Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Handheld Performance

[17th Dimension]

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is the latest PlayStation exclusive to land on PC. While the game suffers from occasional freezes and crashes on Windows, it's playable both on Steam Deck and ROG Ally. Check out the specific performance numbers, as well as optimized settings for both devices, in our handheld performance review.

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[HOkay]

A surprisingly big difference in playability between the two this time round. It seems so ridiculous that it crashes on Windows & not on SteamOS, kinda makes you wonder what the performance is like on Linux on the Ally...

 

[vbq7qK68eyYAH4iR]

I gotta say, looking at the pictures for the Deck and Ally, i thought it was crap, but once i got to the video section and saw it while you were playing, it seemed much more acceptable, visually. Things were happening so fast, there wasn't time to stop and appreciate the visual artefacts. PS, can't wait for a wider rollout for SteamOS.

 

[ninjafada]

any has a ryzen 370 or something with 890M to test the game with ?

 

[akaloith]

what about msi claw 8?????????????

 

[colossusrageblack]

Steam Deck is really starting to show its 'tech age' with recent titles. Unfortunately for Valve, developments in the mobile chip space aren't really progressing fast enough to come out with a Steam Deck 2 anytime soon. Although the AI 9 HX370 is quite a bit more powerful, it's also rather power hungry and doesn't really deliver a lot of improvements at a 15W TDP, which I'm guessing is what Valve is waiting on. For these reviews it would also be nice to get the latest chips tested, like the HX370 and the MSI Claw AI 8+.

 

[watzupken]

Steam Deck is really starting to show its 'tech age' with recent titles. Unfortunately for Valve, developments in the mobile chip space aren't really progressing fast enough to come out with a Steam Deck 2 anytime soon. Although the AI 9 HX370 is quite a bit more powerful, it's also rather power hungry and doesn't really deliver a lot of improvements at a 15W TDP, which I'm guessing is what Valve is waiting on. For these reviews it would also be nice to get the latest chips tested, like the HX370 and the MSI Claw AI 8+.

I suspect Steam's next Deck may be ARM based. Looking at x86 solutions in recent years, it may not be possible to find a good replacement if the priority is power efficiency. As you rightfully called out, the flagship chips from Intel and AMD can't really pull itself away meaningfully from the "aged" Steam Deck Van Gogh chip at the 15W. With increasingly difficulties in shrinking transistor size, efficiency is probably going to be secondary with companies trying to outdo each other in terms of performance.

In my opinion, Steam Deck never started off as a solid AAA gaming machine, so I won't go to say that it is "starting to show its tech age". Most AAA games back when it was launch was playable at around 30 to 40 FPS with generally the lowest graphical settings. But games over the last 2 years have become insanely taxing on the hardware, so much so that even the flagship RTX 4090 can't run AAA games with high framerates without resorting to DLSS or any upscaling technology. So no surprises, the modest hardware and very limited power and thermal limits in these handheld PCs will suffer even more. What is surprising is that it still runs (even though borderline into the unplayable territory) with just 15W.