Valve Announces the Steam Deck Game Console

[persondb]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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.



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.

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.

 

[Colddecked]

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.



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.

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.

 

[Ja.KooLit]

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

 

[Nordic]

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]

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.

"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.

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

Any reason why?

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.

 

[Colddecked]

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.



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.



Any reason why?


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.

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]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

@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]

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

Yes.

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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:

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.

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.

 

[The red spirit]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

 

[Nordic]

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.

 

[Colddecked]

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 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.



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.



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.


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:

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.

 

[The red spirit]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

 

[Durvelle27]

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

 

[Deleted member 24505]

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

 

[AvrageGamr]

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