

But yes they could have added more cores, given faster ram, stacked ram/cache... its designed to just be enough and not the most powerful.  But for most, even some enthusiasts, it will be more than enough.  I still have high confidence that most AAA games released over the past few years will run at way over 30fps with a mix of high to med settings, and with freesync that will still feel smooth.  Most PS4/Xbox One multiplats will be ~60hz and run/look better than either system.


----------



## persondb (Jul 19, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Why not just add L4 cache, which could act as vRAM?


That would make the chip a lot more expensive, tbh the chip itself was designed to be cheaper, use less area and doing the things that you are saying would make it impossible to meet Valve pricing target.

In addition, from the rumours, Van Gogh wasn't supposed to be for this but for Microsoft tablets, Valve just kinda of used it after MS gave up on products with it.

Valve could have probably used Rembrandt and that would have more CUs, but it might then be impossible to get it to the price they wanted, or likely even announce it now(depending on how AMD feels like it since they will probably announce and release Rembrandt at CES next year).


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 19, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> Like I said, you are selling RDNA short, it's pretty much 2x GCN core for core.


8x2=16. 16 GCN CUs isn't much. That's literally what RX 560 was and I owned that card. RX 560 unlike RDNA has very strong compute component and it is excellent at BOINC stuff. RX 560 essentially beat GTX 1060 at double precision computing, which is what is the main performance metric for projects like MilkyWay at home. Right now, RX 560 is beaten by 20% by RTX 3060. Not bad. Anyway, RX 560 at one point was a great card. It does run CoD WW2 at 1440p, low with max textures and some AA at 30-60 fps. GTA 5 runs at 1440p medium-high average at 45-50 fps. And RX 560 model without 6 pin connector was TDP limited to just 37.5 watts (I had this model). That's quite impressive. A whole computer with i5 10400F and RX 560 idles at around 30 watts and uses around 100 watts in games. But that was with RX 560 and with games from 2015-2017. Today RX 560 4GB is only good for 900p or 720p low at 50 fps. And RX 560 4GB has dedicated GDDR5 128 bit VRAM clocked at 1750 MHz and 4 GB of it, Deck only has shared 16GB of LPDDR5 at unknown frequency. All things considered, likely 2GB or 3GB is allocated to graphics. Also Steam states that in FP32 (single precision floating point operations) that APU achieves up to 1.6 teraflops. Up to means that it varies due to power limitations, temperature limitations. Meanwhile RX 560 4GB, achieves 2.611 teraflops. So I really have no idea where those claims of 20 IPC come from. RX 560 also runs at considerably lower clock speeds, base being 1175 MHz and boost being 1275 MHz. In terms of raw performance, RX 560 should be a lot faster, around 70% faster, but depending on various factors it can be a lot faster (in case of thermal limitations, Deck is supposed to have base clock speed of 1GHz and teraflops were measure at maximum boost of 1.6GHz, so it can lose a lot of performance. Let's take a look at how does RX 560 4GB perform today:









Let's take a closer look at some demanding titles, average fps and settings:
Apex, 1080p medium (high textures), avg 50 fps
Warzone, 1080p lowest, avg 53 fps
Control, 1080p lowest, avg 44 fps
RDR 2, 1080p lowest, avg 37 fps
Horizon Zero Dawn, 1080p lowest, avg 36 fps
AC Valhalla, 720p lowest, avg 58 fps
Cyberpunk, 720p low, avg 44 fps

So depending on game your experience can be okay, but on most demanding titles, RX 560 really struggles or doesn't struggle, but makes everything looks like potato. And supposedly RX 560 is 80% faster than Deck's RDNA APU (I doubt that it can sustain maximum boost with that reported very generous boost range). So if we do math, we can get how well Deck will perform in same titles, at same settings, assuming no VRAM limitations and no CPU bottleneck, which isn't very realistic, but here's the list:
Apex, 1080p medium, avg 28 fps
Warzone, 1080p lowest, avg 29 fps
Control, 1080p lowest, avg 24 fps
RDR 2, 1080p lowest, avg 21 fps
Horizon Zero Dawn, 1080 lowest, avg 20 fps
AC Valhalla, 720p lowest, avg 32 fps
Cyberpunk, 720p low, avg 24 fps

If we agree that lowest acceptable performance is average 30 fps (it will dip below that) and lowest good performance is 40 fps, then only AC Valhalla runs adequately well at 720p lowest at 32 fps. Obviously, there's not much point (super sampling is always cool, but it's very taxing on any hardware) in running games at 1080p on Deck, so we can calculate performance at 720p, which is basically 2x of 1080p in theory, then our game list looks like this:
Apex, 720p medium, avg 56 fps
Warzone, 720p lowest, avg 58 fps
Control, 720p lowest, avg 48 fps
RDR 2, 720p lowest, avg 42 fps
Horizon Zero Dawn, 720p lowest, avg 40 fps
AC Valhalla, 720p lowest, avg 32 fps
Cyberpunk, 720p low, avg 24 fps

Some games are now running really smooth, but others are just okay and Cyberpunk is still in sub 30 fps zone. If we want to hit 40 fps average, we can calculate performance per pixel and arrive at resolution at which in theory titles should run at 40 fps on Deck. So we are left with AC Valhalla and Cyberpunk, both at low-lowest settings, so there's nothing you can change in visual settings anymore and you only can search for low spec mods or reduce resolution. Reducing resolution is easier solution.

AC Valhalla. 720p is 1280x720, meaning 921600 pixels. We get 32 fps with that. We want 40 fps. So we calculate:
32/40*100 = 80%

We need 20% less pixels, so:
0,8*921600 = 737280

And then according Wikipedia's resolution list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions) we get that closest resolution to 737280 pixels is 960x720 (691200 pixels, so we get some performance boost and it's 4:3 aspect ratio, so it might end up being stretched to fit 16:10 screen, if Deck doesn't have good scaler).

Cyberpunk. 720p is 1280x720, meaning 921600 pixels. We get 24 fps with that. We want 40 fps. So we calculate:
24/40*100 = 60%

We need 40% less pixels, so 
0,6*921600 = 552960 

And using same resolution list, we get that closest resolution is 960x540, which is 518400 pixels, so a bit of fps boost from 40 fps and it's 16:9 aspect ratio resolution, so there might be less stretching or less black bars. And it pretty much ends up being a bit more than half of native resolution of Deck itself. 

Is this a good experience on brand new device? For me it's not and over time you will need to go lower and lower just to hit 40 fps or 30 fps average. Also my calculations are only meaningful if performance scales linearly. If there's VRAM limitation or CPU limitation, fps will be lower and there may be some nasty stuttering. If we trust calculations, then we end up at more realistic list, where we try to balance visuals with fps (we want 40 fps average) and we end up with:
Apex, 720p medium-high
Warzone, 720p medium-high
Control, 720p low-medium
RDR 2, 720p lowest
Horizon Zero Dawn, 720 lowest
AC Valhalla, 960x720 lowest
Cyberpunk, 960x540 lowest

If you want to play games on the list, Deck isn't really going to be a nice experience, but I picked some heavier games. Most games are easier to run and should run at higher fps and visual details, but I wanted to see how in theory Deck should perform at its worst. Those are results today and Deck is only running games at 720p (not 1280x800 native) and gets 40 fps. In some cases more, but sometimes a lot less. After a year or two there will be even more demanding games and since we already have to scale down resolution a lot and Deck itself doesn't have very high resolution, let's just say that AAA gaming on Deck will mean Vaseline resolution or just not running them. And that's optimistic. I haven't mentioned that proton has some overhead and that some DRMs are heavy on CPU, so my calculated performance results are really optimistic and it's unknown at what actual clock speed GPU will usually run, I picked 1,5GHz-1,6GHz range, but it's within spec for it to run even at 1GHz. At that point performance won't be nearly close to what I calculated, it will be a lot lower. And for all these reasons, I think that Deck isn't really going to cut it for gaming, but if you are informed customer, well aware of Deck's capabilities and watch benchmark videos, you may be able to play some latest AAA games respectfully well or you should be able to run somewhat older AAA games. 

Emulation is mostly decided by CPU single threaded performance. And you need 2 times faster than FX 6300 core, cores ton run some PS2 games emulated. Zen+ had nearly 2 times IPC of FX 6300, but we have Zen 2 cores here. And unfortunately lower clock speed range. It's not going to run all PS2 games well, but with frame skipping some could run. PS3 emulation is not doable at all. So you are left with trouble free emulation of PS1, Dreamcast, PSP, Wii, NDS, GameCube. By trouble free emulation, I meant in performance only, I can't imagine how you could map Nunchuck to Deck's gamepad or emulate dual screens of NDS. So Deck will realistically be good for PS1, PSP, Dreamcast and maybe GameCube. Obviously, all lower end consoles shouldn't be problematic to emulate, but odd controller layouts will not be doable on Deck, those are N64, Sega Master System (Genesis), Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar and some others. Is this good? It might be good in terms of raw number of titles, but I'm pretty sure that Deck buyer would really want PS2 emulation and it's somewhat painful not to have it run well. Overall, it's fine for emulation, only with minimal limitations. 

Is device capable? It's is capable, but nowadays many devices do more and at similar price point. And if you don't pick 64GB model (which should be avoided), it ends up being even more expensive and then competition is even fiercer. At that point it's possible to buy a laptop, which can run PS2 emulation well and get a gamepad for that, Despite all hype, Proton today is still not great. You still lose a lot of your game library. If you ditch Steam OS, you may be able to use Windows, but Valve didn't promise any Windows drivers and Windows will have it's own quite big overhead, higher storage requirements and some actual maintenance requirement and no console UI. Making it less than ideal solution, if not outright broken solution (custom hardware is cool, until you need drivers).

If emulation is ignored, then it would seem almost reasonable to drop display resolution to native 1280x720 or even lower 960x540, to have more performance and better visual quality in games and sometimes to preserve some battery life. Otherwise, Deck will age like milk.





Colddecked said:


> But yes they could have added more cores, given faster ram, stacked ram/cache... its designed to just be enough. not the most powerful.  But for most, even some enthusiasts, it will more than enough.  I still have high confidence that most AAA games released over the past few years will run at way over 30fps with a mix of high to med settings, and with freesync that will still feel smooth.  Most PS4/Xbox One multiplats will be ~60hz and run/look better than either system.


They didn't promise Freesync and I provided my performance analysis of what you could optimistically expect out of Deck. I really don't think that your expectations are realistic for Deck yet, you seem to be overestimating it and expect it to be a lot better than it will actually be. I hope that my preliminary performance analysis will be insightful for you.



persondb said:


> That would make the chip a lot more expensive, tbh the chip itself was designed to be cheaper, use less area and doing the things that you are saying would make it impossible to meet Valve pricing target.


I'm sorry, but actual numbers would be nice and from what we know yet, Deck seemingly won't be fast enough to not disappoint hyped up fanbase. Anyway, if I remember correctly Intel released Broadwell with EDRAM. It didn't increase the cost of CPU, but it made like 20% performance difference. I think that it would have been smart of Valve to include something like that.


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 20, 2021)

I won't argue with all your numbers, some of them certainly are insightful and get your point across.  Just a few points of disagreement:



The red spirit said:


> Deck only has shared 16GB of LPDDR5 at unknown frequency. All things considered, likely 2GB or 3GB is allocated to graphics. Also Steam states that in FP32 (single precision floating point operations) that APU achieves up to 1.6 teraflops. Up to means that it varies due to power limitations, temperature limitations. Meanwhile RX 560 4GB, achieves 2.611 teraflops. So I really have no idea where those claims of 20 IPC come from. RX 560 also runs at considerably lower clock speeds, base being 1175 MHz and boost being 1275 MHz. In terms of raw performance, RX 560 should be a lot faster, around 70% faster, but depending on various factors it can be a lot faster (in case of thermal limitations, Deck is supposed to have base clock speed of 1GHz and teraflops were measure at maximum boost of 1.6GHz, so it can lose a lot of performance. Let's take a look at how does RX 560 4GB perform today:



I really doubt they only have 2 or 3 gb of that memory dedicated to graphics even, why would they put 16gb in then only dedicate 3 at most?  This thing is going to have more graphics memory than a Series S.  Oh and it looks like memory bandwidth has been confirmed to be 88 gb/s.    While your numbers look sound, one thing that they over look is how much more efficient RDNA2 is.  Things like VRS help ALOT.   https://www.techpowerup.com/review/gears-tactics-benchmark-test-performance-analysis/4.html.  This thing can use mesh shaders, sampler feedback streaming, maybe they'll have smart access memory enabled as well, which can lead to nice performance increases, especially on newer games, not possible on older hardware.  One thing I totally agree with you on is thermal limitations will basically determine performance, Valve knows that too which is exactly why they spec'd the SoC the way they did, what's the point of adding more cu if it will push it over their thermal design?  I expect like the switch, this will have a fan inside which will keep thermals in check. 



The red spirit said:


> Emulation is mostly decided by CPU single threaded performance. And you need 2 times faster than FX 6300 core, cores ton run some PS2 games emulated. Zen+ had nearly 2 times IPC of FX 6300, but we have Zen 2 cores here. And unfortunately lower clock speed range. It's not going to run all PS2 games well, but with frame skipping some could run. PS3 emulation is not doable at all. So you are left with trouble free emulation of PS1, Dreamcast, PSP, Wii, NDS, GameCube. By trouble free emulation, I meant in performance only, I can't imagine how you could map Nunchuck to Deck's gamepad or emulate dual screens of NDS. So Deck will realistically be good for PS1, PSP, Dreamcast and maybe GameCube. Obviously, all lower end consoles shouldn't be problematic to emulate, but odd controller layouts will not be doable on Deck, those are N64, Sega Master System (Genesis), Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar and some others. Is this good? It might be good in terms of raw number of titles, but I'm pretty sure that Deck buyer would really want PS2 emulation and it's somewhat painful not to have it run well. Overall, it's fine for emulation, only with minimal limitations.



Seems like your confused here,  Zen 2 cores have higher IPC and higher boost clocks compared to Zen+. Maybe you meant to compare it to Zen 3?  Anyways, PS2 games will have no problems.  And don't forget to add Switch to the list as this should run them better than the actual Switch.


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## The red spirit (Jul 20, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> I really doubt they only have 2 or 3 gb of that memory dedicated to graphics even, why would they put 16gb in then only dedicate 3 at most?


Because you have to share that with CPU and games today eat a lot of RAM. 2, 3GB are essentially what is left after CPU. And not after much time, 16GB won't be enough. It may take 4-6 years, maybe less, but it will happen and I feel, sooner than people think. Warzone at 1080p Ultra already consumes (or allocates, I don't know, it's not vRAM, so I have no idea) a bit over 12GB. 4K pushes that number to nearly 13GB. It also depends on card, driver overhead, how long you play (some games consume more and more RAM the longer you play, one of such examples is GTA 5). I don't know which games is the biggest RAM hog today, but Warzone is certainly on the high side. Also, if you have used integrated graphics, you would soon realize that for some reason motherboard manufacturers tend to set iGPU RAM allocation to quite low amount. I don't know for sure, but Ryzen APUs are limited to 2GB still. Older AMD APUs were also quite limited. FM2/FM2+ APUs may have been limited to just 1GB and at the time 1GB was already too little. I don't know why exactly board vendors do that, but it's very common. 3GB would be quite nice on Deck, actually daring even, but considering current games, it will likely be set to 2GB.



Colddecked said:


> Oh and it looks like memory bandwidth has been confirmed to be 88 gb/s.


So that's not retally much, RX 560 4GB has 112GB/s. That's also not much, but VRAM bandwidth may not be very important here. It's mostly a bottleneck, if you want higher resolutions, more anti aliasing (which is rendering certain parts of screen at higher resolution). Most game elements rely on fast cores. So Deck APU might be limited by core more than memory.




Colddecked said:


> Things like VRS help ALOT.   https://www.techpowerup.com/review/gears-tactics-benchmark-test-performance-analysis/4.html.  This thing can use mesh shaders, sampler feedback streaming, maybe they'll have smart access memory enabled as well, which can lead to nice performance increases, especially on newer games, not possible on older hardware.


I haven't heard of it, thanks for informing me, but I don't like it. It just reduces contrast too much and makes everything very noticeably uglier, it looks a lot like shader quality set to normal in GTA 5, which makes deep blacks grey. Performance difference isn't exactly huge, somewhere in 15% range, I would rather just use FSR instead or reduce resolution one step and use RIS. But that's just me and maybe just game implementation of it, maybe there's more potential in VRS. At least in Gears it looks a lot like disabled shadows, but without anywhere near the same fps impact.




Colddecked said:


> One thing I totally agree with you on is thermal limitations will basically determine performance, Valve knows that too which is exactly why they spec'd the SoC the way they did, what's the point of adding more cu if it will push it over their thermal design?  I expect like the switch, this will have a fan inside which will keep thermals in check.


There will be fan inside, it's written on their own website. Look at Deck grille, it says fan. As for adding cores, look at this:





It's from "Ryzen: Strictly Technical" thread from Anandtech:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technical.2500572/ 

Performance per watt greatly increases, if clock speeds are kept at high power efficiency point. More slower cores are more power efficient, than less cores with higher clock speed. Same performance, but different power consumption. This is how much points per watt Stilt got:
25W - 24 pt/W
30W - 29 pt/W
35W - 29 pt/W
40W - 27 pt/W
45W - 26 pt/W
50W - 24 pt/W
55W - 23 pt/W
60W - 22 pt/W

And so on. It's why Xeons are lower clocked with lots of cores and that's why laptop chips are so power efficient. Basically, there's the optimal frequency point at which you don't need to increase voltage much for lots of clock speed gains and then at some point, you start to need a lot more voltage for same frequency gains. Last frequency steps can be very inefficient and just a tiny frequency reduction, can lead to massive power savings. It's mostly related to simple formula Power consumption = Frequency * Voltage squared. Obviously, you have things like threshold voltage, minimum voltage required for transistor operation, regardless of frequency, as well as other issues at the other end (voltages leaks, changing impedance, heat changing impedance and lots more). Some of those factors depend on architecture, but generally, for each frequency increase, you need one voltage step squared. At first, it barely does anything, but last steps require exponentially more voltage. So my uneducated idea (maybe it's already in very optimal range, who knows?) is to increase CU count, but run each CU at lower clock speed with hopes of increasing performance, without ruining power efficiency and at somewhat higher manufacturing cost (probably not much, dies like that are already small and cost increase may not be linear). I'm not an engineer, but basically all consumer products prefer more clock speed, rather than more, but slower cores. Especially in CPU space, but that's mostly due to poor performance scaling with more cores.

I personally tweaked my RX 580 vBIOS and had stock power limits set to 147 watts, reduction to 92 watts, led to decrease of clock speed by 50-150 MHz in games, meanwhile reducing real wattage of card by ~40 watts. Stock speed on my RX 580 was 1350MHz. I lost no more than 10% of performance, meanwhile I reduced power usage from system total of 220-230 watts to 180-190 watts. Meaning about 40 watt reduction from graphics card alone, which equals to around 35% reduction in graphics card power consumption. That's accounting even for lower VRM efficiency (graphics card's), which is due to them now forced to work at their lower efficiency point. I have seen the same with i5 10400f, but I don't mess with it. 




Colddecked said:


> Seems like your confused here,  Zen 2 cores have higher IPC and higher boost clocks compared to Zen+. Maybe you meant to compare it to Zen 3?


No, I rechecked what I said and Deck specs, there's no mistake. Perhaps I wasn't clear that I wasn't talking about Deck, when I mentioned Zen 2, instead of Zen 2 in general. Deck only boosts until 3.5GHz, probably on single core and in non sustainable way. 



Colddecked said:


> Anyways, PS2 games will have no problems.  And don't forget to add Switch to the list as this should run them better than the actual Switch.


PS2 emulation is still quite difficult. Hardware requirements depend on game and some games are easy to run, meanwhile others aren't. I had no luck trying to run Juiced on FX 6300 or some Shutokou Battle Game. It was really so bad, that FX wasn't even reaching 30 fps. And PS2 instead of running choppy, it makes whole game run in slow motion, due to games made to base their timing on PS2 CPU speed. Perhaps frame skipping can make it choppy again, but FX was so far gone, that I didn't even check that. If you want, you can check out best PS2 emulators, I always use this site:





						Emulation General Wiki
					






					emulation.gametechwiki.com
				




To determine the quality of emulation of each of them. For PS2, it recommends PCSX2:





						PlayStation 2 emulators - Emulation General Wiki
					






					emulation.gametechwiki.com
				




And then you should always look for emulator compatibly list, they often have all known problems collected and documented. In this case, you would need to download, PCSX2, configure it for highest accuracy (often information is required from multiple sources, but sometimes there are good guides on net), get BIOS if needed and get Juiced ISO. I wonder if your 3800X will be able to run it. I'm just curious if Ryzen is enough for it. Anyway, real benchmarks are other titles:

__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/4thnv6

I wouldn't be surprised if Ryzen fails to run some games, emulation can be extremely hardware intensive. The more accurate it is, the more intensive on hardware it will be. SNES needs 3GHz Core 2 Duo to be emulated really well:








						Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
					

How can it take 3GHz to emulate a Super Nintendo? The man behind a major SNES  …




					arstechnica.com
				




PS2 is many times more powerful. I wouldn't be surprised if it required 50 GHz Skylake cores to run at proper framerate and yet with some hacking it can run mostly reasonably well on 4Ghz Skylake cores. I remember, that some settings of PS1 emulators can make AMD FX cores cry. It's a miracle that PS3 is already being emulated. Ironic, considering how some people believed it to be still one of the fastest machines around.

You can watch this video about emulation madness and what it takes to make them easy to run on less powerful hardware:


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## Nordic (Jul 20, 2021)

What games do I currently own on steam that I would want to play on the Steam Deck?

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Deus Ex
Jotun
Human: Fall Flat
Little Nightmares
Superflight
RimWorld
Ori and the Blind Forest
Dead by Daylight
Besiege
Motosis
Risk of Rain 2
City Skylines
FTL: Faster Than Light
Among Us
Battleblock Theater
Castle Crashers
Darkest Dungeon
Gang Beasts
Pit People
Pummel Party
There are some older FPS games like Far Cry 2 I might want to play, but it depends on how well I enjoy shooters without a keyboard and mouse.

Which of these games do you think would struggle on the Steam Deck @The red spirit ? Like I have been saying, if you have reasonable expectations of performance there are thousands of games that would perform fine on the Steam Deck. It is unreasonable to expect good performance in games like Apex, Warzone, Control, RDR2, Horizon Zero Darn, and AC Valhalla without heavy graphic setting tweaks.

Edit: I probably could fit every game I listed except dead by daylight on the 64gb version. I reserved the 512gb version because I will be able to afford it, but it is nice to know that I could have done just fine with the 64gb version.

On emulation: I used to emulate games on my 2014 android phone. I had dozens of roms downloaded. I stopped using my phone for emulation because I really didn't like touch screen controls. I think the steam deck will have at least a little bit more performance than my old Droid mini.


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## Colddecked (Jul 20, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Because you have to share that with CPU and games today eat a lot of RAM. 2, 3GB are essentially what is left after CPU. And not after much time, 16GB won't be enough. It may take 4-6 years, maybe less, but it will happen and I feel, sooner than people think. Warzone at 1080p Ultra already consumes (or allocates, I don't know, it's not vRAM, so I have no idea) a bit over 12GB. 4K pushes that number to nearly 13GB. It also depends on card, driver overhead, how long you play (some games consume more and more RAM the longer you play, one of such examples is GTA 5). I don't know which games is the biggest RAM hog today, but Warzone is certainly on the high side. Also, if you have used integrated graphics, you would soon realize that for some reason motherboard manufacturers tend to set iGPU RAM allocation to quite low amount. I don't know for sure, but Ryzen APUs are limited to 2GB still. Older AMD APUs were also quite limited. FM2/FM2+ APUs may have been limited to just 1GB and at the time 1GB was already too little. I don't know why exactly board vendors do that, but it's very common. 3GB would be quite nice on Deck, actually daring even, but considering current games, it will likely be set to 2GB.
> 
> 
> So that's not retally much, RX 560 4GB has 112GB/s. That's also not much, but VRAM bandwidth may not be very important here. It's mostly a bottleneck, if you want higher resolutions, more anti aliasing (which is rendering certain parts of screen at higher resolution). Most game elements rely on fast cores. So Deck APU might be limited by core more than memory.
> ...



I haven't run PCSX2 in a while.  Last time I did, I had a 2600k and it ran FFXII great (only game I played on it lol), so I don't expect my 3800x to have any problems since Zen 2 has higher IPC than Skylake and I've got my IF tuned to 1900.  Quick search shows some videos of PCSX2 running at a locked 60fps (even shadow of the Colossus) on 4700u IGP so yah...

Anyways all your points maybe true at this time.  But since Deck is an open platform and will be a hit in the emulation community (yes 64gb + sd card + you can modify to install m2, will be enough for that crowd) and you can expect a lot of development for it and things will improve as more RDNA2 architecture stuff is utilized.


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## The red spirit (Jul 20, 2021)

Nordic said:


> What games do I currently own on steam that I would want to play on the Steam Deck?


I don't know what you want.


Anyway I will list everything about how they run, I will use Steam and Proton's compatibility list, but I won't touch Wine:
Amnesia: The Dark Descent - linux native, supports gamepad, low system requirements.
[*]Deus Ex - very old game, not on Steam, but Proton seems to deal well with it, might have some minor compatibility issues, might not properly support modern gamepads.
[*]Jotun - linux native, supports gamepad, low system requirements.
[*]Human: Fall Flat - not linux native, but proton seems to make it run well, not exactly low spec friendly game, but should be okay on Deck, supports gamepad.
[*]Little Nightmares - lot linux native, not low spec friendly, proton supports it. 
[*]Superflight - not linux native, only has partial gamepad support, not particularly low spec friendly, well supported in proton.
[*]RimWorld - low spec friendly, no official gamepad support, linux native.
[*]Ori and the Blind Forest - not exactly low spec friendly, supports gamepad, works well with proton.
[*]Dead by Daylight - Windows only, doesn't run well with proton, supports gamepads, high system requirements.
[*]Besiege - linux native, no gamepad support, low spec friendly.
[*]Motosis - not on steam, not on proton compatibility list, don't expect it to work.
[*]Risk of Rain 2 - not linux native, very low spec unfriendly, supports gamepad, works well with proton.
[*]City Skylines - partial gamepad support, very low spec unfriendly (hard on CPU), linux native.
[*]FTL: Faster Than Light - no gamepad support, low spec friendly, linux native.
[*]Among Us - not linux native, no gamepad support, low spec friend, 80% chance that it will work with proton.
[*]Battleblock Theater - linux native, low spec friendly, supports gamepad.
[*]Castle Crashers - low spec friendly, supports gamepad, not linux native, works well with proton.
[*]Darkest Dungeon - low spec friendly, partial gamepad support, linux native.
[*]Gang Beasts - supports gamepad, low spec friendly, linux native.
[*]Pit People - not linux native, low spec friendly, supports gamepad, works well with proton.
[*]Pummel Party - supports gamepad, barely low spec friendly, not linux native, 80% chance of working with proton.

Overall, if you want a great experience on Deck, you will likely have to forget quite a bit of titles, but majority should work well. 70% of time, you will have a good experience, granted that you like those games.



Nordic said:


> There are some older FPS games like Far Cry 2 I might want to play, but it depends on how well I enjoy shooters without a keyboard and mouse.


I wouldn't even attempt. Not linux native, 70% chance of working well with proton, no listed gamepad support, low spec friendly. 




Nordic said:


> Which of these games do you think would struggle on the Steam Deck @The red spirit ?


Quite a bit of them, but not for performance reasons alone.




Nordic said:


> Like I have been saying, if you have reasonable expectations of performance there are thousands of games that would perform fine on the Steam Deck. It is unreasonable to expect good performance in games like Apex, Warzone, Control, RDR2, Horizon Zero Darn, and AC Valhalla without heavy graphic setting tweaks.


Why? LowSpecGamer usually makes titles playable on Athlon 200GE, but Steam has enough influence to actually make some optimizations that aren't as hacky. At least they could let devs optimize those games themselves. Unfortunately, it seems that they don't care. If puny Vega 3 can do it (with big sacrifices), just imagine where RDNA2 8 would be. You are underestimating it and excusing devs for laziness too much.



Colddecked said:


> I haven't run PCSX2 in a while.  Last time I did, I had a 2600k and it ran FFXII great (only game I played on it lol), so I don't expect my 3800x to have any problems since Zen 2 has higher IPC than Skylake and I've got my IF tuned to 1900.


You certainly can have performance problems in more demanding emulated titles:





						[LIST] The Most CPU-Intensive Games
					

This thread will obviously be a WIP (work-in-progress) for the time being. The goal is to compile a convenient list of the most CPU-demanding games for this emulator. For consistencies' sake, we'll on




					forums.pcsx2.net
				




Shadow of Colossus struggled to run at 60 fps or more with overclocked 4790K. Should run on Ryzen, but just saying that PS2 emulation is still very resource intensive.



Colddecked said:


> Quick search shows some videos of PCSX2 running at a locked 60fps (even shadow of the Colossus) on 4700u IGP so yah...


iGPU doesn't matter. You should run emulated games in software mode, if you want the most accurate emulation with less bugs and glitches. Emulators are notoriously easy on GPU and they are very demanding on a single thread (except for multicore consoles, then you need lots of fast threads). 



Colddecked said:


> Anyways all your points maybe true at this time.  But since Deck is an open platform and will be a hit in the emulation community (yes 64gb + sd card + you can modify to install m2, will be enough for that crowd) and you can expect a lot of development for it and things will improve as more RDNA2 architecture stuff is utilized.


I'm skeptical.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 20, 2021)

I'm so excited for this. Reserved the 256GB


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jul 20, 2021)

I don't think it will flop, i'll probably end up getting one, possibly to run emu's on. Not pre ordering something that is not gonna release till at least Q2 22 though, not much point.

This is why Valve hasn't bothered making games-Valve rakes in an estimated $6 billion in annual revenue from Steam commissions alone-They don't need to. Bet Gabe is fatter now, must eat a shit ton of doughnuts


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## AvrageGamr (Jul 21, 2021)

Hard pass for me. Couldn't care less about emulation or playing AAA games in 720 p on low settings.


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## Nordic (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I don't know what you want.


A Steam Deck!

You said some of those games are not on steam by the way. That is incorrect. Each of those is on steam. They are all in my steam library and I have played many of them before.


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## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Nordic said:


> You said some of those games are not on steam by the way. That is incorrect. Each of those is on steam. They are all in my steam library and I have played many of them before.


Motosis isn't on Steam, hell I can't even find it on net. Either it's a typo or it's really some rare game.


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## Nordic (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Motosis isn't on Steam, hell I can't even find it on net. Either it's a typo or it's really some rare game.


Typo. Mitosis. It is a re-skinned agar.io clone put on the steam store with new game modes and a pay to win business model.


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## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Nordic said:


> Typo. Mitosis. It is a re-skinned agar.io clone put on the steam store with new game modes and a pay to win business model.


Dude, it's still a typo. The actual name is "Mitos.is". Can you please stop being drunk when typing? No gamepad support, low spec friendly, not linux native, 50% chance of it working with proton. I wouldn't really want to run it on Deck.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 21, 2021)

AvrageGamr said:


> Hard pass for me. Couldn't care less about emulation or playing AAA games in 720 p on low settings.


I honestly don't understand why people dwell on this. At this screen size your eyes could never see the difference between 720P or 1080P. And it will be able to easily run med-high settings at 60FPS


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## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> I honestly don't understand why people dwell on this. At this screen size your eyes could never see the difference between 720P or 1080P. And it will be able to easily run med-high settings at 60FPS


You can certainly see low settings and sub 20 fps though


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> You can certainly see low settings and sub 20 fps though


Except this won't run at low settings at 20 FPS


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## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> Except this won't run at low settings at 20 FPS


Yeah, you will need to lower your resolution a lot more for that Cyberpunk to run okay. All way down to 960x540.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Yeah, you will need to lower your resolution a lot more for that Cyberpunk to run okay. All way down to 960x540.


So let me get this straight, The GPD Win3 can play Cyberpunk at 1280x720 on low settings with 30-40FPS while having a much inferior GPU but you think the Deck can't. Man you guys are comical


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## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> So let me get this straight, The GPD Win3 can play Cyberpunk at 1280x720 on low settings with 30-40FPS while having a much inferior GPU but you think the Deck can't. Man you guys are comical


That's what I calculated. I looked up GPD Win 3, it's actually 35 watt handheld and fps highly depends on area. In city it was in 20s. And on top of that, it used variable resolution, so it wasn't 720p raw. So, you still need 960x540, lowest settings to hit 40 fps average.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> That's what I calculated. I looked up GPD Win 3, it's actually 35 watt handheld and fps highly depends on area. In city it was in 20s. And on top of that, it used variable resolution, so it wasn't 720p raw. So, you still need 960x540, lowest settings to hit 40 fps average.


From the review I viewed it was locked at 720P and was suggested also locking to 30FPS for best performance. But lets see the Iris Xe 96 GPU is on average 5% faster than the Vega 8 which is 8CUs (512 Cores) and based on GCN. The Deck is RDNA 2 with 8CUs (512 Cores), RDNA2 should offer around 50% more performance per core over GCN. So i don't see the deck having any issues what's so ever looking that even a 5700G can power games just fine with the aged Vega 8


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## AvrageGamr (Jul 21, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> I honestly don't understand why people dwell on this. At this screen size your eyes could never see the difference between 720P or 1080P. And it will be able to easily run med-high settings at 60FPS


I have had enough tablets in the past with 7-inch screens to see there is a noticeable difference between 720p and 1080p. For example, jaggies are much more pronounced due to the larger pixel size in 720p. And a noticeable drop in detail in mobile games even. An open-world AAA game like RDR2 would not look good on this.


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## TheOne (Jul 21, 2021)

Well thankfully there should be plenty of reviews and information available long before the majority of us who reserved a unit will have have the opportunity to buy.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 21, 2021)

AvrageGamr said:


> I have had enough tablets in the past with 7-inch screens to see there is a noticeable difference between 720p and 1080p. For example, jaggies are much more pronounced due to the larger pixel size in 720p. And a noticeable drop in detail in mobile games even. An open-world AAA game like RDR2 would not look good on this.


The problem with that is were the screens native 720P or higher. I saw RDR2 being played on the Win3 and it looked no different than playing on the Xbox One or PS4 which majority games also ran at 720-900P. RDR2 ran at 864P on the Xbox One


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## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> From the review I viewed it was locked at 720P and was suggested also locking to 30FPS for best performance. But lets see the Iris Xe 96 GPU is on average 5% faster than the Vega 8 which is 8CUs (512 Cores) and based on GCN. The Deck is RDNA 2 with 8CUs (512 Cores), RDNA2 should offer around 50% more performance per core over GCN. So i don't see the deck having any issues what's so ever looking that even a 5700G can power games just fine with the aged Vega 8


Well I did calculations, based on how RX 560 performed and then tried to compare it to 8CU RDNA2 iGPU based on teraflops alone. It seems that it wasn't a very good idea. I looked at different video:









This is 3400G. It is similar to what Deck will be. It has 4C8T config, but with Zen+ cores. Deck is clocked lower, but has higher IPC, so it be similar to 3400G, but a tiny bit weaker. 3400G has 11 CU Vega cores (704 of them). In raw teraflops, Vega 11 is a bit faster than what Deck can achieve at its peak. So overall 3400G is somewhat faster at CPU and quite a bit faster at GPU. It does run Cyberpunk at 720p, but there are some pretty bad frame drops and some areas just have quite low fps and I concluded earlier that I consider 40 fps as playable. Ryzen 3400G can't achieve that and it runs game at 1280x720, which is a bit lower than native Deck resolution, which is 1280x800. That's 10% more pixels to drive. Realistically, I would expect Deck's GPU to be 20% slower than 3400G's and CPU to be 30% slower. Cyberpunk isn't very CPU demanding game, but it's hard on GPU, so it maybe won't be bottlenecked by Deck's CPU, but Deck has 20% less GPU power than 3400G. So let's calculate. 1280x720 is 921600 pixels, Deck is 20% slower, so let's reduce pixels by 20%. We get 737280 pixels. At this point we get same 34 fps as 3400G, but we really want 40 fps. 40 fps is 15% more hardware taxing, so lets take away 15% resolution. With that reduction, we are left with 626688 pixels. Closest resolution to that is 960x640 and now Deck supposedly runs Cyberpunk okay, that's quite a bit lower than 1280x800 (1024000 pixels) resolution. With my previous calculation I arrived at 500k pixels or so, so this time result is more optimistic, but it still isn't that great for Deck. Depending on overall system performance, FSR may speed up little RDNA APU, I don't think it will make Cyberpunk run at 1280x800 with 40 fps average. FSR doesn't work very great with low end hardware, as its overhead is so big that it cancels out  a lot of performance gains.


----------



## Durvelle27 (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Well I did calculations, based on how RX 560 performed and then tried to compare it to 8CU RDNA2 iGPU based on teraflops alone. It seems that it wasn't a very good idea. I looked at different video:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


the problem with the comparison is it is still GCN vs RDNA2. Yes the Vega 11 has more CUs/Cores but it is also still using a much inferior architecture. Just to give you an example

The Vega 64 which was the highest end single GPU you could get based on GCN; It has 4096 Cores vs the Current Gen RX 6700 XT based on RDNA2; it has almost half the cores at 2560 Cores but based on our very own TPUs review the 6700XT is on average 36% faster than the Vega 64 at 1080P

The architectural refinement alone gives it a boost


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 21, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> the problem with the comparison is it is still GCN vs RDNA2. Yes the Vega 11 has more CUs/Cores but it is also still using a much inferior architecture. Just to give you an example
> 
> The Vega 64 which was the highest end single GPU you could get based on GCN; It has 4096 Cores vs the Current Gen RX 6700 XT based on RDNA2; it has almost half the cores at 2560 Cores but based on our very own TPUs review the 6700XT is on average 36% faster than the Vega 64 at 1080P
> 
> The architectural refinement alone gives it a boost


I look at teraflops. 3400G is faster than Deck in pure teraflops. Also I compared 11GCN CUs with 8 RDNA CUs and GCN CUs are undoubtedly higher clocked. I think that comparison certainly is quite fair. 

BTW why 1080p? Those cards aren't even getting well loaded at resolution that low.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 21, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I look at teraflops. 3400G is faster than Deck in pure teraflops. Also I compared 11GCN CUs with 8 RDNA CUs and GCN CUs are undoubtedly higher clocked. I think that comparison certainly is quite fair.
> 
> BTW why 1080p? Those cards aren't even getting well loaded at resolution that low.


Well that's where your going wrong, rDNA was made to Game not flop.
Gcn and  now cDNA are made to flop the shit out of stuff, my vega64 still is worthy in some tasks, just sigh.


----------



## Durvelle27 (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I look at teraflops. 3400G is faster than Deck in pure teraflops. Also I compared 11GCN CUs with 8 RDNA CUs and GCN CUs are undoubtedly higher clocked. I think that comparison certainly is quite fair.
> 
> BTW why 1080p? Those cards aren't even getting well loaded at resolution that low.


You can look at TFlops all you want, TFlops does not translate into more power


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Well that's where your going wrong, rDNA was made to Game not flop.
> Gcn and  now cDNA are made to flop the shit out of stuff, my vega64 still is worthy in some tasks, just sigh.





Durvelle27 said:


> You can look at TFlops all you want, TFlops does not translate into more power



Oh people, you are making TPU uncool here. The main task that graphics card is supposed to do is to flop. CPU is mostly used for barely parallel, but heavily sequential code, which is mostly arithmetic (a good ALU). CPU can also do floating point operations, but due to low parallelization, it's not really very optimal for that. Graphics cards as well as some old math co-processors, are very good at floating point operations. Those operations are a lot rarer in general computing, but they do dominate in certain tasks. Gaming is one of them, as well as some productivity and scientific computing. Gaming is mostly low precision (relatively), so games often utilize single precision or half precision computing capabilities of cards, meanwhile productivity tasks like CAD work, scientific simulations, medical screening, require same fundamental task, but in more precise form and thus they often utilize double precision (basically same floating points, but a lot more numbers after point, so less rounding, more precision and often less speed, but on consumer cards a lot less speed, due to nV and AMD wanting to milk enterprises with Quadros and Radeon Pros). Obviously other card aspects matter, but flopping also matters a lot. Depending on architecture, it can be hard to achieve maximum theoretical floating point performance, be it difficult to program architectures or be it various software overhead. A good example of difficult to program architecture for is Kepler, in each SMX (streaming multiprocessor), it had 192 cores, compared to Fermi's 32, but also the smaller controller logic. I won't get into details, but after a while it became clear, that Kepler's SMX's controller logic was insufficient to properly distribute load to each CUDA core and required some software trickery to work well, if not, it will essentially be underutilizing CUDA cores and it would lose a lot of performance. Still, even with this unfortunate trait, Kepler was a massive improvement over Fermi, so even less than ideal optimization meant, that it will be faster than Fermi, but the problem became clear, once it became old and devs may have started to not optimize for it as much, so Radeons that at launch were weaker, started to beat faster Kepler cards. All I want to say here, is that floating point performance certainly matters, but due to various reasons, maximum theoretical floating point operation performance may not be achieved. That doesn't make floating point spec useless, it's there, but how much in reality is achieved will inevitably vary. Games are made with various developmental constrains (time, money, team size, human talent, goals and etc) and often don't really extract everything from the cards. As long as they run good enough and as long as good degree of actual floating point performance is achieved, there's very little reason to pour more RnD into optimization. Meanwhile, professional software is often more serious about having as much performance as possible, due to how computationally heavy certain tasks are, thus they are far more motivated (also less limited by time and budget) to optimize for hardware better. That's why some game benchmark toping cards are beaten by supposedly "less" powerful cards. Oh, and nVidia historically gimps double precision floating point performance a lot more on consumer cards, than AMD, that's why AMD cards for a long time dominate in MilkyWay@Home.

So, there's only one question, how much it is easier to tap into all those RDNA 2 teraflops, compared to GCN. Sadly that's hard to quantify. But it seems that it should be substantially easier.


----------



## AvrageGamr (Jul 22, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> The problem with that is were the screens native 720P or higher. I saw RDR2 being played on the Win3 and it looked no different than playing on the Xbox One or PS4 which majority games also ran at 720-900P. RDR2 ran at 864P on the Xbox One


Upscaling console games from 900p and 864p to 1080p looks better than native 720p. Win3 is only a 5.5-inch 720p screen, so it won't be as noticeable compared to 1080p. The Deck is 7 inch 720p screen with larger pixels. The bigger the screen, the worse 720p looks.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Oh people, you are making TPU uncool here. The main task that graphics card is supposed to do is to flop. CPU is mostly used for barely parallel, but heavily sequential code, which is mostly arithmetic (a good ALU). CPU can also do floating point operations, but due to low parallelization, it's not really very optimal for that. Graphics cards as well as some old math co-processors, are very good at floating point operations. Those operations are a lot rarer in general computing, but they do dominate in certain tasks. Gaming is one of them, as well as some productivity and scientific computing. Gaming is mostly low precision (relatively), so games often utilize single precision or half precision computing capabilities of cards, meanwhile productivity tasks like CAD work, scientific simulations, medical screening, require same fundamental task, but in more precise form and thus they often utilize double precision (basically same floating points, but a lot more numbers after point, so less rounding, more precision and often less speed, but on consumer cards a lot less speed, due to nV and AMD wanting to milk enterprises with Quadros and Radeon Pros). Obviously other card aspects matter, but flopping also matters a lot. Depending on architecture, it can be hard to achieve maximum theoretical floating point performance, be it difficult to program architectures or be it various software overhead. A good example of difficult to program architecture for is Kepler, in each SMX (streaming multiprocessor), it had 192 cores, compared to Fermi's 32, but also the smaller controller logic. I won't get into details, but after a while it became clear, that Kepler's SMX's controller logic was insufficient to properly distribute load to each CUDA core and required some software trickery to work well, if not, it will essentially be underutilizing CUDA cores and it would lose a lot of performance. Still, even with this unfortunate trait, Kepler was a massive improvement over Fermi, so even less than ideal optimization meant, that it will be faster than Fermi, but the problem became clear, once it became old and devs may have started to not optimize for it as much, so Radeons that at launch were weaker, started to beat faster Kepler cards. All I want to say here, is that floating point performance certainly matters, but due to various reasons, maximum theoretical floating point operation performance may not be achieved. That doesn't make floating point spec useless, it's there, but how much in reality is achieved will inevitably vary. Games are made with various developmental constrains (time, money, team size, human talent, goals and etc) and often don't really extract everything from the cards. As long as they run good enough and as long as good degree of actual floating point performance is achieved, there's very little reason to pour more RnD into optimization. Meanwhile, professional software is often more serious about having as much performance as possible, due to how computationally heavy certain tasks are, thus they are far more motivated (also less limited by time and budget) to optimize for hardware better. That's why some game benchmark toping cards are beaten by supposedly "less" powerful cards. Oh, and nVidia historically gimps double precision floating point performance a lot more on consumer cards, than AMD, that's why AMD cards for a long time dominate in MilkyWay@Home.
> 
> So, there's only one question, how much it is easier to tap into all those RDNA 2 teraflops, compared to GCN. Sadly that's hard to quantify. But it seems that it should be substantially easier.


Grow up ,read up, and give your nogin a tap.

You don't define what makes a GPU good or not.

It's use depends on it's use case.

This IS for gaming, not simulations or super computer work or server etc, Gaming.

Get over yourself.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Grow up ,read up, and give your nogin a tap.
> 
> You don't define what makes a GPU good or not.
> 
> ...


Dude, I'm saying that floating point is pretty much fps.


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Oh people, you are making TPU uncool here. The main task that graphics card is supposed to do is to flop. CPU is mostly used for barely parallel, but heavily sequential code, which is mostly arithmetic (a good ALU). CPU can also do floating point operations, but due to low parallelization, it's not really very optimal for that. Graphics cards as well as some old math co-processors, are very good at floating point operations. Those operations are a lot rarer in general computing, but they do dominate in certain tasks. Gaming is one of them, as well as some productivity and scientific computing. Gaming is mostly low precision (relatively), so games often utilize single precision or half precision computing capabilities of cards, meanwhile productivity tasks like CAD work, scientific simulations, medical screening, require same fundamental task, but in more precise form and thus they often utilize double precision (basically same floating points, but a lot more numbers after point, so less rounding, more precision and often less speed, but on consumer cards a lot less speed, due to nV and AMD wanting to milk enterprises with Quadros and Radeon Pros). Obviously other card aspects matter, but flopping also matters a lot. Depending on architecture, it can be hard to achieve maximum theoretical floating point performance, be it difficult to program architectures or be it various software overhead. A good example of difficult to program architecture for is Kepler, in each SMX (streaming multiprocessor), it had 192 cores, compared to Fermi's 32, but also the smaller controller logic. I won't get into details, but after a while it became clear, that Kepler's SMX's controller logic was insufficient to properly distribute load to each CUDA core and required some software trickery to work well, if not, it will essentially be underutilizing CUDA cores and it would lose a lot of performance. Still, even with this unfortunate trait, Kepler was a massive improvement over Fermi, so even less than ideal optimization meant, that it will be faster than Fermi, but the problem became clear, once it became old and devs may have started to not optimize for it as much, so Radeons that at launch were weaker, started to beat faster Kepler cards. All I want to say here, is that floating point performance certainly matters, but due to various reasons, maximum theoretical floating point operation performance may not be achieved. That doesn't make floating point spec useless, it's there, but how much in reality is achieved will inevitably vary. Games are made with various developmental constrains (time, money, team size, human talent, goals and etc) and often don't really extract everything from the cards. As long as they run good enough and as long as good degree of actual floating point performance is achieved, there's very little reason to pour more RnD into optimization. Meanwhile, professional software is often more serious about having as much performance as possible, due to how computationally heavy certain tasks are, thus they are far more motivated (also less limited by time and budget) to optimize for hardware better. That's why some game benchmark toping cards are beaten by supposedly "less" powerful cards. Oh, and nVidia historically gimps double precision floating point performance a lot more on consumer cards, than AMD, that's why AMD cards for a long time dominate in MilkyWay@Home.
> 
> So, there's only one question, how much it is easier to tap into all those RDNA 2 teraflops, compared to GCN. Sadly that's hard to quantify. But it seems that it should be substantially easier.



How can you reconcile RX5700 having better frame rates in most games than Vega64?  That's 9.6 tf vs 12.5 tf.  Not to mention a higher power limit lol.  Tflops don't tell the whole story in gaming.  

Can you at least wait until the Deck is out before sounding so sure it sucks?


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Dude, I'm saying that floating point is pretty much fps.


And I'm saying your wrong. .... .


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> How can you reconcile RX5700 having better frame rates in most games than Vega64?  That's 9.6 tf vs 12.5 tf.  Not to mention a higher power limit lol.  Tflops don't tell the whole story in gaming.
> 
> Can you at least wait until the Deck is out before sounding so sure it sucks?


And here I go bust. I don't know. I just know that flops definitely matter, due to basically all geometry calculations being floating point. I said that there's could be limitations in achieving maximum theoretical floating point performance. From spec sheet, RX 5700 XT definitely looks overall worse, but here's one thing that is better on it and it's pixel fillrate. It seems that hardware in that one aspect on RX 5700 XT is just better and maybe that one specification matters. 

Here's some snack:





						3D Benchmarking - Understanding Frame Rate Scores
					

After taking care of 'the platform', the 3D-card is the only thing left. The 'fill rate' describes the amount of pixels that a 3D-solution can render in a given amount of time. We all know that a fram




					www.tomshardware.com
				




It seems that Vega 64 may perform better than RX 5700 XT at low resolutions, but maybe not.



TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> And I'm saying your wrong. .... .


Any technical reason why?


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> And here I go bust. I don't know. I just know that flops definitely matter, due to basically all geometry calculations being floating point. I said that there's could be limitations in achieving maximum theoretical floating point performance. From spec sheet, RX 5700 XT definitely looks overall worse, but here's one thing that is better on it and it's pixel fillrate. It seems that hardware in that one aspect on RX 5700 XT is just better and maybe that one specification matters.
> 
> Here's some snack:
> 
> ...


Because flops do not align well with FPS ,why else?!.

In flops did a 1080ti beat a vega64?! No but in FPS it did.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Because flops do not align well with FPS ,why else?!.
> 
> In flops did a 1080ti beat a vega64?! No but in FPS it did.


I see. You still haven't noticed *maximum theoretical* floating point performance


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> And here I go bust. I don't know. I just know that flops definitely matter, due to basically all geometry calculations being floating point*. I said that there's could be limitations in achieving maximum theoretical floating point performance.* From spec sheet, RX 5700 XT definitely looks overall worse, but here's one thing that is better on it and it's pixel fillrate. It seems that hardware in that one aspect on RX 5700 XT is just better and maybe that one specification matters.
> 
> Here's some snack:
> 
> ...



DING DING DING.

With newer architectures it becomes easier to achieve maximum theoretical performance.

Get it?

Anyways, if you want to claim that Vega 64 is better at low res than 5700 then post evidence.  It still wouldn't explain the difference between the two cards seeing how the Vega has the ~25% higher TF number.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> DING DING DING.
> 
> With newer architectures it becomes easier to achieve maximum theoretical performance.
> 
> Get it?


I already knew that, that's why Kepler aged poorly. But I think that pixel fillrate advantage still matters.


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 22, 2021)

64K said:


> The 5700 is a little faster Vega 64



Thanks for proving my point!  Vega 64 has better TF, but 5700 has better game performance.



The red spirit said:


> I already knew that, that's why Kepler aged poorly. But I think that pixel fillrate advantage still matters.



Stop moving the goal posts, even if pixel fill rate matters, it just goes to show you TFlops isn't everything when it comes to gaming performance which was your original point.  Just admit you don't know, its ok to be wrong about things and learn...


----------



## Nordic (Jul 22, 2021)

We really need hand on reviews. @W1zzard will TPU be doing a steam deck review? It isn't in your usual suite of products reviewed.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

Colddecked said:


> Stop moving the goal posts, even if pixel fill rate matters, it just goes to show you TFlops isn't everything when it comes to gaming performance which was your original point.  Just admit you don't know, its ok to be wrong about things and learn...


I don't mind admitting something, but there's nothing to learn here. You all just keep saying that this or that doesn't matter, but what does matter? I'm pretty sure that flops, pixel fillrate and texture fillrate do indeed matter at different stages of 3D rendering pipeline. I don't know exactly where, but I'm open to learn that. Sadly, nobody talks about that here.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I see. You still haven't noticed *maximum theoretical* floating point performance


Ducks that got to do with actual FPS performance.

Nothing.

And again dodged my question is a Vega 64 better than a 1080Ti then?!, Cos it's flops say so.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Ducks that got to do with actual FPS performance.
> 
> Nothing.


What does then?


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> What does then?


Reviews.

Testing.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 22, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Reviews.
> 
> Testing.


I'm talking about graphics card, what inside of it does matter? You say that floating point performance doesn't matter.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I'm talking about graphics card, what inside of it does matter? You say that floating point performance doesn't matter.


It's not totally irrelevant, but Rops, Tmus Raycast units, clock frequency, ACE engine's the cache structure and amount and other special function hardware, and the attached memory frequency and bandwidth all have a part to play in how much FPS, whereas flops uses a few but far from all of those functions.


----------



## Colddecked (Jul 22, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I don't mind admitting something, but there's nothing to learn here. You all just keep saying that this or that doesn't matter, but what does matter? I'm pretty sure that flops, pixel fillrate and texture fillrate do indeed matter at different stages of 3D rendering pipeline. I don't know exactly where, but I'm open to learn that. Sadly, nobody talks about that here.



Look, of course TF matter, but its just a measure of one aspect of performance.  Another problem is that you think TF are all equal.  They aren't when it comes to actual game performance.  That is why you can't compare AMD and Nvidia cards strictly based on TFlop since Maxwell, because Nvidia uses their TF better (more efficiency tricks) than AMD did, and were able to get better game performance even though their their TFlop number isn't equal. 

As MrK is pointing out, Vega 64 had more TF than 1080ti, but the 1080ti is far and away the better gaming GPU.  Just don't get so hung up on the TFlop numbers, it'll give you a rough idea but there's more to the equation.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> It's not totally irrelevant, but Rops, Tmus Raycast units, clock frequency, ACE engine's the cache structure and amount and other special function hardware, and the attached memory frequency and bandwidth all have a part to play in how much FPS, whereas flops uses a few but far from all of those functions.


ROPs, TMUs probably influence FLOPs. Ray Tracing Units, don't matter, unless you use them. Clock speed is surely directly related to FLP output. ACE is just AMD's version of SMX, which is CU ( Compute Unit). CU is cores with controlling logic, but without cache, ROPs, TMUs, encoders, decoders and etc. Memory bandwidth is likely heavily related to FLOP output too. 




Colddecked said:


> Look, of course TF matter, but its just a measure of one aspect of performance.


It's general performance evaluation. It takes into account clock speed, IPC, core count and likely memory speed. That's pretty much whole card.



Colddecked said:


> Another problem is that you think TF are all equal.


They are are, floating point operation per second isn't a fuzzy metric.



Colddecked said:


> They aren't when it comes to actual game performance.  That is why you can't compare AMD and Nvidia cards strictly based on TFlop since Maxwell, because Nvidia uses their TF better (more efficiency tricks) than AMD did, and were able to get better game performance even though their their TFlop number isn't equal.


But why?




Colddecked said:


> As MrK is pointing out, Vega 64 had more TF than 1080ti, but the 1080ti is far and away the better gaming GPU.  Just don't get so hung up on the TFlop numbers, it'll give you a rough idea but there's more to the equation.


Well that's a general consensus, but I wonder why exactly.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 23, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> ROPs, TMUs probably influence FLOPs. Ray Tracing Units, don't matter, unless you use them. Clock speed is surely directly related to FLP output. ACE is just AMD's version of SMX, which is CU ( Compute Unit). CU is cores with controlling logic, but without cache, ROPs, TMUs, encoders, decoders and etc. Memory bandwidth is likely heavily related to FLOP output too.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Why, because both manufacturers have been at this a while, they realised early on they're just chasing the bottleneck about and always will be.
And clearly flops were not the bottleneck, so what is?!

Also regurgitating the same shit I just said back at me slightly fleshed out is you agreeing with me flops are not the big picture?! It Sooo?!.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Also regurgitating the same shit I just said back at me slightly fleshed out is you agreeing with me flops are not the big picture?! It Sooo?!.


I don't care about agreeing or not. I only care about actually learning how each graphics card specification influences the way graphics card works.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 23, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I don't care about agreeing or not. I only care about actually learning how each graphics card specification influences the way graphics card works.


Funny because this started because you Know Steam deck is useless for gaming on ffs.

You don't learn by shitposting in tangential threads you have no interest in, yet spout crap like your an insider who somehow Knows how it performs before reviews?!.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Funny because this started because you Know Steam deck is useless for gaming on ffs.
> 
> You don't learn by shitposting in tangential threads you have no interest in, yet spout crap like your an insider who somehow Knows how it performs before reviews?!.


Either way, it will not run Cyberpunk or Valhalla very well. You people are expecting miracles from thin client hardware. Meanwhile, I have been interested for a long time in low end hardware, used some of it and observed what it can do. Deck won't be a miracle today. Cyberpunk will not run at average of 40 fps and over time, Deck will certainly struggle in more and more games as time goes on. I personally don't like buying hardware that is only scrapping by today, as it feels disappointing soon and makes TCO high. Deck doesn't do anything to make me think otherwise. lol, you already have Zen 2 chip. Why don't you try disabling cores and setting it at Deck's PPT and clock speeds, I wonder how fun will that be in games. You can also downclock your graphics card, to loosely match Vega 11. Now tell me how well everything runs.


----------



## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Either way, it will not run Cyberpunk or Valhalla very well. You people are expecting miracles from thin client hardware. Meanwhile, I have been interested for a long time in low end hardware, used some of it and observed what it can do. Deck won't be a miracle today. Cyberpunk will not run at average of 40 fps and over time, Deck will certainly struggle in more and more games as time goes on. I personally don't like buying hardware that is only scrapping by today, as it feels disappointing soon and makes TCO high. Deck doesn't do anything to make me think otherwise. lol, you already have Zen 2 chip. Why don't you try disabling cores and setting it at Deck's PPT and clock speeds, I wonder how fun will that be in games. You can also downclock your graphics card, to loosely match Vega 11. Now tell me how well everything runs.


You keep spouting crap but I showed you the GPD win3 playing Cyberpunk just fine on med settings with above 30FPS while it has a inferior GPU. Just stop at this point dude


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> You can't spouting crap but I showed you the GPD win3 playing Cyberpunk just fine on med settings with above 30FPS while it has a inferior GPU. Just stop at this point dude


It was running it at low and with enabled function to lower resolution to maintain fps. And 30 fps average is unplayable imo with that framerate variation.


----------



## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> It was running it at low and with enabled function to lower resolution to maintain fps. And 30 fps average is unplayable imo with that framerate variation.


I'm not going to argue as you've shown you have no clue as in to what you are talking about


----------



## ThrashZone (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> You keep spouting crap but I showed you the GPD win3 playing Cyberpunk just fine on med settings with above 30FPS while it has a inferior GPU. Just stop at this point dude


Hi,
Yeah 30fps should be fine on a device this small.

Way too small for me though.


----------



## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> I'm not going to argue as you've shown you have no clue as in to what you are talking about


I still see no reason why you are overhyped for Deck. I'm pretty sure that someone like you never even considered buying 3400G, so why is Deck an exception? It doesn't matter if it's 800p, it's still a lousy gpu. Once you need some shading, it can't really provide that without tanking fps. Many games also tend to look really bad at low settings. It will not last (in terms of performance), not sure what's so fun about having Valve paperweight after 2 years. I'm also sure that it's heavily overpriced even for what it is. Interesting concept, poor value and terrible performance with occasional compatibility issues. Yeah, really fun.


----------



## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Yeah 30fps should be fine on a device this small.
> 
> Way too small for me though.


Just check this out. This is the GPDwin3 shown playing various current games at decent settings with 30-60FPS @720P. It's pretty stellar especially to have inferior specs


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> Just check this out. This is the GPDwin3 shown playing various current games at decent settings with 30-60FPS @720P. It's pretty stellar especially to have inferior specs



That GPD looks sweet, even on low/med GTAV looks really playable


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

Gruffalo.Soldier said:


> That GPD looks sweet, even on low/med GTAV looks really playable


He said it stayed locked at 60FPS which is great. From all I can pull up the graphics are equivalent to the Xbox One and PS4


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> He said it stayed locked at 60FPS which is great. From all I can pull up the graphics are equivalent to the Xbox One and PS4


Apart from the price, that is one helluva handheld.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

Gruffalo.Soldier said:


> Apart from the price, that is one helluva handheld.



Price isn't that bad. 64GB model is $50 more than my 32GB switch. Pair it with a decent SD card like a 512GB and call it a day or swap the SSD for a bigger one. I chose to go with the 256GB plus adding a 512GB SD card.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 23, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Either way, it will not run Cyberpunk or Valhalla very well. You people are expecting miracles from thin client hardware. Meanwhile, I have been interested for a long time in low end hardware, used some of it and observed what it can do. Deck won't be a miracle today. Cyberpunk will not run at average of 40 fps and over time, Deck will certainly struggle in more and more games as time goes on. I personally don't like buying hardware that is only scrapping by today, as it feels disappointing soon and makes TCO high. Deck doesn't do anything to make me think otherwise. lol, you already have Zen 2 chip. Why don't you try disabling cores and setting it at Deck's PPT and clock speeds, I wonder how fun will that be in games. You can also downclock your graphics card, to loosely match Vega 11. Now tell me how well everything runs.


You do it, learn some practical stuff, I'm not making lofty knowledge claims based on stuff I'm trying to learn about.
I played with. 3400G (£600 build for 11 year old, 965 points on uniengine heaven bench) at the weekend, I know.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> You do it, learn some practical stuff, I'm not making lofty knowledge claims based on stuff I'm trying to learn about.
> I played with. 3400G at weekend, I know.


Funny things is he keeps saying 3400G but the 3400G is based on Zen+ while the Deck is based on Zen 2. Zen 2 is on average 15-20% faster than Zen+


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## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> Funny things is he keeps saying 3400G but the 3400G is based on Zen+ while the Deck is based on Zen 2. Zen 2 is on average 15-20% faster than Zen+


But 3400G is not as constrained by power limit and is clocked higher, so that more than offsets IPC deficiency.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jul 23, 2021)

Durvelle27 said:


> Funny things is he keeps saying 3400G but the 3400G is based on Zen+ while the Deck is based on Zen 2. Zen 2 is on average 15-20% faster than Zen+


Not to mention Vega verses Rdna2.

And ddr4 verses LPddr5(approaching twice the bandwidth).

@The red spirit 3400G unconstrained isn't this flat out, that's some clutching at straws right there, your basing your opinion on nonsense.

And a 3400G is typically connected to a 1080P display, this isn't.

How's about we wait on reviews ,you can spout absolutes all you want while learning about GPU?! But where's it getting us, to another round at the same loop.

We heard your opinion, we have it in mind now back it up with fact's or peaceably agree to disagree and we'll see what benches say, going round in circles helps no one.

Out.


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## Durvelle27 (Jul 23, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> Not to mention Vega verses Rdna2.
> 
> And ddr4 verses LPddr5(approaching twice the bandwidth).


And it uses Quad channel which is a huge plus


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## The red spirit (Jul 23, 2021)

TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> And a 3400G is typically connected to a 1080P display, this isn't.


Not that you can run Cyberpunk at more than 720p.




TheoneandonlyMrK said:


> How's about we wait on reviews ,you can spout absolutes all you want while learning about GPU?! But where's it getting us, to another round at the same loop.
> 
> We heard your opinion, we have it in mind now back it up with fact's or peaceably agree to disagree and we'll see what benches say, going round in circles helps no one.
> 
> Out.


Okay, goodbye.


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## P4-630 (Aug 6, 2021)

Linus trying Steam Deck early


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Aug 6, 2021)

P4-630 said:


> Linus trying Steam Deck early


His words, extremely happy with how every game played.

My words, nooice.


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## TheOne (Nov 10, 2021)

And now it's delayed 2 months, and I'm now after Q2.









						Steam Deck :: FAQ
					

Steam Deck is here!




					www.steamdeck.com
				






> I heard Steam Deck is being delayed. Is that true?​
> While we did our best to account for the global supply chain issues (by which we mean we factored in extra time to account for these risks and worked with multiple component vendors), our manufacturing plans were still impacted. Material shortages and delays meant that components weren't making it to our manufacturing facilities on time. Missing parts along with logistical challenges means delayed Steam Decks, so we needed to push out shipping by two months to February. We’ll continue working to improve reservation dates based on the new timeline, and will keep folks updated as we go.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Nov 10, 2021)

I have a 5600G taster in hand for a bit, despite the delay I'm still excited.
Think I'll be 2023 personally, they can shove that if it slips again.


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